Mutopia: Where Music is Free

rabalde writes "Check the Mutopia project. In the same spirit of the beloved Project Gütenberg, but consists of a growing collection of free music. The essence of Mutopia is that of a growing number of musical scores all typeset using GNU Lilypond by volunteers. All the music is downloadable for free as Postscript (.ps) and PDF (.pdf) files , as well as Lilypond's own LY (.ly) file format."

Comments

Geek-Musician alliance needed?

[Pseudonym]

Am I the only one who thinks 70 years is a ridiculous amount of time for a dead person to hold onto a copyright?

It gets worse. We geeks often think we're breaking new ground with our hatred of insane copyright law and regulations, but it's been going on for years.

In Australia, performing Grand Right Works (basically anything intended to be performed on stage, such as opera, musical, revue, pantomime or choral work over 20 minutes long) requires paying money to AMCOS, no matter how long the composer has been dead. You heard it right. Performing a Bach Chorale requires paying the copright meisters even though Bach has been dead for 250 years. How can they do this? Simple: if you don't pay them money for these works that are out of copyright, you don't get the rights to copy or perform anything that is under copyright. They have you by the proverbials.

My mother is a music teacher. Music teachers need to bang their collective heads against these ridiculous regulations all the time, because one thing that music teachers do a lot of is get students to perform music, which requires obtaining performing rights, photocopying rights and so forth. She lived in almost perpetual fear of the AMCOS inspectors. At one point (she doesn't do this any more BTW), she kept her cache of photocopied music in the boot (note for Americans: trunk) of her car and only brought into the office that which was needed for that day.

Oh, and just being out of copyright doesn't necessarily help you. I don't know if you've ever read a composer's autograph, but they're often almost illegible. (I know, I edited a Bach's "Musical Offering" once. I should type it up and submit it to Mutopia.) You really need an edited and published version. But editing and publishing slaps a new copyright on that edition.

IMO, if we geeks spoke to musicians and music teachers over the insanity of copyright law, we would find a strong and vocal ally.