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Complete Mozart Works Now Free
An anonymous reader writes "Mozart's year-long 250th birthday party is ending on a high note with the musical scores of his complete works available for the first time free on the Internet. Although most classical music is obviously too old to be under copyright, the rights to specific editions of pieces are owned by the publishers. Now, the International Mozart Foundation has acquired the right to publish the prestigious New Mozart Edition of every Mozart work on the internet. The response has been so overwhelming that the Foundation has been forced to increase their server capacity."
Please tell him that if there was ever a use for BitTorrent, this would be it.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
What they have put up is hardly "free"; it requires you to agree to a license agreement that limits you to "personal use" under "fair use" principles. Well, geez, you already could copy the music under those principles before.
Companies like Barereiter have been playing tricks with copyright for a long time, for example, by slightly modifying sheet music every few years with meaningless (and often, erroneous) "interpretations".
This is not how music should be treated 200 years after a composer's death, in particular in the day and age of the Internet. There is no reason why Mozart's entire body of work shouldn't be digitized and freely available with no restrictions on use at all, in a form like Project Gutenberg.
This edition is copyrighted.
Mozart in the original would be of use only to an academic --- How do you read his notation? What instruments was he writing for? --- and so on.
Students are being given "fair use" rights to study modern "translations" of Mozart.
Musicians are not being given rights to public performance of the scores. There is a difference and it is a difference that matters.