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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."
They admit the works of Mozart are in the public domain but not the scanned images of the music.
They admit $400,000 was paid to purchase the rights to the edition, which is being put online "for free" by two foundations, but they still require that anybody not accessing solely for themselves (and I would assume this includes teachers and orchestras in this too) may not use it, but instead must purchase from a "authorized" vendor.
These are not nice people who from one side of their mouths say they are doing a public service while from the other side they force you to lie basically, if you want to share it with others. People who pay for the rights to publish online and say they are a foundation (perhaps with tax breaks?) however choose to manufacture this crazy idea that "Mozart's works" can mean something other than sheet music on paper.
I haven't seen info about Lilypond on their site, nor that they are encouraging or allowing rearrangement. It seems more likely that some people in the organization are altruistic and others are quite nasty and warping the project.
Someone should press them to put a creative commons liscense on it or just make it free.
The past year was Mozart's anniversary and to commemorate it these jerks are claiming title. If they really want to share Mozart they should free the scores and pay orchestras to perform it for an online repository like one that was recently featured. Then they could get around to soliciting free translations of the site, providing scholarly info to the wikipedia, networking mozart scholars and performers, etc. I am quite skeptical of this. That said of course I'm going to check out their sheet music and compare to others when I get a chance perhaps someone more expert can actually talk about this area.