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Provider of Free Public Domain Music Shuts Down
Mark Rogers writes "The International Music Score Library Project has provided access to copies of many musical scores that are in the public domain. It has just been shut down due to a cease-and-desist letter sent to the site operator by a European Union music publisher (Universal Edition). A majority of the scores recently available at IMSLP were in the public domain worldwide. Other scores were not in the public domain in the United States or the EU (where copyright extends for 70 years after the composer's death), but were legal in Canada (where the site is hosted) and many other countries. The site's maintainers clearly labeled the copyright status of such scores and warned users to follow their respective country's copyright law. Apparently this wasn't enough for Universal Edition, who found it necessary to protect the interests of their (long-dead) composers and shut down a site that has proved useful to many students, professors, and other musicians worldwide."
Yes. And no. Copyright harmonization between countries is always done in such a way that you still have something to harmonize towards. A harmonization round, at least in the perverted minds of the likes of WIPO and the large publishers, should always overshoot a little.
To give you an example: recently (late 1990s?) the US harmonized its copyright laws so that they were more like those of the EU. The result of this was for instance that recording rights last 90 years in the US; far more than in the EU. So recently organizations in the UK (which is still part of the EU) started lobbying for harmonizing recording rights terms with those of the US, even if those in the US were the result of a round of changes that was supposed to harmonize US copyright law with those of the EU.