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Project Gutenberg Volunteers Partial IMSLP Hosting
bbc writes "Project Gutenberg has volunteered to host all it legally can of the IMSLP's catalog. The Canadian provider of free public domain music recently caved to legal threats from an Austrian sheet music seller. On the Book People mailing list, Project Gutenberg's founder Michael Hart wrote: 'Project Gutenberg has volunteered to keep as much of the IMSL Project online as is legally possible, including a few of the items that were demanded to be withdrawn, as well as, when legal, to provide a backup of the entire site, for when the legalities have finally been worked out.'"
But how will those dead musicians make a living when their work is available for free on the internet.
Classical music is the new Rock'n'Roll
...Or something like that, anyway...
(Just in case anyone needed more evidence that pretty much everything "new" still contains 99% things-that-came-before, making the idea of copyrights absolutely absurd...)
by which I can assume there is still a lot of money to be made from music that is clearly beyond copyright?
after all I would hazard a guess this is all about money, not copyright.
well done Project Gutenberg.
Universal Edition the music publisher (not "Universal", the global media company) didn't shut down the entire site. They demanded filtering based on IP address (= geographical location) be installed so that you could only see the scores out of copyright in your own country, and not those that are still under copyright where you live though available elsewhere. The owner, who was already stressed out after years of doing this, decided himself to shut it all down.
Project Gutenberg - the first and largest single collection of free electronic books - has volunteered to host IMSLP's (International Music Score Library Project) collection of scores.
Related story: Provider of Free Public Domain Music Shuts Down
Props to Gutenberg. Donate if you can spare a few bucks.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
There is a PayPal link on the main site: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
And I think that Project Gutenberg is one of the best initiatives on the Internet.
Where else could you get, for free, electronic versions of books in the public domain? And they provide multiple file formats as well.
The RIAA and MPAA fill P2P networks with dummy info, prosecute you directly if you share your hard drive, and go after grannies who obviously don't have a clue about filesharing. Universal Edition, on the other hand, says "Hey, you can share those scores in most countries, but in this territory we still have copyright". That is nothing like the big music labels and film industry. I am not defending them, since I think copyright is a silly idea and a peculiar recent Western European innovation that most of the world rightly rejects, but let's have some perspective here.
De facto, permissions on the net are the logical OR of the permissions in the various jurisdictions. I.e, if activity X is permitted anywhere, it is permitted everywhere. (This is just another way to say that the internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it).
This is quite clearly a good thing, and the Right thing. However, some legal jurisdictions haven't caught up with the modern world yet.