Sounds more like Failed Mahler to me...

Soon you won't be able to hum a tune without an army of lawyers on your tail, telling you to shut up!

By reproducing this music, they are breaking copyright.

No different than publishing a book online. Music books cost a lot of money. Just because it's not in print doesn't mean you can reproduce it.

That would be nice - would they be able to extend jurisdiction to tuneless whistlers, as well? Pisses me right off, particularly the ones that only know the first line to a song, then trail off, then do it again. Repeatedly

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20071012

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20071013

:-)

> "filter IP addresses" in order to ensure that copyright was protected for 70 years after a composer's death for those in Europe and for 50 years after a composer's death in Canada.

Why wouldn't just not supplying any material from composers who died less that 70 years ago satisfy the lawyers?

> The letter demanded the removal of any score by any of UE's artists.

If they provided a list, why would that be difficult?

So public domain music is now also forbidden to be made available on the Web ?

PUBLIC DOMAIN ?!? What is it with the conglomerates that they have to squelch any and everything that is not under their sole control ?

It's public domain, so where is the problem ? WHY IS THERE A PROBLEM ?!

Lord, have mercy on us. Send us Gabriel or something, so that the evil minions of Belzebuth be purged from this Earth and we be once again able to enjoy that which is FREE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Where is this Feldmahler vampire anyway ? I've got a stake I'd like him to see, close up.

Why copyright ceases after 70 years AFTER COMPOSERS DEATH?

Obviously they cannot benefit from those sales after their death, aren't they?

I don't agree with Record comapnies squeezing as much as possible out of cinsumers, just to fill their own pockets. The internet has alloed sharing of scores. Now if they provided an alternative to spending £15 on a small score book then there wouldnt be a problem. Alot of stores don't sell what the customer is looking for. The record companies need to provide electronic equivilants for a reasnable price.Iam tired of these comapnies bullying people, who arnt in it for ripping off, or even makning money. But just want to share music for the masses, who can learn and pass music on to others.

The record comapnies nned to get things ion order before they alienate the very crowd who are normqally their customers.

> Why wouldn't just not supplying any material from composers who died less that 70 years ago satisfy the lawyers?

Precisely... I run a little reference site which has some old material in. The index page has comments in for the age of the material, so some time each year I take a look through the list and uncomment the ones that are newly out of copyright and upload the images.

Gabriel sends his apologies - he has received an RIAA cease & desist order and will be unable use his trumpet against the evil minions of Belzebuth in the forseable future.

A lot of things can mean that a piece of music which was thought to be in the PD actually isn't.

Firstly, the US has a catch all making anything written before 1923 PD, while this isn't the case in Europe. This means that I could reprint some of Vaughan Williams' hymn tunes fine in the US, while here in GB I have to get permission from the copyright holder (I asked the copyright holder, but they wanted more than I was prepared to pay, so we sang something else instead).

Secondly, the very act of typesetting a piece of music gives you a 25 year edition copyright in GB. I could use this as a source for my own lilypond version, but a straight photocopy/scan would be an illegal copy

Finally, the most difficult one is where there are "editorial enhancements" made - these can be as little as dynamics or phrase markings. This enables the editor to slap a fresh copyright on it for life+70. And yes, that means that when classic hymn texts are tweaked into "inclusive language", it also starts the copyright clock ticking from zero.

Against all these potential pitfalls, it is very easy for a site which is user contributed content to unintentionally infringe. However, the larger question is whether (for example) publishing in the US material which is PD in the US but not in the EU should leave you open for action from the EU. Certainly the publishers of CDROM sheet music have some titles which can physically only be purchased outside the EU - but is the onus on the downloader or the publisher (who here was pretty good about tagging where content was in and out of copyright)?

Of course, commercially there is a big, big threat to music publishers. Until now it was pretty academic when music passed into the public domain, as you still had to buy engraved and printed copies. However, there are now good sources of public domain music, meaning the publishers will in time see the majority of their revenue stream disappear. This isn't such a problem for book publishers, as paying a fiver to have a classic work in a convenient form factor isn't a hardship. However, to put on a performance of (for example) Messiah means hiring in the scores and parts at great expense and paying penalties when a second violinist loses their copy. Printing them yourself from a PD source makes supreme economic sense. The end result is that the publishers are seeing a big part of their asset base being devalued, and it is in their interests to push PD music sources back across the furthest line they can (in this case, EU copyright terms).

www.olga.net also got closed down. They were a site that basically had user-submitted guitar tabs online. Therefore they were usually just a person's impression of how it should be played. Or, in some cases, a few different ways of playing the same song. Usually it wasn't the whole song either, just the main riff.

But it got taken down thanks to the NMPA and MPA

The argument for a reasonable period after death is pretty easy to mount. If the IP on a copyrighted work dies with the author, the value of the IP starts to diminish very quickly after it is created. As the author approaches old age their ability to generate any income by selling the IP is very much curtailed since any purchaser knows that ownership of the IP will have a very short life. By making the IP live a long time after death, the value is maintained at peak right through the author's life, and also provides something that they can leave to their kids.

The alternative, that is that the author's IP lapses at death and reverts to public domain, is a very curious form of the harshest possible death duties. One that no other profession would be subject to. If you build up a business you can leave it to your kids, leave your house to them too. But if your life's work is not in dollars, or bricks and mortar, but based upon artistic works, the state would simply be appropriating them and dispersing the value. In a pure socialist world such a plan might have some support. But that isn't us.

Most author's artists and composers don't make millions from their work. That is a very recent phenomenon restricted to a very few people. Most struggle through life and make enough money to live and maybe enjoy a bit of life. Their artistic output is all they have. Demanding that their output is somehow special, and should be free to all comers, unlike the labour of any other profession is unthinkingly unreasonable. The publication companies are not some huge bemoth profit hungry ogre. They simply represent the interests of the publishers, and their heirs. Yes it is sometimes hard to get a published copy of something. But this is usually a reflection of demand. No demand, it is uneconomic to print. But lack of demand should not be a trigger for the heirs of a composer to lose their ownership. That would a be double punishment, and by implication, the more popular (in print) works would remain under copyright anyway.

Clearly there is an opening for a much better technologically driven solution. But freely publishing someone else's IP on the Internet isn't it. If the web-site was clear about the IP of the content there should have never been any trouble. Maybe it was just too much effort to get it right. Many sites do by country filtering. Yes, you can bypass it, but a best effort will usually satisfy most people.

Copyright only last as long as holder of said copyright is alive. If you want to save money for your wife and kids, as the usual excuse which is put out by the companies. Then get a damn pension.

No one exists within a vacuum. The idea of copyright, was a limited right to reproduce work, before that said work went back into the general public domain. Not to be used forever, and not to be extended for at least 3 generations after the death of the originator.

Canadian site, Canadian laws. We've (Canada) signed on to international copyright treaties for a maximum of 50 years after a composers death. 70 years is a European thing, so based on relevant jurisdictions, the lawyers pushing 70 years can go get stuffed.

If he was providing music from authors less than 50 years after they died (yes their estates and children are supposed to see benefits etc.), then yes he was actionable.

However, if the company wants to take an interest in suing him for their particular publication rights, then they better look to see if it was within 50 years of authorship (corps are eternal, so copyright is ony good for 50 years).

IANAL, just an annoyed reader.

Stu Reeves

By reproducing this music, they are breaking copyright.

No Stu, the record companies have extended the length of copyright after someone dies. 70 years after someone has died? How is that right. Just because a law exists does not make it a just law. In fact the only way to protest against unjust laws is to break them. History will tell you that.

The issue Stu here is that a lot of it is in the public domain, or in some locations is public domain, and the entire site is being forced down.

Project Gutenberg is also at risk.

The big question here though is, why not just remove the articles between 50 and 70 years ago, instead of shutting down the whole thing. Picked up his ball and gone home at the first sign of trouble.

Actually I Dis-Agree.

Notes on a page are not music ... they are a blueprint used to make the music. I mean have you ever heard anyone say "wow, I saw a really good sheet of music today."?

Patents must contain plans and diagrams suitable enough to create the item the patent covers, and they are publicly available. It is the production that causes the infringement.

Are you infringing on their copyright just because you 'know' the words to a song or do you have to sing it to be liable?

The copyright should die with the author period, and no one but the author should be allowed to own it. Let the music companies pay license fees to the authors for awhile and see how they like it.

Belabouring the point here. But...

Copyright isn't anything to do with patents. They are totally different things. Patents are a bargain between the government and the inventor. If you promise to disclose the full nature of the invention, in enough detail that anyone can reproduce the invention, we will give you exclusive rights to the invention for a limited period of time. The bargain is that after that time the inventor has lost the rights forever, but has the chance to make good money in the interim. For society as a whole the gain is that they get full disclosure of the invention, and can use the knowledge gained to accelerate innovation in general. (This latter part of the bargain is what is so broken with the current state of play. Patenting something bleeding obvious does not advance anything except the inventor's interests.)

Copyright means that if you create an artistic work you own it. If you write a piece of music you own it. Same as if you write a book, you own the words on the page. Performance of a musical work without the composer's permission is a breach. But so is copying the printed music. This seems to be lost on a lot of people, but it has very good historical reasons, and these reasons still remain current. In the past, before the days of recorded music, and musical education was much more prevalent, ordinary people would buy printed music of popular songs, and play and sing them at home. This revenue was a critical source of income for the composers. Recorded music killed it off. However for theatrical productions of in-copyright music, or recitals or whatever, you are still legally required to buy the printed music, and it is illegal copy it.

Writing the music and performing it are different acts. The performer has rights to the performance, but these are separate to the rights of the composer. They may well be different people.

The simple thing to understand, the rules for printed music are identical to those for books of prose. There is no distinction between the artistic creations.

Breach of copyright singing a song? Yep. No problem singing a song to yourself in the shower or whatever. But go on TV and sing someone else's song, and you are in trouble. Perhaps the most astounding, but real, example is the "Happy Birthday" song. It is indeed copyright. It is owned by Warner Brothers. You will never hear it sung in a movie or on TV, unless the production is for Warner Brothers. Seems ridiculous, but they paid for it to be written. They do indeed own the rights of any exploitation.

"a very curious form of the harshest possible death duties. One that no other profession would be subject to"

Actually, it's not. Let's look at it a little closer.

Bob is a plumber.

Dave is a musician/writer/painter/some other artistic profession.

Bob spends his 'working hours' installing toilets, and thru hard, honest, quality work he builds a small business based on his reputation for being a reliable honest businessman who does really good work. During his lifetime he purchases and pays off a modest house, and saves enough to help pay college tuition for his children, and has a few bucks left in the bank at the end of his life to leave to them, along with the house, the business, and any possessions he gathered along the way.

Dave spends his 'working hours' practicing his craft, performing privately and publicly, and composing and publishing his works. Thru hard, honest, quality work he builds a reputation as a talented composer/musician/writer/whatever and he creates a small business producing, publishing and performing his own works. During his lifetime he purchases and pays off a modest house, and saves enough to help pay college tuition for his children, and has a few bucks left in the bank at the end of his life to leave to them, along with the house, the business, and any possessions he gathered along the way.

"If you build up a business you can leave it to your kids, leave your house to them too. But if your life's work is not in dollars, or bricks and mortar, but based upon artistic works, the state would simply be appropriating them and dispersing the value"

A plumbers life work (or any service professionals') is in the value his work has provided to his clients. If he has a business/house/inheritance to leave to his children, it's because he accumulated those things during his lifetime by saving. Those toilets don't go on paying him for lifetime +70 years. His "life's work" is every bit as ethereal as an artists.

And the fact is, in order to build a business, you have to hire and manage other people. If you're a plumber, who owns a plumbing business, you won't be doing much plumbing yourself. You'll be managing the people who do and doing administrative stuff. Same rule applies to artists. This is a sad fact of life for anyone who wants to make a living doing something they love. If you do it all yourself, your income potential will be strictly limited. If you want to build a business out of it, you will end up not doing "it" very much, cause you'll be busy running the business.

What you have to leave to your children at the end of your life is a function of how much you have accumulated during your lifetime, which is a function of how much of your "life's work" you focused on accumulating stuff. If a man is a great plumber and installs many, many perfect toilets during his career, and makes lots of money, but never saves a penny, and so has nothing to leave his children, it's not my responsibility to give his children $0.10 every time i take a crap. Likewise, if a man is a great musician/actor/painter/writer and produces many great works of art during his lifetime, but never saves a penny to leave to his children.............you can finish the logic yourself.

And ask anyone without a working toilet who's more valuable to society - plumbers or artists ;-).

I'm not against copyright during the PRODUCERS lifetime, nor for some short period after death to minimize the the situation you describe where an artist's IP value declines sharply towards the end of their life, as purchasers wait for them (and their copyright) to expire. But the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of IP is owned almost wholly buy the publisher, not the artist who created the value, and the reason it's all but impossible to make a living as an artist is that you only get a tiny amount of the revenue generated by your "life's work", while the publisher/distributor gets most of it. The current copyright situation exists to benefit them, not the individuals who actually produced the IP, which is NOT what the whole concept of Copyright is about.

I also don't think you can make a reasonable argument that a person's offspring should automatically be supported after that person's death by whatever work that person did during their lifetime. that really is something that's not true in any other profession, and isn't true for artists' either. You make money, you save some of it, you leave that to your kids. Your "life's work" doesn't do it automagically for you.

What's really at issue is the fact that modern technology is rapidly making RECORDED art valueless. This is already true of music, books and film, and is becoming more true of other art forms also. It is so cheap, easy, and effortless to copy and distribute these things electronically that what the market is willing to pay for "Copies" is rapidly approaching nothing. this is causing severe pain for the existing established industries, because their entire revenue models are built around iron-fisted control of distribution, which gives them power over both the consumer and the producer. They are simply trying their best to push that pain off on whoever they can.

Artist's should be able to copyright their own works for lifetime + a short period. Nobody should be able to copyright someone else's work, particularly after the end of the artist's lifetime. The original article here is about Universal AG (who've never Produced a single peice of art ever, they're just a distributor) bullying someone in another country for posting sheet music composed by people who died long ago. This situation doesn't fit into the concept of Copyright.

Thanks,

Joe

PS. really hate the new icons. please make them go away. My $0.02.

"This is a sad fact of life for anyone who wants to make a living doing something they love. If you do it all yourself, your income potential will be strictly limited. If you want to build a business out of it, you will end up not doing "it" very much, cause you'll be busy running the business."

So you're SUPPORTING the music biz as the rightful profite(e?)rs????

The difference between a plumber and a songwriter (or author) is that a plumber gets paid immediately for his work. Well paid. It takes most songwriters several years to "sell" their first song, but the advance isn't normally a living wage.

Do we want to discourage songwriters, authors, scriptwriters etc etc ad nauseum? I like music, books, TV etc etc ad nauseum.

The problem in this case is a really tricky one. Yes, public domain material should be available to the public, and certainly this site was more honest than most (there's a whole host of sites listing "public domain movie" torrents, with not a word on the fact that most of them are totally illegal outside of the USA).

However, if sites get closed for serving material that they have every right to serve... well...

I only see one solution, and that's for people like the UK's National Library and the US's Library of Congress to take responsibility for publishing their own country's expired works free of charge.

If they don't do it, someone else will.

"So you're SUPPORTING the music biz as the rightful profite(e?)rs????"

I'm not sure how you got that out of what i said. My point was only the FACT that if you try to build a business doing what you love(beyond the sole-proprietor level), you will inevitably end up doing more "business" than that thing you love. This is a simple fact of life for EVERYONE, including artists, plumbers, monkey trainers, etc. ad nausem. The other two options are to get hired by someone to do that thing you love, in which case you work at their discretion, or you make your living doing something you don't love and do that thing you love in your spare time (which is what most people do).

"The difference between a plumber and a songwriter (or author) is that a plumber gets paid immediately for his work. Well paid. It takes most songwriters several years to "sell" their first song, but the advance isn't normally a living wage."

That's a good point, and somewhat valid, but it takes a plumber years to "sell" their first toilet install, in the form of learning the trade, probably doing an low-paid apprenticeship, and either getting a job, or starting a plumbing business and convincing customers to hire him. the example you're using here is that of the real traditional model, where the artist who writes a song, then shops it around to the established media outlets to sell for a cash advance and a tiny percentage of future sales. Obviously this puts the artist at a huge disadvantage, since they have to give up all their rights to their work to make any money. You can't enter into that situation and reasonably expect to get anything but screwed. But then the only reason people do it that way is either they don't know anything about the Business they've chosen to attempt to make a living at, or they're not really interested in making a "living" at their work, they want to be a rock star.

The point i'm making is that everyone has to "make a living". If you choose art as your way of doing that, it's your responsibility to know what you're getting into. You have no inherent right as an "artist" to get paid to produce whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want, and get paid whether anyone wants it or not. If you write good songs and play your instruments well and I like your style, I'll come see you live and maybe buy the cd. I'm not going to pay to look at the sheet music online 20 years after you're dead.

"Do we want to discourage songwriters, authors, scriptwriters etc etc ad nauseum?"

Nope, i like all that stuff too. That wasn't my point. My point was that Artist's should be able to make a living from their work (if it's good, just like anyone else), but extending copyright 70 years beyond their death doesnt' help with that. Fixing the current business model, so that artist's don't have to sign away all their rights to their life's work to make any money at all, might help.

"The problem in this case is a really tricky one."

Unless they were serving stuff from currently living artists, I beg to differ. Again, those extended copyrights exist to benefit huge multi-national publishers/distribution co's. Dead artist's don't care about that stuff. Maybe Illegal in (or not) in different jurisdictions. I'm firmly on the "law exists to ensure individual freedom" side of that argument.

"However, if sites get closed for serving material that they have every right to serve... well..."

Not sure what Your point is here, but I'm going to guess we agree and that it's Bad?

"I only see one solution, and that's for people like the UK's National Library and the US's Library of Congress to take responsibility for publishing their own country's expired works free of charge."

That is a brilliant idea,.... seriously.

Best,

Joe

still hate the icons.

Bloody parasites (I mean this Feldmahler and friends).

We need a "damn pigopolists" icon (sorry, Joe).

Originally the law for both copyright and patent protected IP for 28 years. In the intervening 300 years, scientists and engineers have managed to make a living without any extension to this. However the greed of the artistic community has continually edged the length of their protection upwards.

I haven't heard about anyone trying the same trick with Project Gutenberg Australia who are in the same situation (50 year copyright vs longer in europe/US). Sounds like its a case of hitting the small guy because you can. Wonder what the EFF's opinion of the cease and desist letter would have been? Maybe it's not to late for Feldmahler to see.

The International Music Score Library Project was taken offline by its founder Feldmahler. In a posting on the site he explained that he was unable to fulfill the demands of the letter and so had to take the whole site down."

Feldmahler is the good guy in this story. He was running the site and was forced to take it down by the bad guys.

Just to clarify for those who failed to read the story as opposed to scanning words :-)

There could a spate of 1970's & 80's pop singers being 'harvested' by errant rap artists who would make more profit from the source of their 'mash ups' being now in the public domain.

Just think of the bloodbath that would ensue from a new JiveBunny track... Where's me gun?