Darcy James Argue wrote:
In an effort to preempt the inevitable questions:
"UE" = Universal Edition, a big music publisher
"IMSLP" = International Music Score Library Project, a website that was
formerly an incredibly useful repository of public-domain scores.
More here:
http://imslp.org/
And here:
http://johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/universal-edition-force-closure-of-imslp/
This was a sad happening indeed, but it does point up the horrible
morass which is copyright law in this day and age when material from
Canada is accessible from Germany or U.S. or Argentina or anywhere on
the planet.
International copyright treaties allow for cooperation between national
law enforcement agencies to help enforce local copyright laws which are
being broken in other countries.
IMSLP may have been a terrific repository of public-domain scores, but
it was a repository of scores which were public domain in Canada. Those
scores were available to anybody who accessed the site, regardless of
which country they logged in from, and that's where the trouble started.
The IMSLP had warnings about certain scores which were illegal for
people in certain countries to download but other than that they did
nothing to prevent such downloads. And since there isn't a single
international copyright term that all countries agree to, sites such as
IMSLP will have to restrict the material they post to only material
which is public domain in the countries with the longest copyright terms.
It's a very sticky legal mess, but if someone is providing materials
which are copyrighted in Germany to someone who is in Germany (without
obtaining written permission and paying royalties to the copyright
owner), they're breaking the copyright laws of Germany.
As long as copyright terms are as long as they are (and they keep
getting longer, not shorter) in many countries, I'm afraid we'll see
more and more such legal actions.
Too bad those who can see most clearly the lunacy of current copyright
law conditions have the least amount of money to press forward with
logical copyright law reform.
And as long as legislators can be bought and sold (as is the habit in
current U.S. Congress and I'm sure other national legislative bodies
around the world) by the highest bidders, the situation isn't going to
change for the better any time soon.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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