Michael Nyvang wrote:
> The reason I say this, is that the copyright
> organizations currently are running multiple lawsuits against
> people who have put music on the web. And they are doing this
> very aggressively (and I mean *VERY* aggressively) in Europe.
I have the impression that these campaigns are primarily targeted against
archives of sound resources as mp3 files which are seen to seriously
threaten the most important income sources of the artists - and not least
the music recording companies.
>
> In fact it looks like they are preparing a major legal offensive
> regarding these issues.
>
> An example you all may know about, is the music archive OLGA
> with sheet music for guitar etc.. AFAIK it has been shut down in 98,
> and several 1000 songs put up on the web as a voluntary effort
> has been removed from the web.
There are other free sheet music archives, for example the GMD archive
(http://www.gmd.de/Misc/Music/scores/) and the Choral Public Domain Library
(http://www.cpdl.org/). I have myself published music on these archives most
of it typeset with the free MusiXTeX utilities (and until now a single
Lilypond based score) which again means that no commercial software producer
may claim any right to fonts and other software used in my scores. Most of
the music contained in these archives is witten by composers who died more
than 70 years ago and therefore should not be covered by restrictions any
more. This is also the case with most of my scores. As for my own
compositions also published this way I have carefully got the permissions
for publishing the lyrics by the poets (or their heirs) and after that
registered the works at the danish copyright organization KODA. This means
that while the scores of this music are free the public performance of it
isn't ! That means that as far as the music is used for educational purposes
(which is the scope of some of my scores - there are links to them in the
web pages of the danish high school music subject) I have given music
teachers free access to teaching materials as an alternative to commercially
published scores etc. The educational institutions must, however, pay
performance fees if the compositions are performed at public concerts.
>
> SO for Mutopia, whatever you do: GET A BULLETPROOF LEGAL ADVICE.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Regards
--
Christian Mondrup, Computer Programmer
Scandiatransplant, Skejby Hospital, University Hospital of Aarhus
Brendstrupgaardsvej, DK 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark
Phone: +45 89 49 53 01
