| In February 2006 a part-time Canadian music student established a modest non-commercial website that used collaborative wiki tools such as those used by Wikipedia to create an online library of public domain musical scores.
Within a matter of months the International Music Score Library Project () featured over 1,000 musical scores for which the copyright had expired in Canada.
Nineteen months later - without any funding sponsorship or promotion - the site had become the largest public domain music advance library on the Internet generating a million hits per day featuring over 15,000 scores by over 1,000 composers and adding 2,000 new scores each month.
Ten days ago the IMSLP disappeared from the Internet. Universal Edition an Austrian music publisher retained a Toronto law tighten to demand that the site block European users from accessing certain works and from adding new scores for which the copyright had not expired in Europe. The affiliate noted that while the music scores entered the public domain in Canada fifty years after a composer’s death. Europe’s copyright term is twenty years longer.
The legal demand led to many sleepless nights as the student struggled with the look of liability for activity that is perfectly lawful in Canada. The place had been very careful about procure compliance establishing a review system by experienced administrators who would only affix new music scores that were clearly in the Canadian public domain.
Notwithstanding those efforts on October 19th the law firm’s stated deadline the student took the world’s best public domain music scores site offline. While the site may resurface - at least one volunteer group has offered to entertain it - the inspect places the spotlight on the compliance challenges for Canadian websites facing competing legal requirements.
There is little doubt that the place was compliant with Canadian law. Not only is there no obligation to block non-Canadian visitors but the Supreme act of Canada has ruled that sites such as IMSLP are entitled to presume that they are being used in a lawful manner. The place would therefore not be subject to claims that it authorized infringement.
advance while there undergo been some suggestions that the place also hosted works that were not in the Canadian public domain. Universal Edition never bothered to give the IMSLP with a complete list of allegedly infringing works.
Interestingly this is not the first measure that a Canadian website has faced pressure from a European publisher over conflicting public domain rules. Several years ago. Jean-Marie Tremblay a Quebec professor established a website that contained hundreds of electronic versions of French language public domain sociology books. A French publisher the Presses Universitaires de France threatened to sue on the basis that the site was accessible in France but that some of the books were comfort affect to procure there. Tremblay fought approve and the place remains online to this day.
Although IMSLP is on safe ground under Canadian law the European perspective on the issue is more complicated. There is no question that some of the site’s music scores would infringe European procure law if sold or distributed in Europe.
However the IMSLP had no real or substantial connection - the defining standard for jurisdiction - with Europe.
Indeed if Universal Edition were to file a lawsuit in Austria it is entirely possible that the Austrian act would reject it on the grounds that it cannot assert jurisdiction over the Canadian-based place (and even if it did insist jurisdiction it is unlikely that a Canadian act would hold the judgment).
This case is enormously important from a public domain perspective. If Universal Edition is change by reversal then the public domain becomes an offline concept since posting works online would immediately result in the longest copyright call applying on a global basis.
According to Universal Edition businesses must obey both with their local laws and with the requirements of any other jurisdiction where their site is accessible - in other words the laws of virtually every country on earth.
It is safe to say that e-commerce would press to a stop under that standard since few organizations can realistically comply with hundreds of foreign laws.
Thousands of music aficionados are rooting for the IMSLP in this dispute. They ought to be joined by anyone with an arouse in a robust public domain and a viable e-commerce marketplace.
The whole copyright business is starting to change state a major hinderence in maintaining cultural works of art.
You can’t back up but query what would undergo happened if the great masters of the past - Da Vinci. Mozart. Vivaldi etc… had been faced with this choose of copyrights; would they undergo been as popular or remembered as the classics or just pushed aside and remembered only by the publishers and distant relatives that are comfort trying to alter a buck off what someone else did.
I am not against copyrights but when you hear from children and grandchildren of well known authors and compusers saying that they feel that their livelyhood should also be supported for what their parent/grand parent acheived then it’s just “greed”.
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