Mike Macgirvin
Diary and Other Rantings
Beyond Silicon Valley
   
Saturday, May 17 2008, 05:28 pm
Nov 29, 2007
IMSLP closes down

The lawyers are winning. Found this over on Night Passage (one of my favorite jazz websites):

 

IMSLP.ORG, the Internet Music Score Library Project has closed down, the founder of the site sadly announces:

On Saturday October 13, 2007, I received a second Cease and Desist letter from Universal Edition. At first I thought this letter would be similar in content to the first Cease and Desist letter I received in August. However, after lengthy discussions with very knowledgeable lawyers and supporters, I became painfully aware of the fact that I, a normal college student, has neither the energy nor the money necessary to deal with this issue in any other way than to agree with the cease and desist, and take down the entire site. I cannot apologize enough to all IMSLP contributors, who have done so much for IMSLP in the last two years.

There were more than 10.000 music scores in the public domain on the site
I must add I am not surprised at all, as I wrote in my previous post I re-started playing piano, and I was so happy to find on IMSLP the whole Mikrokosmos by Bartok, a serie of studies divided in 6 volumes, very popular among piano students. It was an old Sovietic edition with titles in cyrliic, but all the studies were there. The problem is: Bartok died in 1945, 62 years ago, therefore Mikrokosmos does not comply with the rule life+70 years and it's not in the public domain. But this is not the only case. I really hope they open again, but being more careful about published scores.
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-- Proconsul Marcus Claudius, "Bread and Circuses",
stardate 4041.2