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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TechnoratiI think Kenneth Donnell (Glasgow, Scotland) takes the cake for being scalped for concert tickets.
He paid almost $200,000 for the privilege of seeing Led Zeppelin re-unite for an evening in London. Yup, the return of the satanic coke-heads that can't remember what song they're playing from one bar to the next.
Dude, they're old. Brains long since fried. Have any of them made any memorable music in the last 30 years? There you go. Do you remember the Cream re-union? It was freaking horrible - and Clapton still plays guitar for a living. A year from now the DVD of the event will be in the discount bins at K-Mart for $4.95. Why not spend the money on a new Ferrari or something?
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Let me put this another way. Those of you buying Led Zep tickets are probably wanting to see this person play guitar:
But what you are going to see instead is this person playing guitar...
I might have to eat crow on this one. Had a look at the concert footage and was quite impressed (though streaming video to Oz from the UK was a bit of a challenge). They definitely did better than Cream for 60+ years old rock-n-rollers.
It's also worth noting that Afred's picked up the distribution rights (I got the email this morning since I'm still on the distro lists for most of the big music supply houses). Alfred's will keep it out of the discount bins at K-Mart and in the Classic Rock section of your local music store for years to come - at a premium price.