No thanks?!? If a composer who 'died in 1960' wrote beautiful music for us to enjoy pre-1923, shouldn't we still be eager to send a bit of our monies toward his/her family who undoubtedly still own the pub. rights to his/her compositions? God knows being a composer for a living isn't very profitable... ESPECIALLY these days (even 200 years ago... I can't think of any composer besides Haydn who became a fat cat by composing alone). Buy the modern scores, download the old ones!WJM wrote:No.danikonpiano wrote:...except that it IS called the INTERNATIONAL music score library project... therefore copyright laws of all countries should be observed.
And in any event, how do you do that when "all countries" have contradictory copyright laws? There are countries which have "domaine public payant", and those which do not. You cannot simultaneously observe the laws of a "domaine public payant" country, and a non-DPP country. You cannot simultaneously observe the laws of the United States and Canada with respect to a pre-1923 work by an author who died in 1960.
Just as with the various Projects Gutenberg, music projects of this sort should make their activities — by being organized in and hosted in one single country — subject to the laws of that country.
To say that you have to observe the copyright laws of all countries, means you have to observe the copyright law of the strictest country, which means that the whole world must now run on Mexican copyright law.
No thanks.
I would repeat (from my 1st post) that composers born after 1860 have no business being on the site. I know that this includes quite a few composers who we would all love to study for free, but unfortunately, it's bloody illegal. Suck it up & quit whining. BUY the Debussy, Mahler, Rachmaninov, or whoever's scores. They're relatively cheap in Dover editions. I did, and it was worth it... books keep better than printer paper anyway.