IMSLP Forums

Hi,
I want to upload a scan of a score manuscript. The scan is not done by me, but it is published under "Creativ Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International". As far as I understand with this license it would be allowed to upload it to IMSLP, if I redistribute it with the same license. Unfortunately if I select this type of license in IMSLP upload form I get the error "Scans must be Public Domain". Does this mean that I cannot publish this score on IMSLP at all?

If this scan is simply a photographic reproduction of the source, it is not copyrightable under a CC or any other license in most places---look up "sweat of the brow". (I'm assuming the piece itself is in the public domain.)

The piece and manuscript are from 19th century and therefore public domain.

The scan is from "Münchner DigitalisierungsZentrum", a company which does scans for the "Bayerische Staatsbibliothek". In their FAQ (https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/inde ... c=faq&l=en) they write that the scans are free to redistribute for non-commercial use only. For commercial publications there are special conditions. This differentiation cannot be done with a public domain copyright. Therefore they used a non-commercial CC, I suppose.

If a scan cannot be copyrighted in general, does that mean that the "DigitalisierungsZentrum" is not allowed to forbid the redistribution in the public domain?

That's pretty much what it means for our purposes, even if MDZ might disagree. The usual practice on IMSLP for this kind of thing is to upload simply as public domain while always making sure to credit the scanner; see http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Scores_f ... bibliothek for instances from BSB in particular. Some libraries with digitization projects include "copyright" notices in all their PDFs, for which removal by the uploader is recommended---I think BDH does this, for example. (Removal is recommended because the notices are misleading and nobody around here agrees with them anyway.)