One of the best free-sheet-music sites, the IMSLP, got killed by the copyright vultures today.
Since European copyright laws extend for 20 years longer than those in Canada, where IMSLP is located, European publishers Universal Edition demanded that IMSLP block access to its site from European users, for fear that some music from that 20-year window might sneak in. The site's owner, who is a volunteer, simply didn't have either the time to figure out the technical issues involved in complying, nor the money to hire lawyers to fight his case, so he just shut down the site, depriving the whole world of access to perfectly-legal public-domain scores by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, and so on. Everyone loses, except a few publishers extracting the last few Euros out of their ageing catalogs, and their attorneys.
Copyright is a good thing, but the principal beneficiaries of ridiculously-long copyright terms are not musicians, artists, or the public, but corporate lawyers. On top of this month's $222,000 judgment against a woman who put 24 songs on her Kazaa account, it's been a bad month for common sense.
Update: This site is the orchestral equivalent to CPDL, which many of us choral musicians rely on regularly. Could this happen to CPDL? You betcha.
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