IMSLP Forums

Hi - I'm new. I've made a musescore source that follows the scan mirrored from the Royal Danish Library as closely as I can manage. Their original is "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported" and the IMSLP scan, "Public Domain". I'm pretty sure that means I can do whatever I want, but do we know if they have a preference for license terms for typesetting of the originals they hold (for instance, to use the same Creative Commons terms)? Also (although I can ask in another forum) - you just want the PDF at this stage, holding the source for later, is that correct?

With many thanks to them, IMSLP and WIMA,
Jean

if their original is creative commons, any derivatives of it should also be cc, I should think - I'm a little confused actually. We ask the same cc-license-distribution-rules-courtesy-etc. even in cases where others may regard our claim to do so as dubious (e.g. editing that didn't involve much actual editing), as some may regard the Danish Library's claim to put a CC label on theirs. Hrm. ... But I don't think the site software allows it... That's actually part of the CC rules, though, you see, which is part of why I'm confused...

Maybe this is another way of putting the question. I know there was some kind of overall negotiation by which IMSLP was allowed to mirror these scans - does that mean that the Royal Danish Library are OK with the label "Public Domain" that occurs on the mirrored version, even though they've labelled the originals more restrictively?

If they're happy, then anything goes. If they aren't, and it should be the same license on IMSLP, then so should my PDF. They used a version of the CC license that explicitly prohibits derivatives, and I'm personally not likely to challenge that, but I don't see any way my PDF could be seen as a derivative instead of just a different format for the same information. But then the next question (for WIMA) would be - is musescore source based on a scan considered a derivative? I say "no" - it's a subset of the same information as on the scan - but I think like a scientist, not a librarian or a lawyer...

We've not had any complaints from them about this issue. The issue of whether a scan of a public domain original is subject to some sort of copyright protection evidently has not been definitively settled by a court in the EU yet. It has in the USA, one of the few bright spots in the grim universe of US copyright. In light of the Montezuma decision in Germany, which considerably limited the ability of people to make claims of editio princeps on works of long-dead authors, such claims on scans will hopefully be challenged as the nonsense they are. While several libraries like DKB are very sensible and make no brash claims about scans (DKB in particular has thankfully taken a very minimalist approach on this), others have been quite insane and have asserted full copyright protection. As I see it, if someone can claim copyright or some form of IP protection on a mere scan of a public domain original, what is the point of having a public domain at all? Why not just go all the way into the notion of perpetual copyright?

Some have suggested this, which seems to be nearly the opposite of the original intention of the thing (not that I am an originalist in most things myself, and copyright and copyright law have in my opinion much value if rightly thought about, shaped and applied, but chipping away at public domain (among some other things) would be the wrong way to take that...)