IMSLP Forums

Hello Community,
first, let me say, that I am so happy about what IMSLP is doing for the musical world.
Its just amazing. I have read on the homepage, that currently there are 122.000 musical works on IMSLP.
That is the public domain material. I assume its almost all public domain material of classical music in the world. right?
So i was woundering: How much copiright protected works are there in classical music?
I tried to google it, and was searching for information on publishers websites (Bärenreiter, Henle etc.) but couldnt find any numbers.
Does anyone of you know?
Cheers
Andrew

This is actually something of a misunderstanding on your part. While it is true that a majority of the 122,000 works are out of copyright at least in Canada, there are quite a few items that are under a type of copyright here (more than half the files, actually). These files are all available here under one or another flavor of the Creative Commons license, or our own special Performance Restricted version derivative of it (which allows composers to get paid as normal by their respective PROs). The "plain vanilla" creative commons are functionally close to public domain, while other versions restrict commercial use or derivative work creation. Also note that while most works of composers like Hindemith (died 1963) are free in Canada, they are very much under copyright elsewhere.