The UK’s MPA tries to take down IMSLP

A post at the IMSLP journal talks about the recent attempt by the UK’s MPA (Music Publisher’s Association) to take down their site.  More information on the forums here and here.

Basically, it went something like this:

MPA complained to godaddy that imslp is hosting copyrighted music, and providing one specific example.  Godaddy shuts down the DNS link to imslp, effectively taking the entire site off the internet, rather than investigating said specific example.  Also, this was done without notifying the folks at imslp.  When confronted with the ridiculousness of the claim, the MPA backed down but wanted the posted take-down notice taken down. 

IMSLP’s response is brilliant:

“I've written permission to publish it. Others are publishing it all over the internet. Again, they each have written permission. Here's the sourced written permission:

The following is the e-mail that GoDaddy received from the MPA. IMSLP / Project Petrucci LLC grants everyone permission to reproduce it in part or in its entirety. I also grant everyone permission to reproduce the above post in part or in its entirety. Please feel free to make this incident as widely known as possible.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4775#p24690

Seriously, you can't expect to take down a major website, with a bogus DMCA takedown notice, and then try and hide the evidence. Can you see that? It makes you look ridiculous.”

So now, I’m doing my part to make this incident as widely known as possible.  The UK is trying to enforce their questionable claims of copyright on a work written by a Russian, published in Germany, and hosted on a website in Canada.  All of these places have shorter terms before a work enters the public domain.  That means the initial claim was false.

Then, in response to that claim, GoDaddy takes down the whole site, without notification, without investigation. 

Luckily, they didn’t stay down long.  Slashdot got wind of this recently too, and as always, there are some really interesting and informative things being discussed.  One neat alternative resource someone pointed to is the Mutopia Project, a site where people are re-typsetting public domain sheet music in LilyPond.  You can download the music as PDF or as LilyPond source files to create your own edition.