UK Music Publishers Issue DMCA Takedown On Public Domain Sheet Music

from the there-is-no-public-domain dept

It was just a few months ago that we noted how music publishers were annoyed at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), which has aggregated music scores of public domain music. We noted that it occasionally received copyright threats, and now it's received another one. The UK Music Publisher's Association (note: not a specific publisher) issued a DMCA takedown over some public domain music (Rachmaninoff's The Bells), and GoDaddy (as it seems to regularly do) took down the site. Nice of them.

IMSLP and its supporters are apparently looking to see if they can file a copyrfraud lawsuit against the UK MPA for the bogus takedown. Even more bizarre is that the MPA is now trying to hide the fact that it sent the takedown in the first place, demanding that the director of IMSLP takedown the takedown notice. Amusingly, in the response to the MPA, the person from IMSLP notes that their last email was sent to the imslp.org domain... which is useless:

I note that one of the receipients of your 21/04/2011 11:23 email is feldmahler@imslp.org. Because you caused, via a bogus DMCA takedown notice, imslp.org to be removed from the internet, that email address will not work.

Of course, the punishment for filing false DMCA notices is pretty minimal, so these sorts of situations will keep happening. It's really too bad that GoDaddy took down an entire site over a single DMCA notice, but the law encourages that sort of censorship approach.

Filed Under: classical music, copyright, dmca, public domain, takedown
Companies: imslp, music publishers association