IMSLP Forums

Hello all,

Please forgive me if these questions have been asked a million times, but I would just like to clarify some things for my own peace of mind:

1) Do the PDF files of material listed on IMSLP have any restrictions in terms of usage or copying? Does anyone have rights over the "scan" itself?

2) I would like to print and use songs from some Christmas Carol collections on IMSLP. From what I saw, almost all of the collections are around 100 years old (and the dates of death for the editors seem to be around there as well for the most part). Since I live in Canada where the copyright term expires after 50 years of the life of the author/editor, am I safe in assuming that the material in those collections are no longer under copyright? Is it at all possible that some publisher could still hold the rights to some of the material? Has the background check on these kinds of collections already been done by folks involved with IMSLP to determine their public domain status, or do I need to look into it further? Do other IMSLP users research the public domain status of works they wish to download or no?

Thank you very much for your time. This is a great resource.

If the last surviving contributor has been dead more than 50 years, it is absolutely free in Canada and you can do whatever you like with it - including printing it and selling it.

I was typing a reply when Carolus made a simpler reply. My longer version was:

You need to be familiar with copyright law in the country of usage. While some of the scans at IMSLP will be legal in all countries, not all of them are. For example, in the country I live and work in, editors are given the same protection as composers, while in other countries they might have reduced or no protection depending on the level of their contribution.

Some of the works (I think mostly typesets?) might be covered by a Creative Commons license that does not include commercial use. So you may use them for studying and playing, but not recording or selling. But it sounds like you are looking at scans, not typesets?

Start by reading:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Public_domain

and

http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:Copyright_Made_Simple

steltz wrote:I was typing a reply when Carolus made a simpler reply. My longer version was:

You need to be familiar with copyright law in the country of usage. While some of the scans at IMSLP will be legal in all countries, not all of them are. For example, in the country I live and work in, editors are given the same protection as composers, while in other countries they might have reduced or no protection depending on the level of their contribution.

Some of the works (I think mostly typesets?) might be covered by a Creative Commons license that does not include commercial use. So you may use them for studying and playing, but not recording or selling. But it sounds like you are looking at scans, not typesets?

Start by reading:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Public_domain

and

http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:Copyright_Made_Simple

Yes, the files I'm interested in are scanned works. If the file description says "Copyright: Public Domain", does that mean that there are no rights being claimed on the scan itself and we are free to do with it as we please? I know that some works on IMSLP have a Creative Commons license on them, but I think that all the files I'm interested in are scans that are listed as Public Domain.

Scanning a document is just a form of copying. If I xerox a public domain document, I do not get copyrights on my xerox copy. Similarly, the scanner does not have any copyright claim.