The English-language Wikipedia - where I am an administrator (though not a bureaucrat, or a member of the Foundation, or... just an admin, which is not especially much of anything) - has had to worry about being held liable as an entity for copy-violations by individual contributors. As I understand it- and I am not hedging just to hedge, because I don't know the whole story here at all or anywhere near it (the why of it, the history of this, for instance...) - what exists on the site (and others also, if memory serves) are a few of the following:
1) several pages explaining to contributors, in very considerable, broken-down detail, the copyright rules of the various countries.
2) pages like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:COPYVIO , which give direct instructions for what to do if one finds a violation, and links to other pages and rules. If someone finds something that looks like one, they ask the contributor, hopefully get a response, but in
any case remove it until the issue is resolved. (See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights .)
(3)"Is the Berne Convention legally binding"?
To paraphrase the US Constitution: So far as the US is concerned - Treaties that we sign
are the law of the land. We acted against our own law, unconstitutionally, in ignoring the World Court, but could do so without being "called on it" by practically anyone really it seems because, well... please don't get me started. I do not know if Canadian law works similarly wrt treaties, though suspect that countries that allow their citizens to violate treaties they've signed do not get called back to sign many more of them (unless capable of sufficient arm-twisting, etc. ... never mind, I promised myself I wouldn't start.)
So when IMSLP comes back up after an agreement with UE, and this problem then occurs with Schirmer, and then with Belwyn Mills, and then with Schott, and with Sikorski, and then with Edition Nordstern, and then with Merton, and then.. do we consider each one to have some personal issue with us (or... oh no! it's a cabal!
) - or eventually institute some tighter self-regulation, maybe on the Wikipedia model, maybe not?; I don't claim the greatest coherence in this comment; and I don't claim that I'm getting my point across all so very well. But maybe looking in at least as much as out can have its benefits, time to time, in balance...
Eric