I see IMSLP has been a regular supporter of the IA. They are somewhat of a Project Gutenburg but for public domain sheet music and recordings, and they are a great source for music students. I imagine they have deep interest in these results. Their comments really highlight some potential difficulties with determination of copyright that can cause digital libraries unnecessary problems.

I haven’t followed the case too much, as I suspected the big money side was going to win somehow, but sheet music publishing has always been contentious between those selling it and those providing it for free. Sheet music was and is targeted as a form of piracy by record companies and publishers. Even Nintendo gets in on the action.

If someone can make a buck off of it, they’ll beat you up for giving it away for free.

We agree that the court case sets a very ugly precedent for libraries like archive.org (and ours). Before you go banning and taking down tens of thousands of items in mad rush, please do seriously consider our comment made shortly before the attack that took you down for two weeks:

https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/21/lending-of-digitized-books/#comment-492068

When a publisher reprints something in 1975 that was originally published in 1885 it does not grant a new copyright on any pre-existing public-domain material. There are countless examples (many thousands) on this site of the type of thing mentioned in the above post. When a new edition of a public domain original is issued, the only thing covered by the copyright claim is the new material added which must be at least somewhat original in nature to qualify. This should be made clear in the copyright registration (though they sometimes fail to do so). It should not be solely for a new typeset (in the US and many countries) but only for new additions such as commentaries, annotations, illustrations, prefaces, afterwords and the like. If someone redacts the newly-added material the 1975 print is fine as its reduced to merely a new typesetting of the 1885 original (sometimes a publisher doesn’t even bother to produce a new typeset but literally reprints the old one) – thus with the identical content as the original.

IMSLP is of course a much smaller site in terms of the sheer number of items in our library. We’re highly specialized after all (music scores, for those who might not be familiar). We have a team dedicated to this kind of thing and we’re always busy at it. We know all about the various games played by publishers. Take a page from our book please. Archive.org has a lot of community goodwill and there are no doubt folks with time to volunteer and do some curating to redact only the kind of newly-added thing mentioned above. Hachette el al really don’t want a public domain. They just want to control everything – despite the fact that they’re clearly benefitting from things in the public domain – just take a look at this short list taken from your own list of “banned books” affected by the decision:

“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain (first published 1884-85) “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin (first published 1899) “An American Tragedy” by Theodore Dreiser (first published 1925) “Candide” by Voltaire (first published in 1759, also in English translation, again in English 1762) “The Decameron” by Giovanni Bocaccio (written ca.1353, published in English by 1620)

All five of the originals are public domain worldwide, even the two translated into English. Yet there they are on the list. Yes there are certainly derivative works which are very much under copyright – like Bernstein and Sondheim’s “West Side Story” – based on “Romeo and Juliet” but obviously recast, transformed and adapted in such a way that it’s a work on its own. That one won’t be showing up at IMSLP for quite some time for obvious reasons.

That being said, publishers have been known to put up “scarecrow notices” on plain old reprints containing nothing at all outside the original. In the US, these are technically illegal. With all the lawfare they’ve conducted over the decades, they’ve got countless folks gaslighted into thinking every claim made is a valid one. As the lyric of a famous song goes: “It ain’t necessarily so.”