IMSLP Forums

Hello everyone:

A friend of mine gave me links to three free albums of electronic music:

http://bandcamp.sectionz.com/album/beats-vol-1
http://bandcamp.sectionz.com/album/mindfighting-2
http://bandcamp.sectionz.com/album/dead-surfers-club

I read the description for a bit and looked around, and noticed that these were licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND. It would be interesting if these could be uploaded to IMSLP. Of course, they cannot be transcribed to musical notation because of the ND clause, but the recordings themselves may be a valuable addition to IMSLP. (or maybe the other way around, I favor IMSLP's organization scheme)

Would there be any problems if these were uploaded? Of course, the license allows that, but I don't want to encounter copyright troubles because of a (presumably) large publisher's powers or anything similar. And does this music belong here? It may not be a good idea to introduce it to IMSLP.

Please give thoughts on this.

Thanks,
Lekro.

lekro wrote:... Of course, the license allows that, but I don't want to encounter copyright troubles because of a (presumably) large publisher's powers or anything similar.

Well, (a) we'd be respecting the terms of the license, and (b) it's standard practice here to give links to the source of any 'imported' files--it would probably be friendly to also note their setup for donations. My main concern with this is that through their site/bandcamp, you /have/ to go through the 'Buy Now' option, which draws very direct attention to this model; here at IMSLP, of course, there would be nothing like that, only a note in the Publisher Info or Misc. Notes field.

And does this music belong here? It may not be a good idea to introduce it to IMSLP.

Any music that can legally be hosted on IMSLP belongs on IMSLP. It's true that we don't currently have anything like this (as far as I know), but we do have some experimental electronic-only works (that is, no written notation), and the main difference here aside from the style of the pieces would be their grouping as an 'album', a concept which in the modern popular-music sense is rather alien to IMSLP.

KGill wrote:-snip-

I feel the same way about the donations model. On bandcamp, it's "in your face" and takes precedence over the download, while in IMSLP, the reverse is true. This donations model should be similarly obvious and visible on the IMSLP work page if these files are uploaded.

An "album" can be a work with multiple songs within it, just like a song cycle. I realized that the S in IMSLP stands for Score, so uploading this sort of work to IMSLP wouldn't make sense, but to PMLP, it makes more sense. It probably just means stretching the definition of "Music Score" more than usual.

EDIT: After looking around SectionZ for a while, I found something that surprised me a bit. This album:

http://bandcamp.sectionz.com/album/ism

costs $10 to purchase, yet is licensed with a CC-BY-NC-ND license as well... That basically means it's legal for someone to buy it and post it online... ? I think there's something wrong with that.

Are the individual works in that list all licensed under CC? All by the same composer?, etc. We do have a few things where a composer has created a sound file only and uploaded it. When you get into someone other than the composer asserting CC claims, we run into potential infringement issues.

Carolus wrote:Are the individual works in that list all licensed under CC? All by the same composer?, etc. We do have a few things where a composer has created a sound file only and uploaded it. When you get into someone other than the composer asserting CC claims, we run into potential infringement issues.

All of them, on that page, appear to be licensed under CC, by the same composer (Aleksander Vinter). But the publisher isn't the composer. I doubt that this publisher is infringing on the composer's copyright, but I found the same works on the composer's bandcamp website here, as all rights reserved:

http://shop.savantofficial.com/album/ism

I find it strange that the publisher is releasing these files under CC, even if payment is required in order to obtain them. It would probably be a good idea to check with the composer first that he gave permission to this publisher to publish his works.

It seems possible that Vinter has released these under CC, though this is not explicitly stated in all locales. I note the files are also on SoundCloud and several other sites. Might be worth an e-mail to him to check if he's OK with it. If so, upload away using the identical license.