IMSLP Forums

Hi,

I wanted to make accessible some of Heikki Suolahti works. Many of them have never been edited, but a company, Music Findland (musicfindland.com) is selling copies of the original handwritten score. In their edition, they write that no reproduction, distribution, etc. can be done without the author's consent. Plus, they made accessible a low resolution PDF for two works he has written, but they put a big sign on every page stating that this is "For promotional use only".

If I understand the copyright laws properly, all his instrumental works would be in the public domain in Canada and in the EU, but i don't think I can upload a pdf that specifically states that it's protected.

If I were to retype it completely (something I like to do), I can be sure it's in the public domain, right?

Also, he has written many songs with poems from famous finnish authors as lyrics... He died exceptionnally young, so the poets outlived him greatly... i'm correct to understand that even if his music is in PD, all his vocal works aren't, right?

Thank you!

Hello and welcome. I am just a regular contributor, but I think I can answer some of these questions.

Phelynx wrote:I wanted to make accessible some of Heikki Suolahti works. Many of them have never been edited, but a company, Music Findland (musicfindland.com) is selling copies of the original handwritten score. In their edition, they write that no reproduction, distribution, etc. can be done without the author's consent. Plus, they made accessible a low resolution PDF for two works he has written, but they put a big sign on every page stating that this is "For promotional use only".

If I understand the copyright laws properly, all his instrumental works would be in the public domain in Canada and in the EU, but i don't think I can upload a pdf that specifically states that it's protected.

Reproductions of manuscripts are called facsimiles. They definitely fail the threshold of originality in Canada and the EU, so it should be OK to scan them in and upload. That said, if the publisher placed copyrightable content onto the pages, such as their logo, then those will have to be removed; I think the IMSLP staff can help with that. Or you could cover it with a piece of paper while you scan. But if it's just copyright notices and "do not reproduce" scaremongering, then you shouldn't worry; IMSLP is full of uploads with that kind of text, such as when a publisher reprints a public domain edition and then tries to claim copyright, which is fraudulent.

Regarding the PDFs; it is possible that the original images are still included, with the watermarks overlaid on a separate layer. In that case, it should be possible to extract the original un-watermarked scans. I have done this before, and described my method on this page (for Linux). If you have a link to the PDFs (on the publisher's website only, please), I could give it a try.

Phelynx wrote:If I were to retype it completely (something I like to do), I can be sure it's in the public domain, right?

That is correct; but I'd say, base yourself on the manuscripts as much as possible and not on the published editions, otherwise you could risk incorporating some of their editorial decisions in your own typeset, and these might be subject to copyright. In any case, I think it would be best if you upload as many manuscripts as you can, as they are the most authentic source.

Also, if any of the Music Findland editions were published in 1992 or earlier, and do not include any additions beyond a faithful rendition of the manuscript, then those might be public domain in Canada and the EU, due to the Urtext rule.

Phelynx wrote:Also, he has written many songs with poems from famous finnish authors as lyrics... He died exceptionnally young, so the poets outlived him greatly... i'm correct to understand that even if his music is in PD, all his vocal works aren't, right?

Correct; all contributors must be in the public domain. That said, you could make a typeset without including the lyrics, which would be fine; or you could cover up the lyrics in any scanned images. Referring to a poem by name is also not a problem according to Carolus in this previous discussion.

That is correct; but I'd say, base yourself on the manuscripts as much as possible and not on the published editions, otherwise you could risk incorporating some of their editorial decisions in your own typeset, and these might be subject to copyright. In any case, I think it would be best if you upload as many manuscripts as you can, as they are the most authentic source.

Yes the text I use seems to be handwritten by the composer himself, in fact, Music Findland has just made availiable the manuscript with watermarks on it.

Regarding the PDFs; it is possible that the original images are still included, with the watermarks overlaid on a separate layer. In that case, it should be possible to extract the original un-watermarked scans. I have done this before, and described my method on this page (for Linux). If you have a link to the PDFs (on the publisher's website only, please), I could give it a try.

If you have time to try it, It could be very interesting to see if it's possible to take out the watermarks. Here is the pdf on the publisher's website: https://nuotisto.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws ... 763ac58969

If I could upload both the manuscript and a more easily readable typeset, that would be great!

Anyways, thanks a lot for your help!

Isn't it a case of posthumous work?

Phelynx wrote:If you have time to try it, It could be very interesting to see if it's possible to take out the watermarks. Here is the pdf on the publisher's website: https://nuotisto.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws ... 763ac58969

I could indeed get the watermarks off as I'd thought, but creating a new PDF with the same compression efficiency is a different matter. The images are encoded in JBIG2 format (.jb2e files), which isn't supported by ImageMagick, the library that I normally use to create PDFs.

coulonnus wrote:Isn't it a case of posthumous work?

Based on my understanding of the Public Domain page, this isn't a factor in the EU, but in Canada, it might be copyrighted for that reason if the concerto was first published (i.e. "performed or delivered") between 1968 and 1997. I don't think that's a reason not to try and upload, though.

I removed the watermark on one page by converting jpg to tif with threshold = 20%. But the staff and bar lines that were under the white parts of words like "promotional" are deleted. I will research a workaround.

What is the publisher's page that links to the pdf you provide? Perhaps they explain what "promotional use" is. And perhaps retypesetting it is promotional use.

Hi everyone, and thank you for your interest.

I was able to remove the watermarks by using Wondershare PDF element. That software was able to recognise the watermarks very effectively, better than Acrobat DC Pro.

So now I have the document without any addition by Findland Music. It might not be the highest resolution, but it's readable.

I'm not sure if I will continue with the retysetting, as the composer made some rythmic mistakes which force me to make choices, so that's quite infortunate. That being said, there are some very interesting passages.

Thanks for your help!

Here is the page on IMSLP : https://imslp.org/wiki/Viulukonsertti_a ... i,_Heikki)

coulonnus wrote:I removed the watermark on one page by converting jpg to tif with threshold = 20%. But the staff and bar lines that were under the white parts of words like "promotional" are deleted. I will research a workaround.

I'd like to suggest using the pdfimages tool instead; it can extract the original scans as they were, intact, because here the watermarks are just PNG images embedded in the pdf. I don't know what OS you use, but it's included in this Poppler for Windows build. Try dropping the pdf onto bin/pdfimages.exe.
I plan to take care of the violin concerto tomorrow or so. If I can't handle the JBIG2 format, I can extract the scans as uncompressed images and then re-compress them, which will unfortunately sacrifice a little bit of quality and compression efficiency.

edit: Okay, looks like OP has beaten me to it, congratulations. Unfortunately there's been a big loss in compression efficiency since the file is 55mb, whereas the original was 2,7mb; but the most important thing is the preservation of the original scans, so good job.

coulonnus wrote:What is the publisher's page that links to the pdf you provide? Perhaps they explain what "promotional use" is. And perhaps retypesetting it is promotional use.

I don't think this really matters, as IMSLP will only host files that are public domain or Creative Commons (or CPDL-licensed, but w/e), not just any file where it would be legal to do so.

Phelynx wrote:Here is the page on IMSLP : https://imslp.org/wiki/Viulukonsertti_a ... i,_Heikki)

Thanks. The watermarked pdf was monochrome apart from the watermarks and yours is grayscale, providing a 58 MB size. Could you convert it to monochrome? Should be about 5 MB for this resolution.

Actually Canada is no problem because the composer died before 1949. All works of composers who died before that year are public domain in Canada, regardless of publication, performance, broadcast, recording or 'delivery' (the last four come into play for composers who died 1949 and later). If no publication took place before 2003, the manuscripts are fine in the USA as well. The EU is the one place where they could be under copyright under the editio princeps rule, which means if they were actually published they could be protected for 25 years from the date of first publication.

The place which makes these available is basically a state agency - a kind of Finnish Music Information Center - so there is some question as to whether these are actually published in the legal sense, and if they're even eligible for protection as they are government published works.

I converted it with pdfimages. I have uploaded a monochrome version without changing the resolution.