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The New York Philharmonic Archives has made over 520,000 Pages of Parts Marked by Philharmonic Musicians available, including scores and parts!

See this link: http://drumchattr.com/new-york-philharmonic-archives/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A9yEv7dLzE

Very interesting. They're claiming rights on all the markings, of course. Which could be valid in some cases - maybe.

Which is true, The University of Utah had performed Beethoven 7 earlier this fall and they used their website, they naturally denied it of course that they used their site for the use of obtaining "Great Bowing's" which are not really that great if you ask me. But apparently there is a cellist who "claims" she has contacts in with NYPhil, so I simply obliged myself and sent emails to their cello section asking if anyone knows this cellist who's making claims against the Philharmonic and none of them knew who she was. They have asked around and no one in the Philharmonic knew this girl.

Which is pathetic to run your mouth and claim that you have such contacts. So, I had contacted the Archivist and presented the issue, and she had contacted the school and warned them of the legal issues that the Philharmonic would pursue if they continue taking advantage of their website.

Honestly I think it would be best if we stuck to clean scans of parts if at all possible (yes, I know sometimes marked part can't be avoided). Almost every orchestra and conductor likes to mark sets of parts their own way, especially the larger orchestras where the principal players actually get to decide on some markings. The NYP archives are extremely interesting, and I am thinking we can make a template to deep-link to their online reader, which appears to be nearly identical to the one used by archive.org.

Well, some of the scanned parts in the NYP archives are of fairly recent and copyrighted works, so - I for one would suggest using them for reference purposes (I used one set - of Ibert's Escales- just to check names of movements (at least, in that early? published version- perhaps not the same as in the autograph score,etc. of course...), etc. to add to the information sections of the page- but not to "clean and upload").

I don't know about the parts, but they certainly do have some stuff that's at least uploadable here, such as Mitropoulos's annotated score of Mahler 6 for the 1955 performance. There's no way that isn't clear for Canadian status, though I don't really know how the US status would be decided - I guess they'd claim they're putting it under new copyright protection by publishing it on their site?

protection? his annotations, nothing more, to my mind, but I'm no copyright expert...

Obviously, any annotations by someone who died more than 50 years ago are not subject to protection in Canada (since the annotations were certainly performed). The problem I see with a lot of the items in their collection is that you have some annotations which are fair game, along with others (Bernstein, for example) which are probably not fair game.