IMSLP Forums

Last week I attempted to delete a transcription I made (at the request of a musician) which was not an effective piece of music. I was told by an admin that, "no deletion of files released under CC licence".

http://imslp.org/index.php?title=Duo_fo ... id=1672183

So, it would seem that I'm apparently unable to control the distro of my own music. This is unacceptable and is making me dramatically rethink my relationship with IMSLP.

I'm tempted to upload new, blank files, or another piece, but those would be messy workaround with what should be a composer's right.

Any ideas on how to proceed?

EDIT: For the record, I have requested and had files deleted in the past.

I would say in this case one can delete the files and redirect the workpage to the workpage cello duo II. On this workpage one can make a remark,
that the version for clarinet and cello has been withdrawn. Let´s wait on other opinions.

This appears to be the gift that never stops giving. Creative Commons licenses (all flavors) have been irrevocable from their inception. This was a feature built into them by their author (Law Professor Lawrence Lessig) to allow the free distribution of any work released under the license terms. I think his objective here was to arrange things so that a case arose like some horror-tale in which Disney, the British MPA, angry tax-funded librarians in Spain who think there should be perpetual copyright on Renaissance manuscripts in their libraries, et al, ganged-up and shut down sites like IMSLP there would be others to arise elsewhere with copies of your works which could (hopefully) be made available again (kind of like a legal whack-a-mole). Certain restrictions can be invoked by authors with respect to derivative works, commercial use, etc. but the files can be copied freely and distributed as long as the terms of the license are observed for the entire term of copyright protection. Since you're in the USA and everything on IMSLP was presumably published after 1977, this means your lifetime plus 70 years in the USA and EU, plus 50 years in Canada, Japan, China and countries with similar terms.

Looking over your user page history, the upload history, etc., it would appear that you've been quietly adding works here for a long time - well before we started enforcing the "irrevocable" part of the Creative Commons licenses. In fact, you've been here so long that you haven't even gotten the standard template-message for composers which explains all of these issues in some detail - which I intend to remedy at once. This means we're in a kind of odd position with respect to your catalog, so I'm seriously inclined to go ahead and remove this item for you as requested. This issue arose because of the fair number of composers in the last two years who added their works (quite explicitly, I should add) under the CC licenses then abruptly demanded all their works be removed when a publisher winked at them. A number of admins who had put in time tagging these works for our category walker and adding other improvements to the pages to make them easily found and accessed by anyone on the planet 24 x 365 x 7 pointed out that this was a bit unfair since they'd collectively added some value (often substantial) to the work's exposure only to see it yanked away and given over a publisher (some of whom who actually tried to shut down this site in the past).

Thanks for the help, Carolus!

Not that I ever want to do this again, but if I did decide to retract a piece, what are my options?

1. Upload a 'revision' which is blank with the text, "Withdrawn"?
2. Change my CC license and then delete?
3. ???

Just as a Meta discussion point, shouldn't these licenses always favor the creator? What's the point of having a license at all if the creator can't control their work after submitting to one distro site?

FWIW, I've been using IMSLP for a while now and have garnered performances across the globe thanks to its worldwide outreach. I deeply appreciate the service you folks provide. I am also likely the first person to use the net for free distribution of my music, starting in 1986 with a string quartet I released via a RelayNet-associated BBS as a series of gifs, zipped.

Here's an article about it: http://beepsnort.org/archives/000540.html

Perhaps it would be fairer if anything uploaded before you were made aware of this could be requested for removal in the same way as before, and now that you've been notified, any of your future CC uploads would have the license's irrevocability enforced as per current practice.

jeff_harrington wrote:Just as a Meta discussion point, shouldn't these licenses always favor the creator? What's the point of having a license at all if the creator can't control their work after submitting to one distro site?

I believe that is entirely the point, at least from the perspective of a site like IMSLP. No ambiguity, no retractions, if it's distributable once it's distributable forever, and by anyone who follows the terms.

ETA: Thanks for the link, Jeff--very interesting.

That really is interesting. It kind of goes along with Severo Ornstein's notion on the best way to make his father's works available, which was "steal this music!" (which has likewise made Leo Ornstein's pieces much better known than ever before.) The irrevocability aspect is another reason that any new piece uploaded to IMSLP is considered "published". It is very similar to the older notion of "general publication", with the added aspect that nothing ever goes out of print. This can be sort of a pain from a composer's view if he revises a piece, since copies of the unrevised version will be circulating even more so than they would have been in the days of zinc plates and 100-copy print runs. If you have another case like this - where it was a type of derivative work that you're not pleased with - one thing that could be done would be to replace the files with those of original piece which inspired it and have the page redirected to the original. Sort of a way to get around it as long as you keep in mind that any copies out there already are out of control (which would be much the same as if there had been a print run where items were sold).

Some thoughts about and around this question...

In my country an author is not only considered as a copyright owner, but also the legal owner of 'moral rights' on his works − one of them being the 'right of removal', and though the usage of this right is not common, the author can remove one of this works from its publisher's catalogue.
The author has not the right to sell or give away his 'moral rights'...

This is the major point why, although I thought and am still thinking about it, I never put one of my works here on IMSLP − although I'm certain it would be beneficial for my works' exposure. (One other reason is somehow explained in Jeff's article: the real exposure still comes from the 'professional', 'real life' network; and, apart from this, the professional milieu (at least on my side of the Atlantic...) still seems to think that new music is more serious when it can only be bought in a bookstore...)

I fully understand the point of view of those who spend time here, and don't want to see composers taking back their works just when they get an occasion to sell it elsewhere; nevertheless this policy may prevent to come here those composers who can pretend to a career; those who can't are here, and maybe some of both categories will repent, at 25, to have irrevocably uploaded their works written when they were 13!

That said, IMSLP is not exactly doing an active promotion of the new works, like the one one can expect from traditional publishers. (They do that work, don't they?)
Since years I was asking (myself!) if some non-definitive solution could be acceptable here, like a "leasing" or "deposit" concept. Not sure it can, right?

To me, although I am one of the admins that spend time working on these pages, the bigger issue is -- how can you put people in a position where they do something legally, only to have it declared illegal later? It might be very difficult, indeed, to prove that something was once under CC but is no longer.

The longstanding complaint one reads and hears from composers in many forums, etc. (unless they're already very famous) is that traditional publishers do nothing whatever to promote their music. It's kind of a funny situation we're in at present with respect to composers, new music, the promotion and performance thereof, etc. There are so many living composers even now on IMSLP that it's pretty easy to get 'lost in the phonebook' and yet the very same thing can be said about enormous catalogues of traditional publishers like Schott. If you look at the IMSLP list of most popular files (based on number of downloads), you'll have to go pretty far in to find a new piece. Still, composers have reported getting performances and attention they might not otherwise have received.

For a long time we just deleted things upon request. The problem which caused the reversal of this (and the enforcement of CC's irrevocable clause) came about mainly because a fair number of composers were not very good at the practical things to make their works appear in the right places where someone actually look for them - like adding the average (= approximate) duration, the date composed, the date of first performance, tagging their own works for the instrumentation required (yes it does take some time to learn the instrumental tagging system), etc. All of this information adds up in terms of helping a prospective performer looking for some newer music find something to fit their program. With the composers who abruptly demanded removal of their catalogues, the bulk of this work had been done by admins and other volunteers.

My overall impression of some of the composers who drop by, sign up and add things here is that they've never used this site even once and have no clue whatsoever about its organization and the numerous other aspects which make things work they way they do. Others by contrast seem to be quite expert almost immediately. Pages are set up logically, files added in a manner consistent with that found on the heavily-trafficked pages, etc. Some even figure out the tagging system and do it themselves. With such composers one hardly even knows they're adding things it's done so well. This all being said, my overall impression is that if this site consisted of nothing but scans of works of public domain composers, with maybe some new editions and perhaps a few arrangements irrevocably released under CC licenses (only), the admin team would be spending a lot less time doing maintenance than they presently do. I don't expect there would be a great deal of difference in terms of site traffic, either. The whole problem of 'top 100 classical' programming all plays into this in a fairly significant way and is another factor which we easily spend years discussing.

So, what do composers expect from IMSLP? Should we think about a subscription-only section of the site with a full "All rights reserved" copyright available, automated registration of works with performing rights societies, etc. (with IMSLP getting the "publishers' share")? In other words - an electronic, internet-based music publisher? Would a model structured along the lines of a credit-union work, with the subscription fee constituting the members' shares of the organization work? We could even make things available in printed form I suppose. I do understand a composer's misgivings about making something available here. Performing rights societies like ASCAP, BMI, and their counterparts elsewhere seem to think CC is the functional equivalent of declaring one's work to be public domain (as if there were only the one CC license). Unfortunately, with folks selling DVDs of "all the world's great piano music for just 20 dollars" on places like E-bay, they have somewhat of a point (the enforcement of the non-commercial aspect of a CC-BY-NC-ND license means sending letters to E-bay's legal department). A lot of publishers would not even consider a work which is available on this site - even if it was just a score of an orchestral piece (for which they could even rent the parts as long as it was under one of the more restrictive licenses).