IMSLP Forums

Hello, all:

As people have noted, in 2019 works entered the public domain in the USA for the first time in many years. Yay!

I've got to imagine that some scores on IMSLP are included in that category. But I haven't found a way to search for them, and I haven't found a forum topic proudly listing all the newly-relabelled scores on IMSLP.

What scores on IMSLP were not in the public domain in the USA in 2018, but entered the public domain on 1 Jan 2019? Is there a search of some kind where I can find such scores myself?

And, also for 50-pma and 70-pma jurisdictions, there is a similar question: how can I find out which scores on IMSLP entered the public domain for 50-pma and 70-pma jurisdictions on 1 Jan 2019?

Is there a way to list scores which exist, are known of, entered the public domain on that date, but are not on IMSLP?

It's such a wonderful thing when a score enters the public domain, I would like a way to celebrate it!

There's probably this and that I'm getting wrong, but

(applies to uploads of published musical works and published books only; new typesets based off of manuscripts, and manuscripts never published, and manuscript versions _of_ works later published, etc., are subjected to different branches of (c) law.)

(1) many of the scores first published in 1923 (or rather, first given a US publication in 1923; some of them may have received first publication outside the USA earlier- we need to be more careful about this, I think, and I'm not sure we have been!...- just because it says etc etc 1922 doesn't mean we don't need to check for 1922 _US_ publication) -- are in public domain in the US now. (I say "many" because some others already have been for one reason or another - failure to renew properly being a major one.)
(2) Canada and areas with very similar laws: works composed/ most recently arranged/texts by people ... by people who died no later than 1969 (1968 or earlier, that is) should be in the public domain this year, I believe. (If a work was composed by someone who died in 1930 but used a text by someone who died in 1969, we're still sorry out of luck unless we get permission from the estate of the librettist (and then the work is uploaded as creative commons, not public domain, if I remember.)
(3) Europe: basically similar rules to Canada except "died 1948 or earlier", not 1968 or earlier. I think. There are some important differences. Someone should write about them who knows and correct the many things here I've gotten wrong (sorry.)

Basically I use various searches, Musicsack, etc. to find possible now-uploadable or status-changeable works and composers, myself...

Eric wrote: ↑Mon Feb 11, 2019 4:15 pm ....Basically I use various searches, Musicsack, etc. to find possible now-uploadable or status-changeable works and composers, myself...

Could you tell us what those searches are, specifically?

Recapping what the copyright rules are, is not so interesting. The rules are described in many places, especially in IMSLP's instructions. Your searches, however, are interesting. Musicsack? What's that? Please share!,

Musicsack is a fairly useful biographical database. This Google search

("1968" OR "1948") site:musicsack.com/PersonFMTDetail.cfm

turns up about 200 database entries. Some are of the "born 1948" sort, some just contain the number for some other reason, but some are what we're looking for.

Jim DeLaHunt wrote: ↑Mon Feb 11, 2019 5:02 am What scores on IMSLP were not in the public domain in the USA in 2018, but entered the public domain on 1 Jan 2019? Is there a search of some kind where I can find such scores myself?

One approximation of this is, "scores which were published in 1923". It turns out that IMSLP has categories for year of publication, including Category:Works first published in 1923. There are 364 "works", mostly scores, listed in that category.

For example, the Fantasia fugata, Op.87 (Beach, Amy Marcy) is in that category. The information the page confirms that the work was published in 1923.

From a sample, it looks like IMSLP lists all these works as being Public Domain in the USA. However, some works are still under copyright in other jurisdictions. For instance, the Les biches, FP 36 (Poulenc, Francis) page has a prominent notice at the top, "It is very unlikely that this work is public domain in the EU, or in any country where the copyright term is life-plus-70 years."

Still, Category:Works first published in 1923 is a pretty good answer to my question about works which entered the public domain on 1 Jan 2019.

Jim DeLaHunt wrote: ↑Mon Feb 11, 2019 5:02 am …for 50-pma and 70-pma jurisdictions, there is a similar question: how can I find out which scores on IMSLP entered the public domain for 50-pma and 70-pma jurisdictions on 1 Jan 2019?…

I have not been able to find a category or similar index for "people who died in 1948" (whose work might be have entered the public domain on 1 Jan 2019 if it was in a 70-pma jurisdiction, or for "people who died in 1968" (whose work was in a 50-pma jurisdiction).

It looks like may composer entries have the death date spelled out (year, month, day), and works have the contributors spelled out. I imagine it must be theoretically possible to combine that information and make an index of works which likely entered the public domain. And, I see copyright categories on composer pages. Something must be looking at death dates and applying 50-pma and 70-pma rules to apply the categories. But, I have not see a user-accessible index.

Can anyone point me to such a thing? Thank you.

Eric wrote: ↑Tue Feb 12, 2019 2:55 pm Musicsack is a fairly useful biographical database.

Ah, I see. I think you mean http://musicsack.com/. It says it is, "the biggest database of information about people involved in music". An impressive effort. It also looks like a solo effort by one Frank Green, and I don't see that the contents are freely licensed.

Another big database of information about people involved in music (and other metadata) is https://musicbrainz.org/. It is a collaborative effort, and the contents are freely licensed. It would be interesting to see which is the bigger and better database by various metrics, but I don't see a way to do that easily.

MusicBrainz allows fairly flexible searching using a query syntax. For instance, searching for Artist with query "end:1948 AND type:person" yields a list of 166 entries for people who died in 1948. (The works of such people might have entered the public domain in 70-pma jurisdictions on 1. Jan 2019.)

It is also possible to download a snapshot of the database behind MusicBrainz, and do direct SQL queries of it. I have done that from time to time. It's interesting, but requires a database developer's expertise.

Jim DeLaHunt wrote: ↑Mon Feb 11, 2019 5:02 am Is there a way to list scores which exist, are known of, entered the public domain on that date, but are not on IMSLP?

I discovered a couple of ways to cross-check, one of which will require some effort.

The Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL) has a Category:1923 works. It only has 4 entries, one of which I already recognise as an overlap with IMSLP, so exhaustively searching the category is feasible.

And it turns out that the US Copyright Office, together with the Internet Archive, has put some great research material online. Each year from 1891 through 1978, the US Copyright Office printed the Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) (source: The Copyright Card Catalog and the Online Files of the Copyright Office). The Catalog lists the copyright registrations received by the Copyright Office. It is divided by registration year, and by category of work (including music composition). Those printed volumes are scanned and hosted by the Internet Archive as the Copyright Records Collection. The Internet Archive also performed OCR on the scanned pages, so they offer a text file with the contents (though I don't know the OCR error rate of this text).

For instance, the musical compositions registered in 1923 are listed in:

• Vol 18 Part 3: Catalog of Copyright Entries, 1923 Music For the Year 1923 Vol 18 Part 3
• Supplemental Index To Catalog of Copyright Entries, Compositions of Selected Authors 1923 Music Part 3 Nos. 1-13
• There should be another volume for Music For the Year 1923 Vol 18 Part 3, but I can't locate it on the Internet Archive.

It should be possible to parse the text rendering of these volumes. The parsing would both detect errors in OCR, and provide a structured dataset to use in queries against MusicBrainz and IMSLP to look for entries not in those collections.

The same Catalog of Copyright Entries on the Internet Archive has volumes with copyright renewals. It might be possible, for example, to parse all the 1924 copyright registration entries, and the 1951-52 copyright renewal entries, then compare them. It might yield a list of 1924 copyright registration entries for which there is no evidence of copyright renewal. That in turn might be a start to IMSLP being able to treat some 1924-1948 publications as public domain in the USA.

Also, WorldCat (the aggregate catalogue of library holdings) returns 10,014 entries for holdings which are "musical score" type, published between 1923 and 1923, having the keyword "music". Using the keyword "music" yields a different set of 14,419 entries. There will be some overlap in the two result sets. And, these are just library holdings reports; generally it's not easy to download scanned images of the scores through WorldCat.

It would be an interesting project to systematically parse these listings and compare them to what is in IMSLP. The result could potentially be to fill out IMSLPs list of composers and works, and perhaps to let some scores now labelled as non-Public Domain be re-labelled as Public Domain. Interesting.

Are the LoC pages you refer to related to these https://imslp.org/wiki/Catalog_of_Copyr ... or_the_USA pages?

Eric:

Cool! I didn't know that index existed. IMSLP Wiki for the win, again!

However, from what I can see, that IMSLP wiki page is an index of links to the scanned volumes hosted at the Internet Archive, which are the same scanned volumes that I linked to directly. So this page does not constitute an independent copy, much less an independent scan, of the Copyright Office volumes.

No, its primary use is, like that of similar pages, is to try to save time and inform people of such resources hopefully -before- they've had to go find them on their own Sorry!
BTW, HMB @ ÖNB has moved, it's now at ONB-Cooperations, not at the old 16615 link. So if one is looking for 1923 (1924 next year, etc) publications, that's the summary page to look at... (down at the bottom).