Hard copies of public domain music books are sold at a phenomenally high price in my country since they're mostly imported from places where printing itself is quite expensive. I'm considering a business where I print these books and sell them for a third of their current market price while still being able to profit from the sales. I only plan to start with common public domain books like Mozart's Sonatas for the piano or Hanon's The Virtuoso Pianist - 60 Exercises. My question is since these books have already been published by other publishers (Hal Leonard, Boosey & Hawkes, etc), will I be violating their copyrights by republishing these? PS: I don't want to reprint Hal Leonard's edition, I want to print the copies available on IMSLP.
Note: Copyright law in my country allows the publishing of Public Domain works.
Can I publish any public domain content from IMSLP to be sold for profit?
Moderator: Copyright Reviewers
Re: Can I publish any public domain content from IMSLP to be sold for profit?
Of course you can reprint or publish like a new engraving of a public domain work! The only thing we have to ask is for uploading your editions on here please do not upload things like sample or excerpts of a full work uploaded on here or make IMSLP like a category page then put watermarks on your edition and have to go to another website to download it there without those things. People have done that in the past and we prohibit it on here.
But besides that we won't stop you from publishing them.
But besides that we won't stop you from publishing them.