IMSLP Forums

In the instructions about copyright one can read:

"In the EU, Urtext editions get up to 30 years of copyright protection after publication. IMSLP voluntarily observes this rule for 25 years as a courtesy to publishers."

This is a little strange, because it is not a courtesy, if IMSLP takes 25 years instead of 30 years for protection. I believe to remember, that the background of this notice
is the following: Every new edition, which is younger than 25 years, should not appear on IMSLP, independent of the fact, that it is an Urtext or a first edition or an edition with essentiell additions of the editor. Am i right?

It's a little confusing thanks to the wording of the EU directive. Under the directive, member states have the option of setting a term of up to 30 years from first publication for urtext (or "scientific") editions. As far as I know, the longest term for such editions to be found is that of Germany, whose section 70 specifies a 25-year term for such editions. Italy specifies a 20-year term. The UK specifies a 25-year term for a "typographical arrangement" (not really the same as an edition but amounting to the same thing for practical purposes). The other EU-member states don't really specify anything, so the status of such editions is simply unknown in those countries. Apart from editions produced between 1988 and 1990 by state-employees of the now-defunct governments of the USSR, the DDR, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc. (which were not co-published in a western country like Germany or Austria), we apply a 25-year rule (voluntarily - since Canada's law likely affords little if any protection to such editions as an "adaptation" thanks to its fairly high threshold of originality). There's also Canada's rather strange attempt at a partial rule of the shorter term, which a Canadian court decided applies only to works with more than one contributor involved (like an edition of a public-domain composer's work).

This seems to have been a fairly successful policy, and the folks in Germany who came up with the idea of a special limited term for such editions (established before the EU as I recall) deserve some credit here for coming up with a way in which publishers like Baerenreiter can continue to make a living producing such editions (which really do have some serious up-front costs) while not placing an undue burden of excessively long copyright on the end user for something which does not involve the level of original creativity (though it can be quite labor-intensive) of a new piece written from scratch. It certainly beats the pants off the 95-year from publication or life of the last surviving editor plus 70 years which is the case in the USA until someone spends the 7-8 figures in legal fees to blow it all out of the water over the threshold of originality (a test they would likely fail, since the US threshold is one of the highest on earth). So, it is a courtesy since we could take the position that not even last year's latest offering from Baerenreiter is sufficiently original in nature to stand up to Canada's threshold of originality.