Music and theatre publisher Universal Edition has effectively shut down a very useful college student's website, the Canadian International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP): the site had to go offline following a scary cease and desist warning (.pdf file) by Universal's lawyers.
The IMSLP, an online library for music scores no longer protected by copyright, has been warned by Universal lawyers to install a complicated and expensive filtering systems because Béla Bartók's (died in 1945), Alban Berg's (died in 1935) and Gustav Mahler's (who died in 1911) works are apparently still under copyright in some countries (in Canada, where IMSLP is based, copyrights expire 50 years after the author's death, in Europe, 70 years after; at the North Pole, they last 575 years and many polar bears have been sued for whistling Monteverdi arias without copyright clearance) and hence the site's owner was about to get sued big time by Universal Edition.
Advice to our readers: if you're prone to singing opera arias in the shower, be very careful whose works you perform: you might very well have to pay performance fees to some giganticor music company. Consult your lawyers first; if necessary, install a telephone in your shower.
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Project Gutenberg tries to come to the rescue; Slashdot debates the issue