While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit’s opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has decided not to pursue Supreme Court review. We will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers (AAP) agreement to remove books from lending at their member publishers’ requests.
We thank the many readers, authors and publishers who have stood with us throughout this fight. Together, we will continue to advocate for a future where libraries can purchase, own, lend and preserve digital books.
Thank you, this is interesting to read. I also use ISMLP from time to time and can only imagine how valuable it is to actual musicians. Now, it is simply true that sheet music that is under copyright is, indeed, under copyright, but as ISMLP focuses on classical music it’s not such a big deal, as much of it is in public domain (many 20th century classics still aren’t, I believe, such as Stravinsky, Shostakovich…), at least the original old editions.
This part lacks important detail, though. The two translations are likely to be new ones, not from 17th/18th century, so they have new copyright too. The other two books may be under legitimate new copyright because of the supplementary materials or textological work. I talked about this with some people on reddit who I guess were knowledgeable about this, and basically when an editor works on a new edition they might introduce corrections to the text based on the manuscripts or some other version of the text (e.g. censored sections). This is work that should (I guess) also be copyrighted. Now, I haven’t gotten a completely satisfying answer about what really can be covered by this, because it can be difficult to explain whether mere modification of spelling of e.g. Shakespeare (original <walk’d> = modern <walked>) counts as copyrightable work, or does it require more extensive work (such as dealing with the textual variations in early Shakespeare editions, which are mind-boggling).
They go into more nuance in the comment they linked within the comment I shared which addresses their experience with some of the things you mention, where publishers will change/add things, and that new material changes the public domain status, but others will change minor details and and try to call it a new protected work.
I’ve seen many guitar tab sights get copyright noticed out of existence, but now playing piano and learning about IMSLP, they seem to be very above board and respectful of the law, so it’s interesting to hear of the challenges they face even in trying to comply with established rules.
Things like what IMSLP provide are at least as much educational and historical materials as they are entertainment, and I’m glad they’re trying to legally preserve it all. I’ll have to look more into their difficulties, it was very interesting reading these 2 posts and their content is very much of interest to me.