Creeva’s World 2.0

Recently I started con­tribut­ing to the Inter­na­tional Music Score Library Project and I’ve ran into a small snag.   Cur­rently I’ve only uploaded two pieces ( I did say I was going to con­tribute more to the pub­lic domain going for­ward) and I received the fol­low­ing mes­sage the day after I uploaded the pieces:

Dear Creeva,

IMSLP is located in Canada and there­fore oper­ates under Cana­dian copy­right law. A very impor­tant dif­fer­ence between Canada’s law and that of the USA is that the term is deter­mined by the death date of the com­poser or author of the work in ques­tion (term is life-plus-50 years). I was able to find out that George Hen­dricks Rosenkrans died in 1955 and is there­fore pub­lic domain in Canada. Gus W. Bernard is a dif­fer­ent matter.

I was not able to find any­thing on the date of Gus W. Bernard, so I have to esti­mate his approx­i­mate life­time. Please be advised that should info sur­face that he died later than 1959, the item you posted may well have to be deleted. Also, please try to include com­plete infor­ma­tion on com­posers when you add a new name. You can often find out things quickly by means of a sim­ple Google search.

Thanks,

[NAME REDACTED BY CREEVA]

Now I wrote yes­ter­day that just because some­thing is online it isn’t in the pub­lic domain.    Let’s look at the other side of the coin just because some­thing is in the pub­lic domain, it doesn’t mean it is in the pub­lic domain.   In my nor­mal mode of think­ing, I think in US copy­right law.     When we are deal­ing with other coun­tries in our global econ­omy and global com­mu­ni­ca­tions infra­struc­ture we need to be aware of their laws as well when inter­act­ing with other services.

Now the project above could get in trou­ble if the work is copy­righted in Canada and they dis­play it.   I how­ever uploaded it from the US so I broke no US law since both works were in the pub­lic domain here.   Did I break a Cana­dian law though?  I don’t know.   This is one of the prob­lems when deal­ing with the pub­lic domain.   The ques­tion over the Cana­dian law comes to light when you con­sider while the ser­vice is in Canada, I phys­i­cally per­formed the actions legally from a US com­puter.   Very fuzzy and gray in many aspects when you look at the big picture.

So when con­tribut­ing ot the pub­lic domain — be aware where the servers are phys­i­cally located in the world, be aware of the copy­write law in that phys­i­cal loca­tion.   Now if only we could get a US Mir­ror to work off of for that project.….…