OVER THE EDGE
November 7-21, 2007

Legal demand letters posted up on a website due to a copy-
right infringement notice. Website forced offline due to the
inability to fight such a demand. Sounds like just another run
of the mill lawsuit against a website with a hash link to the
latest Britney Spears album. This time, the case is different...
very different.

The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) is
a website devoted to musical scores. These are not just any
musical scores, these are musical score sheets that have fallen
out of copyright and into the public domain. In other words,
the content can be uploaded, downloaded, sold, bought,
burned, slept on, licensed out and played, among other things,
without permission legally. Universities quite frequently use
works from the public domain. English classes which study
literature from eras such as the renaissance and the dark ages
more often then not use works sourced to the public domain.
Question for everyone, what if it turns out that a particular
work, even though it’s in the public domain under Canadian
law — and used in the Canadian jurisdiction, turned out to be an
act of copyright infringement? Well, that’s just legally absurd,
isn’t it? Apparently, one company thought differently.

On October 5th, 2007, an Austrian publisher called Univer-
sal Edition AG sent a cease and desist letter to IMSLP saying,
“As you are aware, the copyright in the musical scores pub-
lished by the UE Authors are copyrighted in Europe for a per-
iod of at least 70 years from the date of the author’s death, and
for 50 years after death in Canada. Certain of these compos-
ers’ works are further protected in Canada or the United States
under the appropriate Copyright Act of these jurisdictions.

It is our understanding that it is possible to filter IP addresses
of those who take part in copying files from your site to pre-
vent such unauthorized copyright infringement.

However, we further understand that such safeguards are not
in place. As a result of the lack of safeguards on the IMSLP
from infringing Canadian and European copyright law, you
and your organization are involved in a collective effort to

EEEEE NUQSS

sorthera undergraduate
student society

breach copyright.

This is a violation of both European and Canadian copyright
law.

We therefore demand that you cease and desist from offering
on your web site the musical scores and any other copyrighted
works of the UE Authors. These works should be removed by
no later than October 19. 2007.”

Since the website was operated by a college student, the
owner immediately folded and took down the entire website.
In essence, a Canadian website that operated legally in Canada
was forced offline. This, of course, no doubt set an extremely
serious chilling effect for any website that operates legally and
has anything to do with intellectual property. In my opinion, it
also further proves that some copyright obsessed companies,
more often then not really feel like they are above the law and
can do as they please. Ifthe story did not gain any major publi-
city, the issue may have died and given the green light to other
companies to bully Canadian public domain websites just like
they bully mothers, kids, dead people, innovators and website
operators. Unfortunately for the Austrian company, the story
gained a huge amount of publicity.

Howard Knopf, a lawyer that defended Canada’s first file-
sharing case against Canadian users was one of many who
weighed in on the issues. He makes several arguments, a
couple of them are, “Absent any ‘real and substantial connec-
tion’, i.e. targeted activity directed to life + 70 countries, there
is no basis in Canadian law for these claims. Justice Binnie has
told us so in SOCAN v. CAIP. [...]

Canada has no ‘making available’ provisions in its law - so
the fact that someone out ‘there’ in the jurisdictional sense in
a life + 70 country can see this site doesn’t make it illegal in
Canada. [...]

Michael [Geist] is right about the applicability of the CCH
v LSUC case - the student is entitled to presume that the re-
source will be used legally, and in most countries in the world
life + 50 is still the law. [...] +

Toll-free: 1 866 358-4431

This is all about cultural sovereignty.”
He also notes that it is impossible to block everyone from
certain countries. I know it’s impossible to block everyone
from certain countries given the rise of anonymous browsing
through proxies. He particularly noted how this content wasn’t
being sold via credit card (which would then make it possible
to block people from certain countries) but, much rather, was
publicly posted. Another important thing to note was some of
the scores that the publisher complained about actually ful-
filled the life +70 years requirement in Europe let alone the life
+50 years as Canadian law explicitly states.

It seemed as: though all was lost; that was, until Project
Gutenberg, another website which also hosts public domain
content voluntarily decided to host the website. They effect-
ively took them under their legal wing. Believe me, it’s a huge
legal wing. Just look at their webpage dedicated to bogus
cease and desist letters (http://cand.pglaf.org).

How the company could possibly have the audacity to even
attempt this is beyond me. Apparently, the absurdity in all of
this — not to mention an intellectual beating from a large num-
ber of prominent corners in the copyright debate including
Michael Geist, Howard Knopf, Cory Doctorow and hundreds
of thousands of web users who have an interest in this, the
publisher finally backed down. They wrote a response (refer-
ence - http://imslpforums.org/viewtopic.php?t=675), which,
in my opinion, is laughable — especially when you compare
it to the original complaint. The response was: “It’s very easy
to present a case of ‘big corporation stamps on small good
guys’ [...]

UE did not close down the site. UE merely requested that a
limited number of works be removed. There was absolutely no
reason whatsoever to take the site down_[...]

UE most certainly made repeated polite and direct attempts
to discuss in an amiable manner the copyright infringements
taking place on the site.[...]

BOO

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