It has come to our notice that an individual has published images of a number of manuscripts photographed by DIAMM and several of our partner libraries on IMSLP. I appreciate that this person probably felt they were providing a service to his fellow researchers and musicians, but in fact he may have single-handedly damaged or even destroyed the future of manuscript image delivery online.
Not only is this a breach of the copyright licence signed when creating an account with DIAMM, it is also a very serious breach of trust that will affect every member of the academic community. Web publication is governed by the same publication copyright as print publication: the only thing that you may reproduce from a web page without infringing copyright is the URL of the page.
Many people appreciate the extraordinary access that DIAMM provides to a wealth of music manuscripts that for most people would be impossibly costly to visit or to buy images for themselves. DIAMM is free, and many libraries also provide their images free. This is an extraordinary service, and one that perhaps we take for granted without realising how much it would matter to us if suddenly it was no longer available. We tend to think of access to manuscript images as our right, yet it is given to us as a courtesy by the owners of the documents.
It has taken decades to build relationships with libraries and archives and to persuade them to digitize their materials, usually at enormous cost. The cost to DIAMM alone to digitize the manuscripts we have photographed is well over a million GBP, yet we make them available to users without charge, a service that costs us a significant amount of money every year, all provided by government or private grants, or with money raised through publications. DIAMM in particular has only been able to survive and grow because of the trust that depositors place in us by allowing us to deliver images of their manuscripts. Our long record of respect for, and protection of, copyright is our great strenght, yet that is now in jeopardy. The upload of copies of our images - and those of other libraries - without permission has brought into doubt the future of DIAMM, since depositors will remove their images if we cannot ensure that users respect the rights of the document owners. In many cases it has taken years (in one case over 7 years) of careful negotiation to persuade libraries to allow us to digitize their documents and put them online. Outside DIAMM many libraries did not put their own images online, and some still do not, because they were/are concerned about rights infringement of this sort - it seems with good justification. Only recently are libraries beginning to put their manuscripts online, and this may stop if users abuse that trust.
Already two libraries have asked us to withdraw their images from online use; carefully negotiated licences with some libraries are likely to be withdrawn, and the images that are lost will not appear anywhere else on the web since the owners believe that the user community cannot be trusted not to redistribute them without permission. We are in the process of negotiating the rights to put over 25,000 new images online, and these negotiations have now stopped until this matter can be resolved: the manuscripts may not be digitized at all, and if they are they may never appear online anywhere. The actions of one individual may therefore mean that many manuscripts that would have otherwise been made available to our community will never appear in a public space.
It is deeply upsetting that the thoughtless behaviour of a single individual should have such far-reaching and damaging consequences for the global research community.
I hope you will join me in censuring the behaviour of this individual and persuading him that, far from helping researchers, he is going to hinder future manuscript access for every potential user - amateur, professional, academic - worldwide.
Replies
Yves Chartier a dit :
http://www.imslp.org/wiki/Category:People_from_the_Modern_era
C'est ce qu'il fait... sans contrepartie financière pour les compositeurs puisqu'il n'y a pas de vente. Mais également sans cession à l'éditeur de droits d'exécution publique (33% en France, 50% aux États-Unis). Sachant qu'un compositeur contemporain est rémunéré bien plus sur l'exécution de ses œuvres que sur les ventes de partitions, il s'agit peut-être d'un modèle plus intéressant pour les compositeurs...
En bref:
- J'ai le droit de faire ma propre copie d'une cantate de Bach et d'en faire une édition, puisque cette oeuvre est dans le domaine public.
- J'ai le droit de numériser et de diffuser sur la Toile l'édition de cette oeuvre dans la Bach-Gesellschaft (1850-1900) puisque cette édition n'est plus protégée par le droit d'auteur (ou le copyright).
- Je n'ai pas le droit de numériser et de diffuser la même oeuvre dans l'édition de la Neue Bach-Gesellschaft (depuis 1950) puisque les droits de cette édition appartiennent à la firme Bärenreiter de Kassel, qui en a défrayé les coûts (sans doute considérables) du travail éditorial, de l'impression, de la diffusion, etc. : je n'ai pas le droit de "voler" cette édition "personnalisée", ou de plagier servilement tout le travail éditorial d'Alfred Dürr ou d'un autre spécialiste de la NBG.
- Ceci étant posé, DIAMM considère-t-elle avoir fait un travail "éditorial" en numérisant, même avec un appareil très sophistiqué, une oeuvre dans le domaine public que la bibliothèque qui la conserve a consenti à sa numérisation et à diffusion sur la Toile ? Il semble bien que non. En ce cas, DIAMM aurait dû prévoir dès le départ qu'elle serait très rapidement "récupérée" par des tiers. Et si DIAMM s'estime lésée, pourquoi n'a-t-elle pas poursuivi les auteurs de ces "larcins" (emprunts serait plus exact en la circonstance). DIAMM pourrait-elle plaider le plagiat ? Cela me semble bien difficile, vu la nature de son travail de simple reproduction, aussi soigné soit-il.
Il n'en reste pas moins que l'attitude insolente de cet Edward Guo envers les éditeurs de musique frise l'indécence. S'il veut vraiment aider la musique contemporaine, qu'il en publie lui-même à ses propres frais dans sa propre maison d'édition!
Thanks for these informations about Mr Guo. As these are rather easy to find, I guess they will take away the transparency worries of Mr Stoessel (mine are still there about his transparency about the legal informations he got on Public Domain questions).
About the duplication question, IMSLP is meant for musicians while DIAMM is meant for musicologists. It's a pain to find all the works of a specific composer on DIAMM while IMSLP doesn't have any musicological informations about the pieces (which you could have by clicking the link to DIAMM). These are thus 2 very different services meant for different audience.
Exactly.....
The real person behind all this is a young Chinese man, Edward Guo, owner of the company Petrucci LLC.
Besides pirating copies of medieval manuscripts, and also Carl Parrish's Notation of Medieval Music, "Feduol" is a Brazilian (Fernando Duale de Olivera) who has started publishing music by Boulez - this could be of great interest to Universal Editions, who have already tangled with Edward Guo the Petrucci owner. Yes, I note poor Fernando has been kicked out of various online scholarly groups.Edward Guo, being a Harvard law graduate, one would hope might have a better grasp of the implications of making cheap Asian knock-offs - and the stupidity of duplication of an already quality FREE service.
http://imslp.org/wiki/User:Feduol
Thank you, Gillian.
The way Julia wrote, it could be understood that DIAMM is becoming something like an administrator for the rights of the images they publish or link, which it's ok, but also for the rights over the sources themselves, it is, that no one will be able to make and use photos of what should be public patrimony, available to anyone. I mean the sources, not the work by DIAMM or anyone.
Olivier Berten a dit :
I meant "intellectual property", of course.
Yves Chartier a dit :
Jason Stoessel a dit :
And I guess you didn't forget to ask him about the international property situation of the books themselves. So what did he say?
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