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
Dear Julia,
Yes, this discussion has generated more heat than light. No point in musicologists discussing the finer points of law. Its all beside the point anyway. Can you please email me direct - gjlander@orcon.net.nz. I am a senior citizen with good experience of legal battles. (The musicology is an indulgence in retirement) and both Fiona and I are here on the far side of the earth, awake while you are trying to sleep. I have strategies to share with you.
J Craig-McFeely a dit :
Ah, I was looking for a general link on the homepage. So each work has a separate PDF made, which will be nowhere near as fine as DIAMM, and a cheeky link there to DIAMM. The uploader Feduol I see is "out" on Facebook. However the real power behind the site is a boy of 27, a musician and Harvard Law graduate. So he's done a dissertation on copyright and knows it all. See my exploration to find the company information. He is the one to approach, but I would have wise legal advice first.
Olivier Berten a dit :
Dear Gillian,
Many thanks for your many contributions on this thread. I'm sorry not to reply to everything and everyone personally, but I am snowed under with correspondence with libraries and trying to keep DIAMM from going down. I have given up with IMSLP to be honest, they haven't even bothered to reply to my messages, but am trying to persuade Feduol (Fernando Duarte de Oliveira - he has now outed himself on FaceBook's Aetas Aurea group, so I have no concerns now about revealing his identity) to take the images down himself. It doesn't look likely.
Many discussions have centred on the rights and wrongs on copyright, rather than on the breach of trust and potential future damage resulting from that breach, and that is what is relevant here. We would all like free access to everything, but until that day comes we have to respect the rights of those who have them under the law or simply morality. Utrecht MSS have not been removed from access (yet!), so I suspect this is a delivery glitch. I will post on various fora the list of MSS withdrawn when I have a moment and when that list stops growing.
Many thanks to all of you who have contributed your knowledge or opinions. I hope that soon we can get back to discussion of musicology!
Gillian Lander a dit :
And it's mentionned as well on the page http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:Other_music_score_websites as a source for original scores scans.
Gillian Lander a dit :
I'm afraid you didn't check the right place: next to each score link, there is the scanner reference. Let's just take a random one: http://imslp.org/wiki/Chansonnier,_GB-Cmc_MS_1760_%28Various%29
"Scanned by DIAMM" is mentionned 9 times on that page, with a link to the soure...
It appears the DIAMM link has gone from the IMSLP site, but I have gleaned the following from their website. We are up against a 27 year old smartee with an agenda. It may take the combined might of Oxford, Utrecht et al libraries/universities to sort him out legally. In the field of medieval music he is clearly an ignoramus.
Welcome everyone! I'm Edward W. Guo, the creator and leader of IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library. But IMSLP is very much a group effort, so treat me as another member of the team when I'm on this site. Besides guiding the project (gently I hope) and resolving the occasional dispute, I am just like any other IMSLP contributor.
I'm also a 25 year old (b.1987) graduate of the New England Conservatory (B.M. in composition, 2008) and Harvard Law School (J.D., 2012). In addition to writing music, I have been accused of playing the violin and piano. Started the IMSLP on a cold winter day in my 18th year, and have enjoyed every step of the way.
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Julia, I now note that the images for NL-Uu406 are no longer available via DIAMM, though the links are still there, so I suggest that a list be made of those libraries that have already withdrawn images to illustrate the damage already done to the project. Surely the offender will see sense. This ought not to develop into a brawl where only the lawyers are the winners. I have yet to check a few others like Graz...
There are clearly issues to be worked out between DIAMM and IMSLP. It is pointless duplication to carry DIAMM images on IMSLP and clearly some form of copyright has been infringed - probably that of the digital image-maker. I hardly think the scribes are going to court. Surely now that Chicken Licken has screamed they will see this. The legalities need clarifying between these two projects - and also to the users of each website. A wise move might be to provide a link to DIAMM on the IMSLP pages. It would appear that the works (such as Beethoven's repertoire) that are on IMSLP, are of an individual composer's oeuvre long past any copyright issues that might obtain. I note Leonin and Perotin have made it into this category. I had wondered though about the legitimacy even of actually putting PDFs of the original score online. One presumes that IMSLP has explored this before going online. Nobody but a scholar would want to use them anyway. A modern performance edition such on CPDL is another issue.