Muse Group, founded by the Ultimate Guitar project and owner of the open-source projects MusesCore and Audacity, has renewed its attempts to shut down the musescore-downloader repository, which develops an application for free downloading of musical scores from the service musescore.com without the need to log in to the site and without connecting to a paid Musescore Pro subscription. The claims also concern the musescore-dataset repository with a collection of scores copied from musescore.com. At the same time, Muse Group has no objections to the LibreScore project, in which the same author develops a free alternative to musescore.com based on the codebase of the MuseScore application, distributed under the GPL license.
Representatives of Muse Group have asked the author to voluntarily delete the musescore-downloader and musescore-dataset repositories. The first repository contains an application that allows users to download any content from musescore.com for free by accessing its internal API. The repository is subject to closure because musescore-downloader bypasses copyright protection systems (there are no claims regarding access to publicly available content on musescore.com). The second repository, musescore-dataset, illegally distributes copies of works licensed from music publishers. In the case of musescore-dataset, the issues are more serious and may be regarded as a criminal offense (willful infringement of copyright with criminal intent).
The author of the problematic repositories refused to delete them, and Muse Group faced a challenging dilemma. On one hand, there is the threat of the existence of the musescore.com service being terminated, and on the other hand, the possibility of ruining a person's life. The simplest solution would be to involve lawyers and send an official DMCA takedown notice to GitHub to block the repositories, but Muse Group decided not to take such actions and to negotiate informally after finding out that Wenzheng Tang, the developer of the problematic repositories, left China for political reasons, and in case of legal issues, he faces cancellation of his residency permit and deportation, followed by persecution in his homeland for insulting the Chinese government.
On the other hand, there is the risk of disrupting the status quo that has been established with music publishers. Initially, all content was shared on MuseScore by volunteers for free and without access restrictions, but then the community faced persecution from rights holders, and the creators of MuseScore had to put in a lot of effort to stay afloat and maintain the site. The problem is that the rights to transcribe a musical work into notation and arrangement belong to the rights holder, regardless of who performed the transcription or arrangement.
The cost of continuing to operate MuseScore.com has become the licensing of sheet music for popular works whose rights belong to companies such as Alfred, EMI, and Sony, and restricting access by introducing a paid subscription system. Muse Group is legally obligated to ensure compliance with copyright laws regarding licensed musical works, and the existence of a loophole for unlimited uploads of licensed content poses a threat to the service's existence.
The confrontation with the author of musescore-downloader has been ongoing since February 2020. It is noted that the time for reflection is nearly over and a decision will soon have to be made. Actions against the infringer could also be initiated at any moment directly by the rights holders.
The stance of the author of musescore-downloader is that he used a publicly documented API in his program, the information about which was removed from the musescore.com website after the application was created. Additionally, the author of usescore-downloader believes it is unfair that access to publications prepared by enthusiasts and originally posted for free public access was restricted only for paid subscribers, while Muse Group does not own the rights to content prepared by users (users do not own the rights to the scores of others' works, as the rights holders are the musicians and music publishers).
Source: opennet.ru
