The Muse Group, founded by the Ultimate Guitar project and owning the open-source projects MusesCore and Audacity, has resumed efforts to shut down the musescore-downloader repository, which develops an application for free downloading musical notes from the musescore.com service without having to log in to the site and without connecting to a paid Musescore subscription Pro. The claims also concern the musescore-dataset repository with a collection of sheet music copied from musescore.com. At the same time, the Muse Group has nothing against the LibreScore project, in which the same author develops a free alternative to musescore.com, based on the code base of the MuseScore application, distributed under the GPL license.
Representatives of the Muse Group asked the author to voluntarily remove the musescore-downloader and musescore-dataset repositories. The first repository contains an application that allows you to download any content from the musescore.com service for free by accessing the internal API. The repository is subject to closure because musescore-downloader is illegally bypassing copyright protection systems (no claims against access to musescore.com public content). The second repository, musescore-dataset, illegally distributes copies of works licensed from music publishers. In the case of musescore-dataset, the problems are more serious and can be considered a criminal offense (intentional copyright infringement with criminal intent).
The author of the problematic repositories refused to remove the repositories and the Muse Group faced a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, there is a threat that the musescore.com service will cease to exist, and on the other hand, there is an opportunity to cripple a person's life. The simplest solution would be to involve lawyers and send an official DMCA request to GitHub to block the repositories, but the Muse Group decided not to resort to such actions, but to agree in an informal way, after they found out that Wenzheng Tang, the developer of the problematic repositories, left China on political reasons and in case of problems with the law, he will have his residence permit canceled and deported, followed by persecution in his homeland for insulting the Chinese government.
On the other side of the scale is the possibility of breaking the status quo that has been achieved with music publishers. Initially, all content was posted on MuseScore by volunteers for free and without access restrictions, but then the community began to be persecuted by copyright holders and the creators of MuseScore spent a lot of effort to stay afloat and save the site. The problem is that the rights to transcribe a piece of music into sheet music and arrangement belong to the copyright holder, regardless of who performed the transcription or arrangement.
The price of MuseScore.com's continued operation was the licensing of musical scores of popular works, the rights to which are owned by companies such as Alfred, EMI and Sony, and the restriction of access with the introduction of a paid subscription system. The Muse Group is required by law to enforce the copyright of licensed music, and having a loophole for unrestricted downloads of licensed content poses a threat to the service.
The confrontation with the author of musescore-downloader has been going on since February 2020. It is noted that the time for reflection is almost exhausted and a decision will soon have to be made. Actions against the violator can also be taken directly by the right holders at any time.
The position of the author of musescore-downloader comes down to the fact that he used in his program a regular publicly documented API, information about which was removed from the site musescore.com after the creation of the application. In addition, the author of usescore-downloader considers it wrong that access to publications prepared by enthusiasts and initially placed in the public domain free of charge was limited only to paid subscribers, while Muse Group does not own the rights to user-generated content (users do not own the rights to the sheet music of other people's works, since the musicians and music publishers are the copyright holders).
Source: opennet.ru