Just a reminder that, confusingly, there are two MuseScores.
MuseScore the open source music notation app, hosted at musescore.org, is what this is about. It's an excellent notation app, and getting better, especially lately with Tantacrul's help.
MuseScore.com the online sheet music repository is related to the former, but was sold to Ultimate Guitar. They have since taken a very anti-community copyright approach, where they lock all score downloads by default. You need an account to be able to download anything, and you need a pro subscription to be able to download anything that isn't either "original" or "based on a public-domain work". They claim this is in order to pay royalties to rights holders (which in practice means a few large multinational sheet music publishers), but do this for every score, regardless of whether the composers are signed to such companies at all. They have no provision for creative commons and other similarly licensed songs (not scores, they do have that) - everything falls into either original/PD, or collecting and sending Pro fees to collection agencies that have no right to such royalties. Want to publish a score for an indie song? Tough luck, people will have to pay money to download it, and none of that money will go to the artist. All of the user-uploaded back catalog of scores, which was previously freely available, was recategorized as non-free after this change and thus requiring a Pro subscription to download, except for known public domain source songs (i.e. mostly classical/old music, and only inconsistently at that). This now puts hundreds of thousands of songs behind a paywall regardless of whether they should be or not.
MuseScore.com have recently taken to sending vague and rather unprofessional DMCA-style threats to developers of scripts that allow you to bypass those download restrictions:
Claims like "All not Public domain content on musescore.com is licensed by major music publishers (Alfred, EMI, Sony, etc.). " are obviously nonsense; I used to have a couple scores that were arrangements of indie game music with CC-like licensing that allows this kind of usage on there, but I took everything down because I do not want to support such policies and I consider it useless if people have to pay to download my score and Sony or Alfred Music get the money, not the actual composer.
When I asked about this on the above GitHub threads, they claimed the rights holders forbid them from allowing creative-commons and similarly freely licensed songs on the same site, other than PD, which also is clearly nonsense (they already have CC options for scores, just not for songs those scores are based on, it doesn't make any sense for the latter to be forbidden).
Wow, I just went ahead and read the exchange from the links you just posted. It really did seem like they were trying to force the repo into compliance knowing they couldn't file a proper DMCA takedown to GitHub, under the guise of collaboration. I understand the need for open source funding, I really do. But getting in cahoots with the music industry, which is well known for how corrupt and draconian in its enforcement is and basically arguing (or rather dodging the issue again and again) that no other licensing models on the same platform can coexist, may not be the right way, even if they claim that the people who take issue with such approach are "less than 50" because in the end, they can simply change the terms at any moment and leave you in the dust.
Thanks for bringing this up! Things are certainly heating up. I've installed that user script since a while back, and used it. Now I see that musescore.com has been updated in this arms race, and it now shows a full viewport notice that flickers on a bit after the page loads - "Unauthorized use of Copyrighted Content" etc
Their notice is amateurish:
> One of the extensions installed on your computer violates the law. Downloading copyright sheet music without a valid Pro subscription is illegal since copyright infringement is banned by the law. Your personal data are being processed in order to report to law enforcement units to prevent intellectual property theft. If you'd like to download sheet music legally, you need to start a PRO subscription.
Yes, MuseScore has taken insane threatening stance to everyone who tries to defy them. Just by having the browser extension without actually using it got me a very menacing message from musescore about "being reported to law enforcement". I believe this is very unprofessional and is mostly made to scare people rather than act as an actual warning or message. They could have said that due to the abuse of such extensions they will block the site access until you turn them off like with adblock. But no they have to say you are getting your ass handed to law enforcement. I wonder who will give any attention to a student just having a publicly available browser extension aimed to view and download music sheets based on previously publicly available museScore APIs.
Composers don't have an option to assert their own copyright, and musescore.com declares that their work is "PD". It could be seen as uploading to musescore is an implicit grant of PD status.
The developer site that documents the API seems to be down now, however.
As I understand it, musescore.org and musescore.com are related in name only, or what's the closer connection? Does musescore.com sponsor MuseScore (app) development?
MuseScore the open source music notation app, hosted at musescore.org, is what this is about. It's an excellent notation app, and getting better, especially lately with Tantacrul's help.
MuseScore.com the online sheet music repository is related to the former, but was sold to Ultimate Guitar. They have since taken a very anti-community copyright approach, where they lock all score downloads by default. You need an account to be able to download anything, and you need a pro subscription to be able to download anything that isn't either "original" or "based on a public-domain work". They claim this is in order to pay royalties to rights holders (which in practice means a few large multinational sheet music publishers), but do this for every score, regardless of whether the composers are signed to such companies at all. They have no provision for creative commons and other similarly licensed songs (not scores, they do have that) - everything falls into either original/PD, or collecting and sending Pro fees to collection agencies that have no right to such royalties. Want to publish a score for an indie song? Tough luck, people will have to pay money to download it, and none of that money will go to the artist. All of the user-uploaded back catalog of scores, which was previously freely available, was recategorized as non-free after this change and thus requiring a Pro subscription to download, except for known public domain source songs (i.e. mostly classical/old music, and only inconsistently at that). This now puts hundreds of thousands of songs behind a paywall regardless of whether they should be or not.
MuseScore.com have recently taken to sending vague and rather unprofessional DMCA-style threats to developers of scripts that allow you to bypass those download restrictions:
https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5 https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/42
Claims like "All not Public domain content on musescore.com is licensed by major music publishers (Alfred, EMI, Sony, etc.). " are obviously nonsense; I used to have a couple scores that were arrangements of indie game music with CC-like licensing that allows this kind of usage on there, but I took everything down because I do not want to support such policies and I consider it useless if people have to pay to download my score and Sony or Alfred Music get the money, not the actual composer.
When I asked about this on the above GitHub threads, they claimed the rights holders forbid them from allowing creative-commons and similarly freely licensed songs on the same site, other than PD, which also is clearly nonsense (they already have CC options for scores, just not for songs those scores are based on, it doesn't make any sense for the latter to be forbidden).