'The Internet has become the dominant form of communication. Copyright law needs to change with it. We want people to have access to this material to foster creativity. Personally I don’t feel pity for these publishers.'
Edward W. Gao, founder of the indispensable International Music Score Library Project, tells it like it is in yesterday’s NY Times piece on copyright issues surrounding the IMSLP. I’m with Edward here – my work as a concert programmer and performing artist has been abetted in myriad ways by the ever-expanding resources of this online community, particularly in the absence of any useful or usable digital technologies from music publishers. Even more critical is how the IMSLP, as Gregory Beaver of the Chiara String Quartet notes, ‘has the potential to democratize printed classical music much as open source has democratized the programming world.’
[On a related note, you can download my WCFSO performance of the first movement from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony at the IMSLP page for that work.]
