Austrian music publisher pushes Canadian internet site offline

Been surfing for the International Music Score Library Project? You know. The site that generated a million hits per day for its over 15,000 free scores by over 1,000 composers. Well, if you surf onto www.imslp.org now, you'll find out why the college student who started the site in 2006 has recently taken it offline. It seems the student received two cease and desist letters from Universal Edition, an Austrian music publisher. According to Michael Geist, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, UE demanded that "the site block European users from accessing certain works and from adding new scores for which the copyright had not expired in Europe. The company noted that while the music scores entered the public domain in Canada fifty years after a composer’s death, Europe's copyright term is twenty years longer." For more information, click on the following link: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2333/159/