NYT on IMSLP lacks vital information

Daniel J. Wakin has an article in the Times this morning about IMSLP, whose main point is that music publishers don’t like it because it threatens their livelihood, and also because of “messy copyright issues.”

The article tells a very strange story. In it, this naïve kid named Edward Guo starts a free music-download website with nowhere near enough attention to whether he’s infringing copyright. He gets threatened by Universal-Edition and takes down all the infringing material, and then puts the now-scrubbed site back online. This all happened over two years ago. Now, Wakin of the Times writes an article that’s mostly about how the music publishers still aren’t happy, the poor dears—an article that is remarkably vague about just what kind of publications are available on IMSLP and whether they do, in fact, infringe anyone’s copyright.

(To spoil the surprise: really old things [which of course isn’t the same as bad things, hence the problem], and no they don’t.)

The people the article quotes are: (1) Ed Matthew, a representative of Schirmer, putting on a brave face; (2) Jonathan Irons, a representative of Universal, explaining that of course sheet music isn’t free, because you’re paying for the scholarship represented by the edition itself; and (3) Edward Guo, IMSLP’s founder, making what is to be fair a pretty dopey “information just wants to be free, man” argument. It’s Irons and Guo who completely screw Wakin up.

If ever, my friends, an article suffered for failing to consult a musicologist (or indeed any reasonably neutral person with a clue), this is that article.

Irons and Guo both encourage Wakin to elide the crucial fact about IMSLP, which is that the editions of music it offers for download are mostly well in excess of one hundred years old. To read this article, you could easily come away with the impression that the modern, scholarly editions put out in the last 30 or so years, by firms like Henle, Bärenreiter, Wiener Urtext, Peters and the like—which are quite reasonably subject to copyright protection for a certain (though much too lengthy) period—are available for free on IMSLP. Of course they aren’t. What is available on IMSLP, I’ll get to in a minute.

Irons encourages Wakin’s misconception because he works for a company that derives a lot of its profits, particularly under the EU’s even-more-insane-than-American copyright laws, from work that people did for it many decades ago. (Universal was founded in 1901 and published, for example, Schenker’s landmark edition of the Beethoven piano sonatas in 1923.) Guo encourages Wakin’s misconception because he seems to think that meaning well is a media strategy. (It isn’t.)

The fact is that nearly everything available on IMSLP is a nineteenth-century edition, of the kind that publishers like Dover and Kalmus have been reprinting cheaply for decades. If I want Bach, I have two basic choices: I can get a free download from IMSLP (or cheap printed copy from Dover) of the late nineteenth-century (but quite good) Bach-Gesellschaft edition; or I can spend a lot of money on beautifully printed copies of the outstandingly brilliant Neue Bach-Ausgabe from Bärenreiter (or the equally good editions from Henle, etc.). Both of these are very good options. I do them both, depending on my needs. The same situation is true for nearly all the classics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music. (Universal, the publishing house that has chosen to get so worked up over this, is interestingly enough not a very major player in the editions-of-old-music business, specializing rather in twentieth-century music.)

However, the idea you get from Wakin’s article, mostly because Irons is intentionally misleading him, is that the cheap availability of old editions is somehow the same thing as failure to pay a fair price for new scholarly editions. This is crazy. New scholarly editions are not available on IMSLP. Some decent nineteenth-century ones are, though, which forces an interesting tradeoff for consumers: how much is that beautiful printing and current scholarship worth? Guo and Irons agree: it should be worth nothing. Irons thinks all sheet music, including very old sheet music, should be very expensive; Guo thinks it should all be free. Wakin surely realizes that there is a difference between old editions and new scholarly editions, but it doesn’t make it into his piece.

No article on this topic could possibly have been adequate without making this distinction, a distinction that (given Irons’s mendacity and Guo’s clueless techno-utopianism) it would have taken a musicologist to make. Not impressive.