Just a reminder that, confusingly, there are two MuseScores.<p>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.<p>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 <i>every</i> score, regardless of whether the composers are signed to such companies at all. They have no provision for creative commons and other similarly licensed <i>songs</i> (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.<p>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:<p><a href="https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5</a>
<a href="https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/42" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/42</a><p>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.<p>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).