The Muse Group – owner of the popular audio editing app Audacity – is in a dispute with the open source community. This time, the dispute isn’t about Audacity – it’s about MuseScore, an open source app that allows musicians to create, share, and download musical scores (especially, but not only, in the form of music).
The MuseScore app itself is licensed under the GPLv3 license, which gives developers the right to split the source and modify it. One such developer, Wenzheng Tang (“Xmader” on GitHub), went much further than modifying the app – he also created separate apps designed to bypass MuseScore Pro’s subscription fees.
After thoroughly reviewing the public comments submitted by both sides on GitHub, Ars spoke at length with Muse Group chief strategy officer Daniel Ray to see what exactly is going on with the dispute.
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What is MuseScore?
The MuseScore app provides access to sheet music, including legal access to copyrighted sheet music owned by large groups like Disney.
It is important to note that the app itself and the sheet music it provides access to are not the same thing and are not provided under the same license. The app itself is GPLv3, but the musical works it provides access to through musescore.com come under a wide variety of licenses, including public domain, Creative Commons, and fully commercial.
In the case of commercial scores held solely for rights, Muse Group is generally not the rights holder for the copyrighted work – Muse Group is an intermediary who has secured the rights to distribute the work through the MuseScore application.
According to the Muse Group, MuseScore is the most popular application of its kind.
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What is Muse Group's beef with Xmader?
While Xmader did, in fact, distribute MuseScore, that is not the root of the dispute. The Muse Group's beed with Xmader comes from two other repositories, created specifically to bypass subscriptions. These repositories are musescore-downloader (created November 2019) and musescore-dataset (created March 2020).
Musescore-downloader is briefly described as: “download free music from musescore.com, no login or MuseScore Pro required. In simpler terms: musescore-downloader lets you download things from musescore.com that you shouldn’t be able to. The musescore dataset is the files themselves that have already been downloaded.
For scores in the public domain or uploaded by users under a Creative Commons license, this is not necessarily a problem. However, many of the scores are only available by agreement between the score owner and Muse Group itself – and this has several significant implications.
Just because you can access the score through the app or website, doesn't mean you're free to access it from anywhere, anytime, or redistribute the score yourself. The distribution agreement between Muse Group and the rightsholder allows for legal downloads, but only when you use the website or app as intended. These agreements don't give users carte blanche to bypass controls.
Furthermore, these downloads can often cost the distributor real money – a free download of a score licensed to Muse Group by a commercial rightsholder (e.g. Disney) is generally not “free” to Muse Group itself. The website must pay for the right to distribute that score – in many cases, based on the number of downloads made.
Bypassing these controls leaves Muse Group exposed – either in terms of costs (it will not make money from e.g. advertising) or for violating its own distribution agreements with rights holders (failure to track downloads).
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What is the OSS community's beef with the Muse Group?
In February 2020, MuseScore developer Max Chistyakov sent Xmader a takedown request — which Xmader republished as an issue on GitHub — for the music downloader. He stated that Xmader was “illegally using our private API.” Chistyakov goes on to state that much of the content in question is licensed to Muse Group by major publishers like EMI and Sony, and that Xmader’s downloader infringes on those rights holders.
Chistyakov then threatens that if the repositories in question are not summoned, he will have to “transfer your information to our lawyers who will work with Github.com and the Chinese government to find you and stop your illegal use of licensed content.”
In June 2020, Daniel Ray of MuseScore (aka workintheory) responded to the GitHub issue “to see if we can resolve this situation without further action.” Ray discussed legal issues of copyright and distribution with Xmader and various Github users for several months. In October 2020, Ray stated that he “has given ample time for responses, but now must continue to request removal from GitHub.”
Unfortunately, this turned out to be less straightforward than Ray had imagined – while the music downloader allows for download licenses for DMCA-protected works, it does not contain those works, meaning that GitHub itself can ignore DMCA takedown requests. This delayed takedown attempts on Github, and during the months of continued absence of comments from Muse Group, commenters on the GitHub thread declared victory, and the thread remained untouched from December 2020 to May 2021.
Source of information: arstechnica.com
