After looking at MuseScore and UltimateGuitar, however, it looks like they are also free and have a similar aesthetic to Audacity. Maybe this will work out after all.
It seems these days they support CC (finally...), but not any ad-hoc or third party licenses. So most of the music I'm interested in, which is legal to distribute sheet music of for free but not commercially (but under a non-CC license), is still paywalled in violation of its copyright.
MuseScore the software is fine, but the MuseScore.com fiasco has left a really bad taste in my mouth. I hope none of that nonsense bleeds over into the development teams of the actual OSS software, but absent any kind of apology or change of direction MuseScore.com, I'm scared.
Seems to boil down to "music publishing mafia didn't like it", which is understandable.
> Otherwise, I will have to transfer information about you to lawyers who will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content.
part
https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issu...
Especially given that person making threats appears to be from Russia and target in China.
He's reporting them to the police of a country for a copyright complaint. The fact that the country is China doesn't mean anything ominous.
Besides the "state persecution" thing, there's regular police and court work in China, every day, for 1.6 billion people, and millions of criminal, civic, business disputes, and other such cases, which is where this will fall into.
That it's China probably makes it even lighter, not harder, since copyright abuses there are seen much more lightly than in the west.
I think any reasonable person would find this unethical mafia-like behaviour.
Essentially it boils down to this: if you see value to society in allowing people to share musical scores with each other, that's fundamentally at odds with a libre software philosophy. Because if you let people share music on a platform, they will inevitably share copyrighted melodies, which means not only that you are forced to monetize to be able to strike licensing arrangements, or else be sued into oblivion. And you are also required to enforce that the sharing software be used as intended in order to placate rightsholders, or else be sued into oblivion. And it's that "as intended" that is fundamentally different from how many of us think about FOSS.
There's a lot of corporate speak in the official post here related to the emplacement of score downloads behind the paywall in the first place https://musescore.com/groups/improving-musescore-com/discuss... but it's the same sentiment: if MuseScore.com doesn't put in place paywalls for downloads and enforce them, they will lose their ability to negotiate with major music publishers, and they see that outcome being a net loss to society of access to digital scores.
Frankly, I think this is a reasonable tradeoff. MuseScore sees monetization and adherence to these restrictions as a necessary step to ensure they have the resources and community to promote music literacy. That's a distinct mission from, say, GNU's mission, and just as valid. And of all the corporations using GPL for visions distinct from GNU's vision (here's looking at you, AWS), this one at least has a reason beyond being a naked cash grab.
The discussion stops being nuanced as soon as the company starts the discussion with a threat such as "will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content".
At the point the email in the Github issue was written the API was public. It was removed after the repository owner responded, as can be seen on the Internet Archive.
Nothing ever justifies offering a public API and getting people to use it, to only later backtrack, accuse users of "stealing" and threaten developers with use of physical force.
If the problem is caused by major industries, then just remove the previously public API and don't send mafia-like threats.
Threatening someone with words like "Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content" is extremely serious and shouldn't be casually dismissed.
This is not "badly worded". This is either a lie, or MuseScore is dealing with institutions that behave like the Mafia. There is no excuse for either of those behaviours.
Also, you seem to be implying that the company had the opportunity to work together and alert the repo owner, but instead they decided to double down on the threats and accusations. This is also completely unacceptable.
>If MuseScore was not acquired and continued down the current path, it would have been already shut down by now. This is what many people do not understand. MuseScore was going to be shut down if it was not acquired and a plan put in place with rights holders.
>Any site or system of distribution that includes copyrighted works and is done so under agreement with rights holders and according to their conditions will be shut down. This is simply reality.
The "excuse" for those behaviors is that they got to stay in business. I don't agree with all the actions of the rights holders but that's the way it is. If you feel it's better for there to be no Musescore at all, I would advise you to just not use the website. There's lots of other free sites that will host Creative Commons-licensed media. If you're looking for someone to negotiate hard against the rights holders, you would have better luck trying with a bigger company like Apple or Spotify.
There is also no excuse for sending threats of use of physical force by CCP instead of sending a proper DMCA.
Even if musescore-downloader was doing illegal things (and I would argue it wasn't, since there was no circumvention of anything), the law should be followed by both sides, no excuses. That means sending a DMCA instead of a threat.
Two, the DMCA seems to not apply here, if this is a Chinese citizen enforcing legal rulings against another Chinese citizen. That is a perfectly valid situation to call the police, in any country. The message getting relayed through a third party (Musescore) doesn't really change it.
Three, this argument is going around in circles, I think a great option would be to contribute to the author's musescore alternative: https://github.com/LibreScore/LibreScore
The DMCA absolutely applies here, since the whole request was for the repository on Github to be removed, and Github is an American website that follows American law and receives DMCA requests.
There's also no indication that Xmader is a Chinese citizen. The Anti-CPP message on his profile could also mean he's from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or anywhere in the world. The person making the threat seems to be Russian and MuseScore seems to be registered in Belgium.
Even if China could be involved, if MuseScore prefers to solve this using physical force (their words) rather than a simple DMCA, that paints them in an even worse picture than anyone ever in the history of open source.
This was a mafia-like threat, plain and simple. There's absolutely no justification for it, even if it's possible to happen.
Also, considering the owner of the repository considers the Chinese state a dictatorship, it's pretty fair to assume "calling the Chinese police on him" doesn't mean anywhere near the same as it means calling the police in Europe or America. This is clearly the worst kind of threat you can make to this developer.
You seem to be giving all the possible benefit of the doubt to the company while giving less than none to the repository owner, even when they provided information about how what they're doing is not breaking the law, and provided a proper way to solve the issue, DMCA. At the same time, the company hasn't provided much.
I don't see why anyone should assume that the company knows anything more than that but is still resorting to threats instead of solving this the easy way.
The accusations don't have a leg to stand on, otherwise a simple DMCA would have solved the issue, period.
EDIT: Also, I don't see how this conversation can continue. If you don't see a problem with calling the CCP police on someone whose only personal information we know is that he's anti-CCP, then I don't think we have enough ethical common ground to even continue this discussion.
However I would still encourage open source authors to be educated on Chinese law and to avoid telling Chinese citizens to do things that could potentially get them arrested in China. If there is a real legal threat there it's irresponsible to ignore it. So in the end it's probably good that it was posted on Github.
Edit to respond to your edit: That's not my view. The issue is that the police have already been called by a different party. (or the equivalent of it, i.e. the company is contractually obligated to contact the government in the event of a violation, under threat of legal action from that government) The email appears to just be informing them of that fact. In my view, that is the only responsible thing to do. The only other option is to just not inform them, and have the police show up anyway.
If this is a real threat then MuseScore really handled it the worst way possible and they should be ashamed for purposefully threatening to endanger a CCP citizen. If it's not, it's just a mafia-style shakedown.
Once again: if you don't see a problem with calling the CCP police on someone whose only personal information we know is that he's anti-CCP, then I don't think we have enough ethical common ground to even continue this discussion.
Edit: I agree with you that if this musescore developer is lying about that, then that would be wrong of them. But I don't think I have enough information to make that judgement. So I think that's where we're disconnected. At least for open source projects, my view is to take any and all potential legal threats seriously until the matter is resolved with the lawyers.
I sell software to the Chinese government to track down dissidents and kill them with drones. I release a lot of code under a GPL license and use the funds to promote OSS software. Most people wouldn't consider this a positive for the world even though more GPL software is created. Or in other words many people do not believe that "the ends justify the means" is a valid reason for something.
They are distinct, stopping the latter would not stop the former, as such they are not linked.
Let me try saying this another way. Tell your story again but where the decision to be involved in open source software was not made. Was the sum total of badness injected into this world quantifiably less?
>We are genuinely committed to open source and do want to make as much as possible as free as possible. The fact that I am sitting here and writing in these discussions at all should be evidence of our commitment to open source and engagement vs. simply passing the issue on to lawyers to deal with.
And then this next (and final) comment ended with this:
> I will not be commenting further on this topic.
> Otherwise, I will have to transfer information about you to lawyers who will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content.
This is by far the worst takedown request I've ever seen in Github. The physically find you is especially concerning, since the owner of the repository seems to be a Chinese national.
Apparently by the time the takedown was written, the API was public but the documentation was taken down. The next replies don't make it better, and it seems they don't have a leg to stand on to send a proper DMCA.
I also had no idea they belonged to Ultimate Guitar. Honestly I lost some of the respect I had for MuseScore and Audacity teams after seeing this.
This is IMO worse than the youtube-dl debacle.
EDIT: The same developer who wrote the email seems to be making threats involving the police in another repository: https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/42#iss...
The affected parties have first to prove or at least argue that the software is doing anything illegal. The repository owners were using a documented, public, authenticated, third party API that was only taken down after the issue was posted. This is not illegal.
If there were anything illegal like piracy happening, it should have been resolved is by having the affected parties send a DMCA to GitHub, just like in the YouTube-dl situation, just like the repo owner asked Daniel J. Rey to do.
This is how it's done. Not by sending lies ("illegally using our private API" that was actually publicly documented) and making mafia-like threats ("will physically find you").
If the API was protected in any way, the usage can fall under anti-circumvention. That's how the DMCA works. This is also a fact.
We can dispute what actually happened, and we can dispute invididual laws in China (or in EU, or the US), but your assertions seem to be suggesting that it's wrong that these things happen at all, which is not true.
The API was public, authenticated, documented and intended for third party developers. Even if it was reverse engineered there is still legal grounds for that, as seen by the YouTube-dl situation.
If there was any law-breaking, it would be the people downloading scores and MuseGroup for distributing them.
Repeating what I said below:
Even if musescore-downloader was doing illegal things (and I would argue it wasn't, since there was no circumvention of anything), the law should be followed by both sides, no excuses. That means sending a DMCA instead of a threat.
Plus musescore.com has numerous shenanigans with payment, ending subscriptions, etc [0]
It leads me to wonder, what is the other side of this deal? Will muscore.com repeat what they did with the free musescore software and utilize it to ensnare a large number of community resources? What kind of deal are the Audacity devs getting offered? I hope tantacrul doesn't become the face of a dumpsterfire.
If the copyright holders are absent then not much is going to be done about this -- that's one of the major reasons why artists join these large copyright holding organizations, to handle this stuff for them!
The UI is garbage. The plugin architecture is rough. It's difficult to workflow -- no automation is really available. Audacity produces good results, at the cost of an insanely high requirement for patience and experience. What you are actually in love with is the creative process of editing and creating audio.
As a project, audacity has languished for a long time. It has the potential to be great -- but it's not there, now.
It's fast, out of the box, multiplatform... and I haven't used it in years, but that's mostly because Reaper it's too great, the only thing I miss it's audacity loading times.
Now I think Audacity has only a few bottlenecks, the main workflow it's not that broken.
If what they say it's accomplished and they prioritize VTS non-destructive effects, improve the Timeline management and other UX details. I could see Audacity present in the majority of home studios and the software behind a lot of professional works (not big studios, but enough for self publish). I now a couple of local bands that recorded their demo with audacity, a cheap interface and a sm57 mic.
...and if I can ask maybe add support for ASIO (something hard to happen becauses licences, but I can dream).
It survives only because of platform effects.
I'm not holding out much hope for Audacity.