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Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

Keep reading that issues/5 thread, especially the replies from Muse Group's Head of Strategy workedintheory. It doesn't explain this Audacity stuff, but the musescore-downloader response makes sense (TLDR: copyright holders forced them to add a paywall or remove non-public domain content).

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That doesn't excuse the behaviour from MuseGroup. They essentially were trying to do same thing that rights holders tried to do to youtube-dl, with (somehow) even less standing, since MuseGroup does not even represent the rights holders in this case.

Fraudulent DMCA claims and scare tactics ("Information about users who use this extension on musescore.com will be shared with local police"[1]) are inexcusable regardless of how they are justified.

[1] https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/42#iss...

Agreed on the police threats and DMCA attempt. They seem to have succeeded in getting it removed from the Chrome web store, due to its name violating MuseScore's trademark.

> They seem to have succeeded in getting it removed from the Chrome web store, due to its name violating MuseScore's trademark.

That can't be the reason, since the name "musescore-downloader" doesn't violate MuseScore's trademark. If you have a trademark, there is no prohibition on me using the mark to refer to you. Doing that is the whole point of your trademark.

But would it cause user confusion over whether the software comes from the same organization as MuseScore itself? Saying it’s just a reference doesn’t seem like it would get you off the hook that easily?

But in this case the maintainers of the Chrome Web Store get to decide. If they think it’s too close, it’s too close.

MuseScore tried to do a DMCA takedown on the project. Only the copyright holders themselves, or their legal representatives, can file those according to the law. MuseScore is not the copyright holder for tabs and scores they're asserting the project author is infringing on.

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