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Comment by Andoryuuta | Hacker News Reader

Alongside the Audacity changes, the Muse group has also performed some highly questionable actions in the context of MuseScore, such as falsely claiming that a downloader script was illegal, and that they owned copyright of all sheet music on their site. Going as far as to state that they will "cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content." [0].

Unfortunately, I don't believe the general users of audacity will ever hear about the groups actions, and will continue to use the audacity without knowledge of what has changed.

[0]: https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5

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> Going as far as to state that they will "cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content."

Wow, that's low. It's one thing to send dumb threats, it's another to threaten someone with involvement of a government that frequently disappears people. This is how you turn your products into the PR equivalent of radioactive waste.

That thread is certainly not a good example of communication, but I cannot find any place where a representative from the Muse group says that they own the copyright to all sheet music on their site. They say (and that's to the best of my knowledge mostly correct at least here in Germany) that the arrangement for music is legally protected and even if someone else typed down the sheet, the rights to this sheet are still protected. And they point to the music industry enforcing restrictions (having worked with the music industry, I find that one entirely credible)

There's a thread on an AMA about ultimate guitar from a while back where the founder talks about when they made the decisions to start adding the features people complain about, and the impression he gives is exactly that; the rights holders of the music had them over a barrel and it was a sink or swim decision

The tone of the post from the Musescore developer at [0] is so bizarre I wonder if the people who manage the company's policies and communications even know about it.

In that case, at least there is some separation between the site musescore.com and the musescore open source app.

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