(serious sarcasm, satire, and humor warning. Not for those who take church music all too seriously)
I am OUTRAGED, my colleagues! OUTRAGED!!! I want you to join my righteous indignation!
To fulfill their moral duty, and perhaps to avoid lawsuits, the great site IMSLP has long blocked all downloads of works and editions of questionable public-domanity until they are proven as such. THANKS BE TO GOD ALMIGHTY FOR THEIR INTEGRITY!! This ensures that we can access free copies of great works with no damage to the composers or editors! (actually, no joking there, it is a good policy)
However, the HEINOUS, and probably PROTESTANT, site SCRIBD does NOT have the MORALS to censor non-public-domain works from their servers!! Oh, the vice! The horror! Why just today, I was (ahem) making sure that NO free copies of Widor's "Bach's Memento" suite were online, when I found it on Scribd! I even found manuals on organ technique and the rare "5 Invocations" by Henri Dallier! ST. MICHAEL PROTECT US!!!!1
Since it is our MORAL DUTY to never view such works, we must AVOID the website Scribd, perhaps run by vile freemasons, and must certainly NOT SEARCH FOR WORKS WHICH ARE BLOCKED ON IMSLP! I certainly would NEVER get a Scribd account so as to download PDFs of these great works!! NEVER! And so must you not do so, upstanding colleagues! Why, this is why we make our large JUST SALARIES!! So that we can fork over $60 to Durand, the GOD-APPOINTED purveyor of music, and do our JUST DUTY to support these tireless editors!
And now I must continue my righteous indignation and make a point NOT to see if I can find Tournemire editions on Scribd! BEWARE!!!!!11!@
(Again, that's all a joke. Really, laugh a bit. And no, I don't really support illegal means of obtaining non-public domain media. Neither do I support speeding on the highway or use of profanity.)
"I had never heard of IMSLP until today. This seems like an amazing site. Anyone else agree?"
Yes, IMSLP is fantastic--I've been using the site for a couple of years now. It is so fascinating to think that a website that a college student in Canada built in his spare time created such a serious threat to a publisher--Universal Edition, Vienna--that they commanded IMSLP to "cease and desist". The site almost folded, but the community realized that they weren't doing anything wrong and that they we're being bullied. With the encouragement of a few lawyers the protocols were worked through and the site made it back on line in a few months.
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