Choral Public Domain Library

Hi there!

I am looking at founding a Volunteer Choir in my city, and would love to be able to use your site to get some score music for us, but I am in Christchurch, New Zealand! Am I still able to download and print sheetmusic for us, even though I am not in the states?

Cheers

Generally speaking, most scores (e.g., all scores licensed under the CPDL copyright policy) can be freely downloaded, printed, copied, distributed, performed, or recorded everywhere in the world. Other scores (e.g., those marked with a "personal" copyright statement) may be subject to specific limitations that the composer/editor wanted to introduce. There might be exceptions related to differences between copyright regulations in New Zealand with respect to the U.S. (e.g., works published before 1923 that are already public domain in the U.S., while they are not PD in contries adopting the "75 years from composer's death" rule). In the case of doubt on specific works, please do not hesitate to post a question here.

Max

Note, however, that neither CPDL nor its administrators are qualified to offer legal advice. So I suggest familiarizing yourself generally with the copyright laws of NZ. Looks like there may be a useful overview at:
http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/Page____7290.aspx

Interesting link, Vaarky: apparently NZ is one of the states recognizing the "typographical copyright" concept. Good to know.

Max

Under the assumption that the above link actually represents the legal situation in NZ, the following two conditions must both apply so that you may legally copy the music for your choir and may perform from it in NZ:

• composer and text writer and arranger (if it is an arrangement of a third party work) must have died more than 50 years ago (interestingly, NZ seems to be one of the very few countries implementing the Berne convention copyright term of 50 years)
• as NZ apparently grants copyright for every music edition ("typographic copyright"), you also need the permission of the editor

For the second point, I would recommend to only use those editions which clearly state in the PDF file that they may be copied and used, because if this permission is not explicitly given, the legal default applies, which means that you may not copy (use?) it.

Beware that the copyright given on the CPDL work page in general is not reliable, because it is often entered by someone else than the editor (in most cases it has been automatically entered by the "Add works" form...).

Good point that the uploader and editor are not necessarily the same, but it does seem to hold at least usually (in my experience adding scores recently).