copyright compliance and personal use

• Jun 4, 2022 - 17:05

I read over briefly the copyright discussion on this forum. I uploaded another musician's piano piece to the PDF convert function. I don't wish to distribute, or have anything made public - merely use the musescore system as a play along until i get timing understanding. I can probably delete this within a week, or perhaps a couple of days, as i play along with it. is this a problem? is there a set to private function? how bad, or awful would this be? i don't want to get into any trouble, or make a composer mad - just want to learn the music as i pretty much suck at understanding timing.


Comments

There is never any copyright problem with simply entering music into MuseScore, regardless of what source you start with. The only thing you ever need to worry about is distributing copies of the music. The PDF import does not do that - the file uploaded is visible to you only.

In reply to by krumpetina

Yes, as long as everything is done in the privacy of your own home or whatever,you are free to do as you like.

If on the other hand you wish to perform the arrangement in public, that requires permission, and that's equally true whether you play directly from the sheet music unaccompanied or whether you use the sheet music. Public performance of a composition, like distribution of the sheet music, requires permission. Most venus that offer live music have what are called "blanket licenses" to allow performers there to play all the copyrighted music they want, so it's usually not your responsibility to deal with this, but it's worth mentioning.

Also, even though uploading to musescoe.com normally (that is, not as part of the special experimental PDF import service) counts as publishing, musescore.com also has "blanket licenses" with a number of publishers that allows you to upload there with no issues as well. If you upload something not covered by such a license, that's OK too, musescore.com will simply mark the score private or unlisted automatically once this is discovered. No one gets in trouble; it's handled for you.

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