Sherry_A_H

context:

i have a very musical brain and perfect pitch to match, so i can figure out pretty much anything by ear quite easily, to the point of rarely needing sheet music to know the gist of how to play something on one of my instruments of choice (usually piano), and whenever i do need to transcribe anything, it’s a breeze.

in recent months, i’ve taken to occasionally spending my free time writing arrangements of pre-existing songs on musescore. it’s usually just for me personally as a means to practice my skills with it and keep my musical brain stimulated, but if i feel proud enough of how one turned out, i might feel so moved to upload it to the musescore website in case someone else might be able to use it. this hasn’t ever been a problem for me until today.

a few weeks back, i composed an arrangement of a radiohead song for lever harp. it ended up turning out nicely, so, as i sometimes do, i uploaded it to the site. i was composing something else today and had the thought to check my other scores on the site (i like going back and making sure i didn’t miss anything, especially on the ones visible to other users), and i noticed the radiohead one was marked as private when i distinctly remembered making it public.

i opened the score for more information only to encounter for the first time: a copyright flag.

to paraphrase the claim: “we believe that this score is related to a work composed by ‘thom yorke, johnny greenwood, philip selway, ed o’brien, colin greenwood,’—” yeah no shit “—and the copyright holder has prohibited us from publishing any scores related to this work.”

two things:

1) there is literally an option when you upload these scores to explicitly state if something is based on a pre-existing work, which I filled out properly before uploading (and have done in the past with other arrangements with no issue so idk why this one’s so special), and I also included extra credits in multiple spots of both the actual score and file upload on the site (i.e. in both the title of the file upload AND in the upload’s description, and ON THE ACTUAL FIRST PAGE OF MUSIC i also included the album title and the year it was released)

2) there’s an “other versions of this score” tab directly beneath the score, and it showed literally three other versions of the same song available to view publicly, and one is even labelled “official,” so idk what they’re talking about when they say “prohibited from publishing any scores related to this work” but ok sure jan

anyway: there’s a little icon on the copyright notice that essentially says “if you think we’ve made a mistake, let us know,” and when clicked it opens a claim dispute page, with clickable options ranging anywhere from “i’m not making any money from this score” to “i directly credited the original artist,” etc. i selected one that was to the tune (heh) of “i created this arrangement on my own” since. ya know. i did. and i basically got told that even when done completely by ear, an uploaded arrangement can still potentially be in violation of copyright law. which. ok. fair, i guess.