How to respond to the takedown request email? #5
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Here is how I replied the email.
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Xmader
changed the title
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This email seems very sketchy to begin with. There are basic grammatical errors throughout the entire email, and DMCA requests are supposed to be sent directly to GitHub, not to a developer. |
I assume they did not even use their head. Only very few people 'have such privilege'. GitHub at most will take this repo. And Chinese government? They will not even bother caring about you. I have heard a few even more serious complaints worse than this before, and it is unlikely that the government would even have response. |
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支持作者，版权是保护创作者的，不是平台敛财的借口。 |
How does money protect a creator from independently transcribed sheet music? It's literally notes on a page, how can the creator of the music actually own that? |
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Be aware of direct emails of copyright notice. You need to reconfirm to musescore devs and musescore creators. Because learning from topjohnwu (Creator of github.com/topjohnwu/magisk) someone impersonating one brand. |
Thanks. |
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It's possible someone faked the email domain. In any case, I've archived this repository on the Internet Archive here. |
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Yep I had some issues. I will try and archive it later. |
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And they took down developers.musescore.com, what a bunch of idiots, but the internet archive is here to stay. |
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Looks like someone impersonate musescore devs eventhough it's opensource. |
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Hi Xmader and crew, I thought I would reply here, in the spirit of openness and transparency, to see if we may be able to resolve this situation without need for further processes. Firstly, I work for MuseScore. This might seem a bit confusing since MuseScore is a free open source project, but there are many similar examples of companies sponsoring an open source project (i.e. - Mozilla). While there are many different models of a company sponsoring a free open source project, even GPL, in this particular case this means that MuseScore BVBA (the legal entity and company):
It would seem that the last point is what participants in this repo have an issue with. Without knowing all of the facts, it would be understandable that there may be confusion. I will do my best to explain. Before getting into the details of the last point and discussing anything related to music publishers or rights holders, there are a few things that are important to understand.
There is another misconception to also clear up. Rights to an arrangement of a copyrighted work do not belong to the arranger, but belong to the rights holder of the original work. It is up to the rights holder to individually determine if they would like to share any revenue resulting from the arrangement, but are under no legal obligation to do so. This is the way the current law works. As such, an arranger may not monetize their arrangement without explicit permission from and payment of fees (fee for right to arrange, plus royalties) to the rights holder. Again, this is the way the current law works. The requirement to charge users to be able to download copyrighted arrangements of works and place advertising on the site does not come from MuseScore BVBA, but is a condition the music publishers and rights holders. Without these conditions, copyrighted works could not exist on Musescore.com at all. Another point of contention expressed in this repo is the fact that arrangers of copyrighted works that publish to Musescore.com are not paid for their effort, even though users must pay a fee to download this content and advertising is displayed. Let's back up to two key points above - Rights to an arrangement of a copyrighted work do not belong to the arranger, but belong to the rights holder of the original work. It is up to the rights holder to individually determine if they would like to share any revenue resulting from the arrangement, but are under no legal obligation to do so. "The arranger may not monetize their arrangement without explicit permission from and payment of fees (fee for right to arrange, plus royalties) to the rights holder." MuseScore BVBA has made agreements with a number of publishers and rights holders where the company pays for the right to arrange and collects, then distributes royalties. Without the company taking on this responsibility, copyrighted scores could not be published to Musescore.com at all. Longtime users will note that the conditions for accessing content on Musescore.com have changed over the past year. I think it can be very valuable to provide context for this change. Not too long ago, MuseScore BVBA was acquired by Ultimate Guitar. At the time it was acquired, none of the content on Musescore.com was properly licensed and the site was on the verge of being shut down by music publishers and rights holders. It was only a matter of time. Following the acquisition by Ultimate Guitar, deals were struck with the publishers to prevent Musescore.com from being shut down, which would involved changing several aspects of the site, including the way in which copyrighted works were accessed - no more free access. It would seem that for many users, the convenience of being able to access such a large number of copyrighted scores is well worth the subscription fees, which not only helps to pay the publishers and the team producing Musescore.com, but also subsidizes the team of dedicated full-time contributors to the MuseScore open source project. But, let's go back to the point of users of the free notation software not being obligated to publish to Musescore.com. This is important to note. Users of the free notation software may also choose to sell their original works through other channels if they desire. No restrictions are placed on this. Another point brought up in this repo is the use scores as datasets for academic research, more specifically AI & ML. This is something we are actively working on and plan to not only make several sizable datasets available, these will be made available for free for academic institutions. The first step in making these available is a process of validation and normalization before these can be used as "ground truth". We are currently working with one of the top music technology research institutions to validate and normalize these scores in order to make proper datasets available. We are very committed to supporting academic research in music technology and you will see use becoming more actively involved in this area over time. This brings me to the final point of misconception about our intentions as a company. We are not the enemy here, in fact, our efforts to generate money are simply used to be able to provide broader access to music creation tools and content, and do so within the context of the realities of the music industry as a whole. This is essential for the effort to be sustainable. There has never been a single effort to disrupt the music industry by ignoring the realities of rights that has been sustainable. Our objectives are that tools for composers should be free - period, and as much content as possible should be as free as possible, while still respecting the rights holders (without that last point it is not sustainable). I believe our vision is far more aligned with yours than you may have initially thought. It is my hope that we may find ways to collaborate (very intrigued by the WebAssembly project), as we really do seem to have the same goals. As we really are very much aligned, hopefully this might be an opportunity to begin a dialogue regarding ways we might instead somehow collaborate. Best regards, Daniel Ray |
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Hi Daniel, I understand the concerns about copyright laws, but all things to do currently as you mentioned, is to pay them. I hope Musescore can raise money by ways other than the paywall (e.g. sell the piano tutorial service, or by donation like Wikipedia), and not losing Musescore.com's key feature. Free downloading was why many users (including me) came to Musescore. We are not enemies, of course. I really hope we can collaborate on the WebAssembly project (webmscore), even it can be somehow merged into Musescore software's master. It can greatly save storage and server resources by generating essential files on the client side (but cost time, not much). Regards, |
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Hey Xmader, Firstly, public domain scores and original works may still be downloaded for free. This is something very important for us. We want to make as much as possible, as free as possible, while still respecting the rights holders. When dealing with copyrighted works, we must deal within the realities of the music industry in relationship to music publishers and rights holders. They set the terms and conditions and we can choose to follow these or not have any copyrighted works available via Musescore.com at all. We did not choose the paywall model, it is a condition of the rights holders. They are not open to other models as you suggested. Again, if we do not agree to these conditions, copyrighted works cannot be published to Musescore.com at all. Also, as part of the conditions with rights holders, we are obligated to ensure that this content licensed to us is not redistributed. This is why I am respectfully asking you to remove this repository and encourage all other forks to similarly be removed, as to not risk the future of the MuseScore project as a whole. It would be great to discuss webmscore and see how this might be incorporated into the larger picture, as I do see unique value here. I would be very interested to further our discussion on collaboration once this repository and the MuseScore dataset repository have been closed. Best regards, Daniel |
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@danieljray I would like to be able to download Public Domain works without an account, I do not get the reasoning behind it. |
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@IamRifki the reasoning is very simple: Musescore.com is a community and having an account is the most basic form of participation in the community. Requiring an account to download content also ensures that that we can prevent abuse, such as downloading more than what can be considered reasonable for personal use, such as using automated methods, etc. This also helps to better support members (free or paid) and better understand the segments and trends of the community as a whole so that we can improve various aspects to make it even better. Keep in mind that it is very expensive to create, host, manage, and support a community of millions and millions of people. We provide an incredible amount of tools, services, and content for free and to suggest that all of this must be available without need to register for an account is a bit impolite. There are more than 30 people working full-time to provide all that MuseScore offers, both paid and free, not to mention the invaluable contributions of the member contributors. To suggest that taking an extra 15 seconds to create an account is far too much of an inconvenience is out of balance with the millions of dollars and thousands of hours that have been spent for there to be anything to be able to download at all. Again, MuseScore is a community that is a balance of give and take and invest and share... not simply take. We welcome your participation in the community. Daniel |
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@Xmader Waiting for your response on this topic. Thanks, Daniel |
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How else are they going to sell your data if they don't make accounts mandatory even for the free downloads? I wouldn't trust UG with anything with a payment method attached, ever. edit: and I notice they didn't address the point of taking down the developer site. |
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The idea that everything on MuseScore is either public domain, original, or covered by major rights management organizations is complete bullshit. I am primarily interested in creating and downloading arrangements of music whose creator broadly allows such usage, and isn't a member of a major rights organization, and I'm sure they aren't getting a cut of any Pro fees. I'm obviously not going to sign up for a Pro membership just to have my money go to big record labels and other organizations I have no interest in, just to download transcriptions and arrangements of independent music. I also don't know if this has changed at all, but a couple months ago I tried to upload a score and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to even get it to show up as a free download. The entire UX for how the upload settings interact with the download experience is terrible. There was some kind of step about whether you created the song (nothing about whether it's public domain though) but it didn't seem to matter. And no way to change it once the score is uploaded. So yeah, sorry, but the way this has been pushed through and implemented is complete garbage. Give people a proper license drop-down, with options for things like "I didn't compose this but the composer authorizes this usage" besides PD/CC/etc options, and then you might be able to earn some community goodwill about how you're dealing with licensing. Until then, we can only be thankful for hacks such as this repo so we don't have to waste our money supporting organizations, including MuseScore itself apparently, who don't support independent music, when trying to download scores from years ago whose uploaders definitely didn't upload them expecting people to have to pay for them all of a sudden. Pulling a bait and switch like that on the community was completely evil, and has gratuitously locked a ton of content behind a paywall that is not warranted for such content. In fact, some music is licensed under non-commercial terms and by putting it behind a paywall you are suddenly violating its license. So maybe think twice about whether how you went about doing this is even legal! |
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Ultimately, I think @danieljray is in the right here. The ability too just download sheet music of well known songs without a fee always seemed to good to me. But like the others I did get used to this incredible feature that one day was yoinked from us. I would like to talk about the design and communication of the paywall. The feeling of the pay-wall is far uglier than it needs to be. First, according to the first agreement you had with rights holders, a pop-up on the website could explain in laymans terms for several months why THE feature is now mostly payed. Second, and i don't know if this is deliberate or not. I notice somewhat of a dark pattern. Subscribe? Like on Youtube or Reddit? This would have been better called [Go Pro & Download] but even then we are 2 clicks in and we are not sure how much we need to pay. 3rd click. completely new url away from the score. "Musescore Pro" reads the headline. "ah, this will be a paywall. hmm No price. it's advertising all these features, but I just want to download the score." I click on the green subscribe button. 4th click. "I have to make/sign in an account before i can see the price?" I sign in. I get to this page and i know even less what the features are of pro and what I get if I don't go pro. Just use the 2/3 columns basic | Pro and the features in the columns like any other website please.
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@Qodify We are working to improve the user experience and to provide more transparency. Part of these practices are dictated by conditions of rights holder, but we are continuously listening to feedback and working to improve. @Xmader as I have not received any response from you, we will proceed with Github to have all copyrighted materials and any references to them blocked. You are clearly intelligent and ambitious, and it is unfortunate that we could not resolve this and collaborate. I will make the point once again, anyone can download from Musescore.com anything that is public domain or an original work for free. The copyright holders of copyrighted works determine the conditions under which their works are available, regardless of being an arrangement or transcription. It is their legal property and their legal right to do so. If we did not able to create an agreement with these copyright holders and comply with their conditions either the works would need to be removed or we would face significant legal and financial consequences. If you choose to distribute copyrighted works you are personally risking such consequences, not from our company necessarily, but from the rights holders themselves. |
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@danieljray You keep completely passing over the fact that public domain, original, or requiring an explicit agreement with a rights holder organization are not the only options. Are you deliberately trying to bury the elephant in the room? I recently found out about an interesting piece of software. You may have heard of it, it's called MuseScore. It's pretty neat! What's more interesting, though, is that it is this thing called "free software". What that means is that -get this- its license, called the General Public License, allows anyone to use it, share it, modify it, and distribute it for free! No need to pay money! Even if you didn't make it, you can share it! It's not public domain though, you have to follow a few rules if you want to do that, but you don't need to negotiate an agreement with anyone. Isn't that amazing? Ahem. So, how about adding a bunch of Creative Commons options to scores on MuseScore.com, as well as some kind of general catch-all "Other/I have permission to share this", so that us who work with and support openly licensed culture can make use of the service without throwing money at rights holders who have no stake nor claim to the works involved? Right now, MuseScore is explicitly refusing to support openly licensed works, instead locking everything that isn't CC0 or purely original behind a paywall. And, on top of that, you are threatening with legal action the only people helping make this content available without a paywall. Is this the image you want MuseScore to give, of an organization that refuses to acknowledge the existence of free culture licenses at all? Do you realize how ironic this is from an organization who develops GPLv2-licensed software? |
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@marcan the distribution of MuseScore software (including availability and use of source code) and distribution of scores are two very separate activities. Regarding the MuseScore software, this is fully within our control and we are not only 100% committed to open source, but also free software. We are also very committed to making public domain content freely available and even engage a team to transcribe public domain content that is made freely available on Musescore.com. When it comes to copyrighted works, the way this is handled is not only not within our control, it also influences the licensing structures and mechanisms we are able to provide on the site as a whole. We understand very deeply the various forms of CC licensing beyond simply CC-0, but are unable to provide such variants on a site that also distributes copyrighted works. These conditions are dictated by rights holders of copyrighted works. So, our choice is to have zero copyrighted works on the site and employ a wider range of CC licenses or to have also make copyrighted works available and be limited to only the licensing options for ALL works, not just copyrighted works, that are agreed to by the copyright holders. Regarding legal action, I am not making any threats, I only stated the potential risks involved in distributing a significant number of copyrighted works. Backing up to the use case you are referring to - the ability to freely download, remix, repost public domain and non-copyrighted works at zero cost. This currently exists on Musescore.com. The only thing you must pay for is the ability to do the same with copyrighted works. That's it. There is no option that exists in reality to freely download, remix, or repost copyrighted works without legal or financial risk due to enforcement actions by the rights holders of copyrighted works. |
What? The music rights industry is now banning open licensing from existing alongside their own stuff? I'm sorry, I don't buy that. If that is really true, that is absolutely evil and you are doing the community a disservice by not fighting against it. But I highly doubt it's true, because it doesn't make sense, and because this is the first time I've heard of this; for example, YouTube has no problem offering CC-BY alongside all rights reserved, and we all know they are deeply involved with rights holders.
Again, I am interested in scores licensed under licenses that are not "public domain" but whose original composer allows derivative works; just in the case of one specific composer I am interested in, a quick search suggests there are 500+ such scores on MuseScore. And yet I cannot download any of them without a Pro subscription, even though that composer is not a member of any rights organizations, and even though this status quo might actually be violating his guidelines, because he only allows for-profit sale of derivative works under certain conditions which, in my personal opinion, MuseScore.com does not fulfill. So by locking down those behind a Pro subscription, you are quite likely violating his licensing conditions, while if you allowed them to be downloaded for free you would be in the clear. Again, "copyrighted" does not mean "you need to pay for it". MuseScore, the software, is copyrighted. That doesn't mean you need to pay for it. You keep denying the existence of permissive and copyleft licenses (which are copyright licenses fundamentally) and this is unconscionable coming from a project that started as copylefted software. |
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So I've been watching this issue for some months now, and I think I'm just going to share my opinions on it. First of all, I believe it is certainly a shame something that used to be provided for free is now locked behind a paywall. I have read statements from danieljray, and can agree to the reasonings that the change from free to paywall is in large part due to pressures from copyright holders asking for their share of the cake. As much as I see it to be in a direct opposition against the principles of free and open source software, it certainly makes sense because they do own the rights to some of the pieces after all. HOWEVER, As many others, even the owner of this repository, have stated many times before, I too find it hard to agree to the fact that even original compositions also falls into the tyrrany of a paywall. In fact, I believe unless MuseScore's primary goal is to profit as much as possible from it all, this is not the only way to satisfy both copyright holders AND previously-happy-now-angry MuseScore users. For example, look at how Youtube operates. Taking inspiration from it, MuseScore can for example let user submitted compositions go free, and ONLY lock it behind paywall WHEN there is a copyright claim from those right holders. Sure this is not without problems of its own, such as false claimings and what not, but it is still a legally acceptable solution to keep right holders at bay, AND more morally acceptable to users. Of course, I am no lawyer myself, so I can be in the wrong. That being said, everything I written is posted in good faith upon the principles of Free and Open Source Software. I guess for now, our only hope is for the community to rise up and develop a fully free and open composition repository for MuseScore Software. I can at least hope MuseScore would accept such pull request if one day such repository were to be developed by the community, no? |
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@marcan YouTube is about recorded audio, while Musescore.com is about printed sheet music. The licensing of rights for these very different scenarios are not at all similar. Consider Google's own licensing restrictions with Google Books vs. YouTube. To access full content with Google Books (and in some cases any part of a particular work), you must pay to access. This is very different from master recording rights or performance rights that YouTube is subject to. The landscape of various rights for different forms of copyrighted works and different media is very complex. There is no one-size-fits all approach for all forms of copyrighted works. |
It those cases the composer that uploaded incorrectly attributed the work. We are working on ways to resolve any inaccurate attributions.
If MuseScore was not acquired and continued down the current path, it would have been already shut down by now. This is what many people do not understand. MuseScore was going to be shut down if it was not acquired and a plan put in place with rights holders.
Any site or system of distribution that includes copyrighted works and is done so under agreement with rights holders and according to their conditions will be shut down. This is simply reality. We are genuinely committed to open source and do want to make as much as possible as free as possible. The fact that I am sitting here and writing in these discussions at all should be evidence of our commitment to open source and engagement vs. simply passing the issue on to lawyers to deal with. We do care about open source and we do believe in the idea of freedom of choice for creators and rights holders... but that goes both ways, when the rights holder doesn't wish to allow their work to be distributed for free. |
That may be so, but you are claiming that printed music rights holders refuse to allow Creative Commons content to coexist on the same platform as their own copyrighted works, which is beyond insane. If this is seriously the case, and your lawyers can't work this out, then the only thing reasonable thing for you to do to not leave the community stranded is simple: create a new instance of the musescore.com platform (perhaps under the musescore.org umbrella), move the scores back there, and only leave copyrighted content identified as owned by draconian rights holders on musescore.com, where it won't hurt the rest of the community. musescore.com already has some degree of cross referencing scores to songs, so it should not be a complex job to take a list of songs owned by such rights holders and make a first pass approximate attempt at this, and let them manually claim anything that slips through. |
How dare you ask questions! Just remember: Nobody is stopping you from forking
Aah, the good old "this company's seventeen cents is more important than the personal safety of a human being" argument.
Legally entitled, sure... If you completely disregard all ethical considerations. |
I'm already working on Tenacity, and you can just
I wouldn't want my work being available to everyone in one API request, and there is not much that can be done for paid users redistributing.
That does not give them the right to act the way they are, to say "we will find you IRL", and other stuff. (I also asked a friend of mine which was on the side of the copyright holders and they thought this was unacceptable behaviour) |
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They're also not legally entitled to throw around threats like deportation. Extortion via lawyer is still extortion. |
Thanks so much. I'll be watching tenacity closely and probably donating once you guys get that sorted out :) |
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I stopped following this issue some time last year and now that i returned somehow it's still not resolved yet. 👀 |
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@RockyMM nerds need to stop pretending to act like lawyers, the law is not a barometer for morality. It is not a judges purpose to decide if the law is correct, it is the judges purpose to decide if the law was followed. You are just plain wrong. We still live in a world where people are jailed in Russia for being gay, genocide happens every day, poor people are shamed and put in jail, the meek wonder the streets, etc. If laws were sufficient, those social problems wouldn't exist anymore. What you are referring to with laws being right and wrong is called natural law (as opposed to positive law). And not every judge believes in natural law. Nor does every judge believe in jurisprudence, which is also a result of St. Thomas of Aquinas' philosophy. Here in the US we have separation of church and state so your "personal philosophy" can stay out of the argument of right and wrong, lawful/unlawful. Canada, separation of church and state isn't explicitly defined but it's implied in practice. |
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@AntiSol I enjoyed your counter argument. I would relate the events of this thread and repository more as "counter culture" than legal protest. |
Thank you for your schooling. And thank you for calling me a kid, but you are way off the mark there. Also, you are way off the mark on every argument that you made. But I see that your mind is already made and that you have some (very liberal) principles which some random commenter won't be ever able to change. So I won't engage in this discussion. P.S. I am unsure what made my comment off-topic, but the reply to my comment is, interestingly enough, on-topic? 🤔 |
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Glad to see we're complaining about Muse deleting comments and then hiding comments on here that we don't agree with... 🤣🤔 |
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I am not sure if you hid your own comments. |
Could be it. |
I didn't delete any comments, nor lock the conversation, nor block anybody. |
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I think GitHub automatically hides comments that are old. It could also be
a certain MuseScore employee reporting them.
…On Thu, Aug 5, 2021, 16:06 Wenzheng Tang ***@***.***> wrote:
Glad to see we're complaining about Muse deleting comments and then hiding
comments on here that we don't agree with...
I didn't delete any comments, nor lock the conversation
<audacity/audacity#1346>, nor block anybody
<#5 (comment)>
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I think GitHub automatically hides comments that are old. It could also
be a certain MuseScore employee reporting them.
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Welp it has been some time since ive looked in this, kinda weird it is continuing for sooo long |
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Well I don't ever expect MuseScore to give up on taking this down, because A) it risks their more than likely illegal exploitation of creators for profits, B) if they give up now it just means they are actually lying and never had any agreements with large producers. Honestly until the time that MuseScore can produce legal documents proving such agreements with copyright owners exist and actual proof of payments being properly portioned out to correct copyright owners, I would disregard the legitimacy of any threats from MuseScore. |
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Just heard about this, and instantly reported @workedintheory for abuse. I can't believe he stooped to that level. Fuck him. |
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Their lawyers cannot touch him, not in Canada. |
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I would recommend scrubbing any traces of your internet location from your real location. |
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The news is always freaking out about the dangers of "Russian hackers" but why aren't they ever concerned about the Chinese? |
Cause the CCP pays people to look the other way, drown out others, and/or kill those who try to point out the facts. |
-600,000,000 social credit. |
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Please note that the new repo is hosted at: https://github.com/LibreScore/dl-librescore |
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哈哈哈，还中国政府，我从来没听说过大中国会为一个名气不是很大的公司办事，真把自己当一回事了 |
and others
2020-02-08T11:03Z
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