Document Protection
Document Protection (similar to how an excel workbook is protected). I plan to sell musescore files as an extra add-on for those who buy my sheet music books. I would like to sell the conductor score & part files separately. I do not want the user to buy just the conductor score and then generate/extract the parts or cut and paste the notes from the conductor score into a new score. I also do not want the user editing the files without permission. That would defeat the purpose of selling parts as a stand-alone product. It should only be used for playback such as Musescore Player app.
This is to prevent a loophole; buy the conductor score, generate the parts with the push of a button, and skip buying the professionally put-together parts score. This loophole is going to incentivize users to print them on 20lb bond/50lb text paper on 8.5"x11" or A4 paper, unbounded. Not to mention the shoddy work that will go into preparing the parts. This approach is NOT recommended for a concert performance, and I would like to prevent users from doing this. I take pride in preparing the parts.
Comments
Whether or not this goes against the aims and spirit of MuseScore, it is likely that any protection would be seen as a challenge and it would take only a few minute's work to disable that protection and post the method online. There are no protected files, whether it be PDF, ePub, MS Word, MS Excel, VOB or whatever - if you can open it and see it on your device you can save it, copy it, change it. You may be better off researching one of the online music sellers who take a cut of your sales in return for hosting, marketing and protecting your work. The willingness of people to pirate your work then becomes an equation of cost of purchase with convenience of getting it online versus hassle and perceived legal risk of hacking and copying it.
In reply to Whether or not this goes by underquark
I'd say especially given the open source nature of MuseScore, that it would be *especially* easy to defeat such protections.
Instead, you might think about, what value *do* want the user to get from the MuseScore version of the score, and then consider if there is another way to provide that. Perhaps a MIDI file and accompanying video, etc.
In reply to Whether or not this goes by underquark
Quite the contrary, I'm not concerned with piracy or hacking. Having the protection enabled (disables certain features) sort of implies it's discouraged for a reason instead of automatically assuming it's OK to use Parts Extraction. Those who want to break the protection system can do so privately. I honestly don't care what they do with it. However, if they go so far as to hack it to enable Parts Extraction at a school or music venue... to be performed by an orchestra, then players will pay the price for it when they get their sheet music that wasn't well prepared on cheap paper. In other words, I can't be blamed for it.
The musescore files are optional purchases for anyone who wishes to play them back on their computer or mobile device for practicing. If they want to break the protection system on the conductor score to extract all the parts in order to get around buying instrument parts from me, be my guest. I can't be blamed for any problems that arises.
In reply to Quite the contrary, I'm not by Anonymous
If all you are concerend about is users shooting themselves in the foot, I'd say, don't worry about. That's their problem. Again, given the open source nature of MuseScore, anyone who wanted to break such a scheme could do so in under a minute flat, so it's hard to imagine it being worth the effort it would take to implement. It's hard to see how users would benefit.
In reply to If all you are concerend by Marc Sabatella
On second thought, I'm going to give out the musescore files for free to students when they order the sheet music books. Consider it a academic discount.
What would it mean to be protected, anyway? Start with the premise that you want to prevent part extraction. Forget hacking tricks; it would be necessary to disable saving and exporting for the specified document, because it would otherwise be easy to circumvent the protection by (say) exporting to MusicXML and then re-importing it clean. But then, it would also be necessary to disable copy and paste operations, because otherwise each part could be selected, copied, and pasted into a separate document. At this point it really makes the most sense to just disable selections, which means disabling editing. Well and good. But now what's the point, really? You have a score that can't be edited nor saved (and it might not be possible to disable saving without disabling printing, as well). You're almost certainly better off with a PDF and an MP3.
Another practical question: how would the option to "protect"/"unprotect" a score be accessed?
This sounds to me like an idea that hasn't been well thought out at all.