The ambitious target set by Musopen founder has been reached and widely exceeded: Aaron Dunn succeeded in collecting more than 68,000 dollars for his project of freeing the great symphonies, a project that needed 11,000 dollars to be covered and that became extremely popular during the last two weeks leading to the aforementioned outstanding result. Dunn thanks the many who supported his idea and promises further initiatives with the same aim: give classical music back to the public domain.

Profiting by the hosting at Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform to finance creative projects that are far away from the mere business rules, on August Dunn started his fundraising campaign to bring music by the great authors to public domain. Indeed, the problem with classical music is its double nature as for copyright laws: compositions are in public domain but live performances and CD recordings are property of the music labels.

Musopen music archive has been busy overcoming this restriction for a long time now, giving users the right to do everything they want with classical music: listen to it, download it, share it on P2P, copy it to friends and relatives, remix it. Thanks to Kickstarter and the generosity of 1276 supporters, Dunn – who works for Box.net in his everyday life – and his colleagues will be now able to hire an internationally renowned orchestra to get top notch performances of the great classical authors’ most important compositions.

Once the performances will be recorded, Musopen will resign all the related rights and will release them on-line for whoever will want to download, share and reuse them. The project Kickstarter page lists Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky as authors of the symphonies to bring to the public freeing them from the copyright knots. As for the musicians to hire, Dunn openly talks about the London Symphony Orchestra in his thanks giving post after the fundraising countdown ended.

And the great symphonies are just the beginning, Dunn vows in the aforementioned post: the raising of so much money compared to the original target – thanks to a popularity that captivated social bookmarking and half-world news sites – opened savannas of new ideas on how to ensure that an always increasing amount of classical music contents enter the public domain. For the time being Dunn says he is “humbled by your generosity, not only for the money you gave but for your help spreading word of the project and personal encouragement“. “For what has been a solitary endeavor for the last five years – Dunn says – this is a dramatic and moving development“.





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