Teacups ready? We've got some fresh brew.
Musescore is a web site that lets you download sheet music. You can download the sheets for many public domain songs after creating an account, but for other songs, you need to have a paid membership. Despite this, they have, or had, documentation for an open API on their site to download sheets without an account or membership, and that API seems to still work. A developer going by Xmader, who is a Chinese national living overseas, created
an OSS tool called musescore-downloader which uses that API to download the sheets without an account or membership.
Back in February 2020, Musescore sent a poorly-worded and DMCA-uncompliant takedown request to the developer. The developer
created an issue in his repo asking for help with what to do about it, and at the (correct) prompting of many commenters, ultimately did nothing.
Eventually the issue was bumped by Daniel "workedintheory" Ray, the "Head of Strategy" of Muse Group, Musescore's parent company, who tried to justify the takedown request in the issue. He was repeatedly BTFOed by others in the issue, but he kept replying - he seemed to be making taking down musescore-downloader a personal crusade, instead of doing something more practical that he had more power over like getting the Musescore developers to fix their API so that this tool wouldn't work.
Muse Group. Does that name sound familiar? It's the same company that bought out Audacity. So after that stuff started popping off earlier this year, this issue started getting noticed again.
Things have come to a head today, when Ray posted
a reply to the issue (archive link since the original has been edited away, though you can still find it if you look at the edit history of
the original comment) basically doxing Xmader's real name, and, well, I'll let his words stand for themselves:
Upon further investigation, it became clear that Wenzheng Tang is a Chinese national, but not resident in China. As a guest in his current country, his residency status is predicated on a number of conditions, one of which is not violating the law.
If found in violation of laws, residency may be revoked and he may be deported to his home country.
This becomes even further complicated given another repo of his - Fuck 学习强国, which is highly critical of the Chinese government. Were he deported to China, who knows how he may be received.[…]
So, both repositories remain up, for now, not because we are powerless to take it down... it is that the process of exercising this power could very literally ruin the actual life of another person.[…]
What I have described in this post is not at all a threat, but an informed assessment of your own personal legal risk.
Has anyone actually used the term "this is not a threat" without a very clear threat either proceeding or following it?
So, yeah. I was kind of ambivalent about Muse's takeover of Audacity in the past, but unless the sun sets today with this asshole condemned and fired… fuck this entire company.
Cow crossover: One of the people
bringing attention to this event on Twitter is Hector "@marcan42" Martin, the "personal friend" of byuu/Near who is either sitting on incontrovertible evidence of his death and therefore the opportunity to dunk on us incel Kiwi chuds forever, or lying about it completely. But good on him for spreading the news of this particular bullshit.
