IMSLP stands for International Music Score Library Project and started on February 16, 2006. It is a project for the creation of a virtual library of public domain music scores based on the wiki principle; it is also more than that. Users can exchange musical ideas through the site, submit their own compositions, or listen to other people's composition; this makes IMSLP an ever-growing musical community of music lovers for music lovers.

Is IMSLP legal?

As the IMSLP servers are physically hosted in Canada, IMSLP has to follow Canadian copyright law. There is also a legally unaffiliated US-located server that can only be contributed to by admins and offers out-of-copyright files in the US only. All scores submitted to IMSLP either belong to the public domain, or permission has been granted by the copyright holder to host them here. The copyright status of every file is marked, and it is clearly indicated if it is not legal to download a file in the EU.

What is the "Public Domain"?

Basically, it means that every score that was published more than 50 years ago is no longer under copyright in Canada, as long as the last author of the publication also died more than 50 years ago.