IMSLP and the State of the Arts worldwide

As many of the people who would read this blog would be interested in classical music and websites regarding it, there is or now was this very good collection of free scores on the Internet called the Internet Music Scores Library Project. http://imslp.org/wiki/
They have recently been put out of action by the actions of a cease and desist letter from Universal Edition. The scores in question are by Mahler, R. Strauss, Respighi, Berg, Friedman, Janacek, Schoenberg, Bartok, Marx, Szymanowski and von Zemlinski. Only one of these composers, Marx, is still in copyright in Canada, where IMSLP is based.
Matthew and I have been discussing this and have agreed to a boycott of all Universal Edition products. We hope you will join in our boycott of Universal Edition products.
This leads us to the second point in this blog entry, the State of the Arts worldwide.
The Arts are incredibly undervalued worldwide. Just in Victoria, the State Government is pretty much trying to kill MYM, which is a highly worthwhile program for young musicians. The attack from UE on IMSLP is another great example.
I believe the Arts should be much more valued than they already are. Look at the comparative budgets for sport and Arts and see what I mean!