To paraphrase a line from one of our platform colleagues at Avid:

There is no such thing as a completely secure system

Generally speaking, aside from anything Sibelius-related, a good way of working
is to always assume that a system is insecure. Now, there’s no need to be
paranoid, but it’s useful to bear in mind when you’re planning the
infrastructure of your site - after all, if your publishing business is going to
be successful it’s worth spending some time and effort in protecting your music.

Security standards employed by Sibelius Cloud Publishing

Keeping you and your data safe is of the utmost importance. Sibelius Cloud
Publishing runs on the Avid Platform, which has been built from the ground up to
be a secure environment for media-industry customers to work with. It employs
many of the same techniques that you’ll find, for example, at your bank to
ensure secure communication and storage of your data.

Risks of publishing your scores online

It’s worth pointing out that as soon as you display your score to a user in any
form then it’s possible for your score to be stolen!

Aside from adopting decent security practices, the best way of encouraging the
legal use of your music is to provide a compelling user experience that is not
easy to duplicate. The attraction for users therefore is not simply the music
itself but also the extra goodies that you provide, be they features, added
downloadable content, or whatever you may choose to develop.

Meanwhile, we’re also actively working with music publishing associations to
automatically limit and prevent copyright theft.

Printing

Printing is probably the most simple and common route of stealing your music.
It’s not new to Sibelius Cloud Publishing. It’s called the photocopier!

Sibelius Cloud Publishing allows you to easily create deterrents to this
approach:

• Only display an excerpt of your score before the customer has made a purchase.
  Once the score has been purchased, display a full version of the score and
  allow them to print. Of course, this approach doesn’t guarantee that user
  won’t then go on to photocopy your score but at least you can guarantee that
  a user purchases it at least once.
• Watermark your score - Sibelius Cloud Publishing allows you to embed text in
  your score on a per-view basis. You can use this text to embed any message
  of your choosing in your score, which will then be printed. You could embed
  for example your licensing terms: “licensed to Joe Bloggs for 2 copies only”.
• Disallow printing altogether - there’s no reason why you have to allow
  printing at all! If you’re going to take this approach, you’ll probably want
  to think about the design of your site to give users a way of viewing
  scores that they’ve previously purchased.

Viewing scores

Every time you request a view of a score, a unique viewer URL is generated.

This URL expires after two hours by default, or you can specify a custom
expiry if you wish. This prevents a user from gaining permanent access to
any of your scores.

Reporting security flaws

If you find a security hole, or even if you just have a security related
question, please let us know. It’s something we take very
seriously.