Record Companies Sue Internet Archive For Preserving Old 78 Rpm Recordings - Sla...
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Record Companies Sue Internet Archive For Preserving Old 78 Rpm Recordings
Record Companies Sue Internet Archive For Preserving Old 78 Rpm Recordings (reuters.com) 66
Posted by EditorDavid
on Saturday August 19, 2023 @12:34PM from the getting-the-single dept.Long-time Slashdot reader bshell shared this announcement from the Internet Archive:
Some of the world's largest record labels, including Sony and Universal Music Group, filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive and others for the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records that are 70 to 120 years old. The project has been in operation since 2006 to bring free public access to a largely forgotten but culturally important medium. Through the efforts of dedicated librarians, archivists and sound engineers, we have preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium. The resulting preserved recordings retain the scratch and pop sounds that are present in the analog artifacts; noise that modern remastering techniques remove.
"The labels' lawsuit said the project includes thousands of their copyright-protected recordings," reports Reuters, including Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" and Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven."
"The lawsuit said the recordings are all available on authorized streaming services and 'face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.'" The labels' lawsuit filed in a federal court in Manhattan said the Archive's "Great 78 Project" functions as an "illegal record store" for songs by musicians including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday. They named 2,749 sound-recording copyrights that the Archive allegedly infringed. The labels said their damages in the case could be as high as $412 million.
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Copyright isn't meant to keep a rights owner profiting in perpetuity - especially anyone other than the original creator. It's meant to let you profit enough to encourage creators in the first place.
Copyright that lasts longer than a normal human working lifetime is extremely ludicrous, and should be ignored wherever you can get away with doing so.
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Do a quiet survey of the general public; they are convinced that these long term copyrights are their guarantee of a payday someday when they write a song or a book or something.
Their odds of doing so are something close to the odds of winning the Powerball, but don't try to convince them otherwise. Copyright form is impossible because of the stupids.
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Maybe the "general public" living in your head, but no, the actual general public thinks they're just as dumb. Every copyright extension has always been a kickback to large media conglomerates, and only media conglomerates and their agents think they're beneficial.
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Do a quiet survey of the general public; they are convinced that these long term copyrights are their guarantee of a payday someday when they write a song or a book or something.
Which is perfectly reasonable when you're thinking of profiting by your own work during your own lifetime. In your children's or great-grandchildren' lifetime, not so much.
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"Which is perfectly reasonable when you're thinking of profiting by your own work during your own lifetime. In your children's or great-grandchildren' lifetime, not so much"
Awesome plan for those artists who don't produce a successful work until their 80s or 90s... How about 50 years or the death of the artist, which ever is the longest?
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Um, no. Copyright should just be long enough to produce the next couple of works.
Do you want to pay your plumber an annual royalty for unstopping your toilet? Work done is done. You wrote a book? That's great, you get a fair chance to sell it. Five years ought to be plenty. The original 14 years was very generous.
Anything beyond that is nuts, and purely the result of big companies buying corrupt politicians.
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You write a novel. It takes you two years to get it published. It finally gets decent sales a year later. Hollywood decides to make a movie, which takes a couple of years minimum. Your book now flies off the shelves and you get nothing. You decide never to bother writing a book again. Five years seems far too short.
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Do a quiet survey of the general public; they are convinced that these long term copyrights are their guarantee of a payday someday when they write a song or a book or something.
That may be so in America, but in most of the world, long copyrights are either ignored, or assumed to be a public demonstration of how America is even more corrupt than the country they live in.
The general public in most of the world believe that Americans have sold their souls to the devil.
A lot of the rest believe they are t-
No. Long copyrights came from the Berne Convention, in Europe, and the USA accepted them when they signed the treaty. Far from being ignored, they're the norm in the vast majority of nations all around the world. Next time, try learning what you're talking about before you stick both feet in your mouth. Again.
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I would predict under that system that a LOT of kids would be getting primary credit and have a parent or guardian signing over the rights to corporations for a small fee.
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Copyright needs abandonware and must sell rules.
no more disney vault where they can take stuff off the market.
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You think that's stupid? Ponder this: "Back in the USSR" was released in 1968. If McCartney dies this year, it will enter PD in 2094.
More than a CENTURY after the USSR that song is about ceased to exist and over 125 years after it was published.
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Was the Beatles stuff on 78 's ?
I hear Paul and Ringo sang Let it Be with Dolly Parton recently.
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78s were dead by the mid 1950s. Some early Elvis songs were still released on 78s.
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Always love it when the username checks out
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My father was definitely buying classical music on 78s in the 1970s. They were seen as having greater fidelity.
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I actually just read that some Beatles music was released on 78 in India and The Philippines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] under "Shellac Era."
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What a wild coincidence. That very recording is being played on our local community radio station as I saw your post.
I still prefer the original, but they nail it.
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I am convinced that these companies are not endlessly extending copyright because they want to make money off the material, but because these companies don't want this material becoming free competition to new material.
Imagine if we had the original tiny length of time Copyright and things like Star Wars or Star Trek or Godzilla or Lord of the Rings had all become public domain. Why bother with the new when everyone "owns" the old.
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companies don't want this material becoming free competition to new material
Good point. I volunteer at our library's Friends-of used bookstore and the boss limits what goes on the free cart for this very reason, which means we end up tossing books. Not the way I'd do it.
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The boss is a douche and the American Library Association should be told about this unethical practice.
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They do make money off the material via re-releases and remasters. Not a bad passive income source if you have it, so it's a combination of the two. Another reason is that absurdly long copyrights allow the content cartels to keep pretending that copyrights are "intellectual property" (which in turn allows them to keep pretending that copyright infringement is supposedly "theft"). I mean, if copyrights are "intellectual property", why do copyrights expire? Property doesn't expire. If the public starts seein
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This seems to be a version of the Etymological fallacy. I'm not sure if there is a more accurate term though. Basically, just because the origin of the copyright law was to encourage creators to publish, it does not follow that this is the current purpose of the law. In fact, it is overtly clear that current copyright law is just a money grab. Yes, it is ludicrous, but the law is currently made by the elite, and applies to the peons.
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The genetic fallacy?
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Forgetting the original intent allows them to boil you like the proverbial frog.
If something different is wanted, it ought to be presented as fresh replacement legislation rather than as continual tiny 'adjustments' to existing law.
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Yeah, that's what many people who don"t create anything will say, until it's something they created and get money for it till they die. Only then they get why copyright, at least up till the death of the last creator, isn't such a bad thing.
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what do you perceive wrong about creating something of value that outlasts its creator?
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People in the past understood it was to maximize the public good [archive.org] (a long read, but well worth it, when copyright length extension was discussed in the past.)
an excerpt from some ways down -
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