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Why Recordings From World War I Aren't Public Domain
An anonymous reader writes "While Disney and others have done a great job pushing the end date for works entering the public domain ever further forward, most people have assumed that anything from before 1923 is in the public domain. However, it turns out that this is not true for sound recordings, in part due to an accidental quirk in copyright law history — in that Congress, way back in 1909, believed that sound recordings could not be covered by copyright (they believed the Constitution did not allow recordings to be covered), and thus, some state laws stepped up to create special copyrights for sound recordings. A court ruling then said that these state rules were not overruled by federal copyright law. End result? ANY recorded work from before 1972 (no matter how early it was recorded) won't go into the public domain until 2049 at the earliest."
UK I found this.
How long does copyright last for?
Copyright generally lasts for the lifetime of the creator and then to the end of the 70th year afterwards. So for Elgar, say, who died in 1934, his original music came out of copyright in 2005. However copyright also exists in the editing, arrangement and reconstruction of previous music compositions and only expires 70 years after the death of the editor, etc. Copyright in recordings lasts for 50 years.
http://www.thefrms.co.uk/copyright.htm
So does that mean that if we manage to record the words of Christ from a 2000 year old clay pot, the RIAA will come after us?
No, the Pope will.
Every time I start to feel a shred of guilt about my rampant piracy, I read something like this. Then the guilt goes away. Copyright is a corrupt system, which no longer serves it's original purpose of promoting production of useful art. Instead it is nothing but a mechanism to ensure maximum profits for those least deserving, and to make sure that the public domain remains small and legally dangerous enough to pose no serious competition. I pay copyright law no respect, and will not do so unless it it reformed to bring it back in line with sensible terms, make it less biased towards those who can afford millions of dollars in legal fees and eliminate the possibility of copyright being abused as a tool to censor criticism or prevent interoperability.
So any movie using the Wilhelm Scream are also breaking copyrights? There go a *lot* of big Hollywood movies!
I'm going to continue doing what I normally do, and ignore copyright law. Absurdities like this just show how backwards and useless the system is. Scrap it, make everything public domain.
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Coming from the UK, I can understand how people can be extradited on US federal law charges. I'd be surprised if state laws apply too. For that matter how does this affect US citizens in say NY if the law is broken in CA?
Whoops, somebody forgot to read the Constitution.
Did all States create those copyright laws? Or did just some of them do? And what about materials recorded abroad, or broadcast abroad? Enforcing copyright law on a State by State level would seem to me like a very difficult thing to do.
Well, I indeed use it as an excuse for theft. I go into the store and steal the DVDc, CDs and books I want. I even steal the DVD players and TV sets to use them. That way when somebody raids my house and sees I have about 10.000 CDs and DVDs that where stolen, I will be paying much less then somebody who did some copyright infringement of 3 numbers on their mp3 player from an album they bought.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Don't worry, I'll start a fund to pay your bail.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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That's right, copyright is STEALING! It is stealing history and culture from future generations. It is stealing from the global knowledge of humanity. Not just infringed upon; information is locked up until it rots in to nothingness.
I have no specific desire to take control of mickey-frikkin-mouse away from the Walt Disney Corporation, or similar works from their holders. But I believe the original idea of copyright was to benefit humanity by encouraging people to create more works by granting an author the PRIVILEGE to control how their work was distributed for a limited time.
However, if a holder does not ultimately contribute something back to humanity in exchange for this privilege, then they are literally stealing from humanity.
The current system effectively prevents these works from continuing to benefit and enrich humanity after they are out of print by failing to permit works from entering the public domain in a timely manner if ever. This needs to be fixed.
For a person or entity to retain control over a work indefinitely, such as current laws essentially permit, is STEALING from humanity.
The individual artist should be able to profit from their work for the rest of their life.
Why? The rest of us actually have to work - we don't get to show up for a few weeks and then say "You have to pay me for the rest of my life for that work". Giving them a few years of copyright to make money off of it, sure, I'm fine with that. However, it's BS for them to get paid to sit back and do nothing for 60+ years because once upon a time, they wrote a few songs.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
So I have several acetate discs from a radio studio in New York. They were recordings of the very first days of America's involvement in World War II. The radio network was purchased years ago and is owned by one of the "big boys" now. (Sucks how Clear Channel owns everything...) As far as we have been able to find, I am the only person even with any record (read knowledge) of this particular recording. So I have a piece of history that hasn't been released and would be really good to have in the public domain.
So seeing that I am probably the only person that has this copyrighted material, whose rightly is it? Mine, the one guy in ten who was careful to not throw this old acetate disc of the estate? Or does it belong to that fat Clear Channel CEO who is at this very moment doing a line of coke off his secretary's &#*@?
> So seeing that I am probably the only person that has this copyrighted material
Your case underlines the bizarre "logic" of modern copyright law. Since you own the media, it is perfectly legal for you to destroy the recordings, which would, of course, destroy the "property" of the rightsholders (since they are the only copy). One wonders how that weird edge case fits into the "you wouldn't steal" rhetoric.
On the other hand, it's totally illegal for you to distribute these recordings to anyone except the rightsholders themselves. So it is effectively illegal for you to preserve this work for future generations.
This is why I do not feel bad in the least to advise you to digitize the recordings and upload them to some filesharing site like RapidShare or MegaUpload in an anonymous way, and then publicize the sharing link on a web forum where there will be a lot of interested people (I'm sure there must be some web forums where WWI history buffs hang out). Much as I like creators to be able to get paid, I hate even more for culture and information to be lost.