To All ARSClist member

Sorry- I inadvertently sent out an old, incomplete posting. Please
ignore
and delete it at your convenience.

My apologies,

Aaron Levinson

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Aaron Luis Levinson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue Oct 21, 2003  12:39:24 PM US/Eastern
> To: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Correspondence with Lawrence Lessig
>
> Let me offer a novel approach to one of the scenarios in question
> which to my knowledge has not
> been previously presented:
>
> Let us say a regional band(Los Cyberians) got together the money to
> press an album in 1971(Cyberian Wine Tour).
> The Cyberians did not register their original songs with any
> performing rights society.
> They did not send in a form SR to the LOC because such a form did not
> exist.
> They looked in the phonebook then went to a pressing plant and decided
> on a name for their label,
> usually a female name spelled backwards will suffice for this purpose.
> They did not establish
> a real corporate entity, instead they opted for the drummer's address
> as the office of the label
> because his mom let him use the triangular room above the garage for
> official band business.
> The initial pressing run of 500 proved to be an ample supply, as the
> record only sold 217 copies
> not including the 3 they gave away to the local college radio station.
> In short, there
> are at best 265 copies of this album in used record stores and yard
> sales around the world,
> counting the 15 copies that are in the hands of rabid collectors who
> realize this forgotten
> gem is truly superb music that never found its audience.
>
> Phonolog is consulted and indeed no trace of the Cyberians album
> exists.
> But, the fifteen copies in the hands of private collectors become
> semi-legendary
> testimonials to this amazing garage ensemble. Finally, one of the
> collectors decides
> to share this lost classic with the world by getting an audiophile
> turntable a high-end
> sound system and transfer the vinyl to a CD. In the process he cleans
> up some surface
> noise and de-clicks the program very gently, he goes on to compress
> and eq the source
> and at the end of a week the album has been turned from a noisy
> semi-professional outing
> into a rounded professional product with punch, detail and wide
> frequency response.
>
> He decides to re-issue the album on a small label for the devotees
> that exist for garage
> based music of this genre. However, even though he has carefully
> searched for anyone
> who claimed ownership he found no one. This mercurial guy went ahead
> and established a bank
> account for the band and began paying royalties and publishing into an
> escrow account
> as though the band had been found. He did this and accounted to the
> band for every dollar
> that would be owed in standard licensing agreement for a song licensed
> to a major label
> soundtrack for example.
>
>
>
> On Monday, July 21, 2003, at 04:16 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "James L Wolf" <[log in to unmask]>
>>>    The "use it or lose it" proposal is pretty much unworkable and
>>> unfair, unless one applied it only after a long period of time like
>>> 50
>>> years or so. Otherwise, any indie publishers would have to keep
>>> stuff in
>>> print without any lapses to keep their copyrights. Just bringing down
>>> the length of copyright to somewhere under 170+ years might be a
>>> better
>>> start.
>> Well, I'm mainly thinking in terms of sound recordings...most of
>> which have
>> very short "half-lives!" However, in this current digital age, all
>> (print)
>> indie publishers would have to keep would be the final printable file,
>> usually in a graphics program; open it, hit "Print" and bind the
>> results,
>> and there's a book. There might be problems with movies and the like
>> (though they could be kept in digital form as well).
>> It would, though, eliminate the problem where "Globazized, Inc."
>> holds the
>> near-perpetuasl rights to a recording, and can tell you "Well, we're
>> not
>> going to reissue it...but we won't let YOU!"
>>>    As to the second suggestion, it's my understanding that recordings
>>> made by corporations which "died intestate" are de facto Public
>>> Domain
>>> (and the intellectual content as well if pre-1923). If no-one can
>>> claim
>>> ownership, no-one can claim infringement. Emerson is a good example
>>> of
>>> this.
>> The problem is we don't always know what is and isn't "public domain."
>> Take NYRL (Paramount) for example...they apparently sold out to
>> Gennett
>> in 1932, and Gennett apparently sold out to Decca in 1934...but that's
>> only as best I know, and depends on whether the buy-outs included
>> perpetual rights to everything they had ever recorded. Oberstein
>> reissued a fair amount of Crown on his Varsity/et al lines...but did
>> he buy the rights or just find the stampers at RCA from the days when
>> the latter pressed Crown?
>> ...stevenc
>>
>
>
Sincerely,

Aaron