This is an interesting question. I think under the digital copyright whatever act, it is a
violation. You can post and distribute a link to the page, but you can't copy, paste and broadcast
the actual text of the page.
By the way, we see what the newspapers did to themselves by providing their content online at no
charge. They deserve their fate because they did it to themselves. However, the WSJ, which provides
MUCH good journalism and is a beacon of the First Amendment has always had a pay wall, and has
succeeded online due to that pay wall. I always try to respect that pay wall, although I have on
occasion copied and pasted contents of WSJ articles into list-mails. I ask that people take note of
the current promo of $1 (ONE freakin' DOLLAR) for 3 months digital subscription to the WSJ, and
consider what value they place on a strong free press and the First Amendment.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lou Judson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, October 10, 2015 5:10 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] The haunting recorded sounds of 19th-century voices
With my friends, I like to extract the text with a reader and just send the article along. Is there
any copyright issue doing this?
Voices From the Grave
By
Terry Teachout
Oct. 8, 2015 3:39 p.m. ET
In 1931, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the oldest person to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, turned 90.
By then the seemingly ageless judge was widely regarded as a national treasure, so CBS marked the
occasion with a prime-time birthday tribute in which he spoke briefly from his home in Washington.
(photo removed)
Justice Holmes was the most eloquent jurist this country has yet produced, and he rose to the
near-final occasion (he retired from the bench 10 months later and died in 1935) with characteristic
grace, closing by quoting his own elegant translation of a passage from a medieval poem in praise of
wine, women and song that he bent to his own austere purposes. “To live is to function,” he said.
“That is all there is to living. And so I end with a line from a Latin poet who uttered the message
more than fifteen hundred years ago: ‘Death plucks my ear and says, Live—I am coming.’”
Three years ago the Harvard Law School Library, where Holmes’s papers are housed, launched an online
“digital suite”that allows anyone with a computer to access its digitized 100,000-document
collection of Holmesiana. I knew from having read G. Edmund White’s 2006 biography that the 1931
radio broadcast was recorded off the air and that the Harvard Law School Library, where Holmes’s
papers are housed, possessed a tape copy of the recording. Why, I wondered, wasn’t it possible to
use the Holmes Digital Suite to listen to that 1931 aircheck?
I got in touch with Harvard a few months ago and suggested that they post the broadcast online, and
now they’ve done so here.(You’ll need RealPlayer to play the file; it can be downloaded here.) To
read what Holmes said on that long-ago evening is to be stirred to the marrow. But to actually be
able to hear it—to listen to the tremulous yet dignified voice of a man who met Abraham Lincoln and
was wounded three times in the Civil War, then spent the better part of three decades sitting on the
U.S. Supreme Court—is an experience of another order altogether.
In case you neglected to do the math, Justice Holmes was born in 1841. That makes him one of a
significant number of notable men and women born in the 19th century whose voices were recorded for
posterity. So far as is known, the earliest-born person to have left behind a sound recording of his
speaking voice was Alfred Tennyson, who was born in 1809, the same year as Lincoln and Felix
Mendelssohn. He recorded several of his poems in 1890 on a machine borrowed from Thomas Edison,and
one of them, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” can be easily found on YouTube. So can the voices
of, among others, Max Beerbohm, Sarah Bernhardt, Robert Browning, G.K. Chesterton,Mahatma Gandhi, O.
Henry, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling,Vladimir Lenin, H.L. Mencken, Florence Nightingale, Theodore
Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, Leo Tolstoy (speaking in English!), Booker T. Washington, Woodrow
Wilson and W.B. Yeats. In addition, there are a few fascinating counterfeits, including alleged
recordings of Walt Whitman (widely regarded as a fake) and Oscar Wilde (definitely phony).
To hear these antique recordings, near-opaque though some of them are, is at once mysterious and
moving. The pitted wax sputters and crackles furiously, and you wonder for an instant what the fuss
could possibly be about. But then the curtain parts and the 19th century comes to life for a few
precious seconds, sometimes through a glass darkly, sometimes with the near-hallucinatory sharpness
of a daguerreotype by Eugène Atget or Mathew Brady.
On occasion they can be unexpectedly funny, as when Browning tries to recite “How They Brought the
Good News From Ghent to Aix,” comes to an abrupt halt, then admits, “I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t
remember me own verses!” Once in a while the humor is both deliberate and biting. Sir Arthur
Sullivan, for instance, recorded this grim prophecy when he first saw Edison’s phonograph at work in
1888: “For myself, I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the result of this
evening’s experiments: astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the
thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever.” If only he could have
known…
I find it little short of miraculous that these vivid glimpses of the fast-receding past have
survived into the uncertain present. How wonderful that the Web has put so many of them at our
fingertips—and how good it is to now be reminded by the electronic shade of a very great man that
the only possible answer to death is life, lived to the hilt.
Lou Judson
Intuitive Audio
415-883-2689
On Oct 10, 2015, at 1:39 PM, Steve Ramm <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Some folks couldn't access this. This should work better
>
> Steve
>
> Here is something from WSJ.com that might interest you: The haunting
> recorded sounds of 19th-century voices http://on.wsj.com/1jUfyUc
>
|