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Hi Karl:

I agree with you. The American taxpayers shouldn't be Universal's transfer and mastering engineer, 
and archivist/storage facility for that matter. I think the deal should be done this way:

1. The Universal masters transfer to the LOC and become the property of the US taxpayer, including 
all outstanding copyright ownership. There should be a tax writeoff of some sort on this in order to 
encourage all the vaults of the teetering megaglomerates to be preserved.

2. The LOC agrees to transfer this material to digital format within a reasonable timeframe. One 
possible funding mechanism is described below.

3. Universal then gets a limited time (I'd argue the max time be 2 years after digitization of a 
given piece of content) to commercialize anything the LOC has transferred, paying a mastering charge 
and royalty on sales to the US Treasury. In other words, they get one bite on the apple, but they 
may keep something in print commercially as long as the copyright on the new version lasts. If they 
take it out of print, I think everything should revert back to the US taxpayers. Universal could 
choose to make its "claim" and then sub-license material to Mosaic or other boutique labels, but the 
material must remain in print and royalties be paid to the Treasury in order for Universal to have 
its exclusive bite of the apple.

4. Anything not chosen to be commercialized by Universal should be put in the public domain by the 
LOC. There may have to be a download charge of some sort in order to pay performance or publishing 
royalties, where these are still due. If none of these royalties are due, then the material should 
be widely available for free to its owners, the US taxpayers. Obviously, the way to do this is via a 
free download site. All of this could be supported by the royalties from what Universal chooses to 
commercialize. I can see that the LOC might need to charge a small amount to support all of this, 
rates akin to Amazon and iTunes downloads would seem reasonable (ie market prices). The goal of the 
PD element is not to get something for nothing as much as to get all this stuff back in print and 
readily available to be enjoyed.

One taxpayer's views ...

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Karl Miller" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2011 5:44 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Your taxpayer dollars being given to the Universal Music Group.


--- On Mon, 1/10/11, Michael Biel <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


From: Michael Biel <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Your taxpayer dollars being given to the Universal Music Group.
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Monday, January 10, 2011, 11:56 AM


On 1/10/2011 11:14 AM, Karl Miller wrote:
> If you read the article below you will not that Universal will retain copyright ownership to their 
> recordings.
> Karl
>
>

That is the same deal that the NBC collection is under.

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Same as most of the unique recordings held at LOC and other institutions...yet as we approach 
copyrights in perpetuity, the rationale for spending taxpayer money for this sort of activity seems 
questionable to me, especially when there will not be reasonable access and even more so when the 
copyright owner has stated upfront that they plan to use the digitized recordings for their own 
profit.

Will LOC get a cut of the profit from the sale of the recordings they have digitized?

For me, there are substantive ethical questions on both sides of the argument, but it seems to me 
that there is room for questioning the use of public funds for this purpose.

Karl


Karl