Blog Post 10: November 19

I had no idea that recording copyrights were deemed to be ruled under common law and had no public domain date. This seems like a totally ridiculous notion that this is the best way to handle recording copyright laws. We are only hurting ourselves by making it "illegal" to use historical recordings, especially when some of them deal with our own history. Access to historical recordings should be easy and encouraged. If we are telling scholars that they cannot access historical recordings for research purposes, then what new research will be done? I sincerely hope that the ARSC and other organizations are able to get the copyright holders to understand the dilemma and reach an agreement. We need to find a way to fix this problem, or we run the risk of possibly losing large amounts of historical recordings entirely.

I am glad that Congress conducted a study on the effect of bringing pre 1972 sound recordings into the federal copyright system. It seems that based on the summary of their findings the deemed it to be a good idea. I did find it interesting that they would allow copyright holders to apply for an extension of protection provided that they make their recording available to the public for a reasonable cost.

I agree as much as anyone that performers need to get paid, but the proposed law in Tennessee seems to go a little too far. The way I read it the performers have complete protection, while consumers have no protection at all. Essentially every time you play a track it could count as a "public performance" and you would owe royalties. While I would say that this is a step in the right direction for getting compensation for performers, I believe that this is an issue that needs to be addressed at the federal level. Approving a law this radical in only one state will surely cause more issues than it solves.

The Belfer Audio Archive has a very cool collection of online audio files. I was very impressed with the large amount of subject matter it covered. I found a very cool and unique recording under saxophone music called The Bird and the Saxophone. It involves the music trading between someone whistling and someone playing the saxophone. The link for it is below.
http://digilib.syr.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/cylinder&CISOPTR=696&CISOBOX=1&REC=13

The National Jukebox collection also has a very cool collection of online audio files. I chuckled a little though when the first thing that popped up on the website was the warning that files could contain offensive or inappropriate language. I found an old recording under the yodeling category called Hi-le hi-lo. The link is below.
http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/966/autoplay/true/