Re: [ARSCLIST] Cataloging, Collecting, Copyright, and Conversion

[Mike Richter <mrichter@xxxxxxx>]

At 12:17 PM 3/3/2003 -0500, Graham Newton wrote:
> Frank Forman
> Premise Checker wrote:
>
> > I shall continue to post articles on copyrights and other subjects
> > pertaining to sound recordings that should be of interest to the ARSC
> > community generally, even though they may rarely concern audio
> > restoration.
>
> Frank...
>
> GIVE IT A REST!
>
> We are all professionals with little extra time on our hands to wade through
> the voluminous posts that you think we all need to see, and the current one
> is a good example.

Perhaps I am out of place here. I am not a professional. In spite of that,
I do not have time on my hands, but I find that the corollaries of the
transfer process are important to my efforts and well worth reading this list.

If the focus is narrowed so that the list is limited to stylus shape and
archival media, I will find other ways to occupy my time. It is all too
easy to declare the function of a list to be support for one's own
particular interests; that can be a trap unless one owns the list, defines
the rules and seeks to avoid opinions other than one's own.

I will agree that the thread on the Alexandria Library wandered off-topic
with the fire report. Except as a cautionary tale for our own efforts, it
should have died by that point. In fact, I believe it would have had no one
picked on it for a discussion of relevance. Indeed, I believe the thread
was appropriate. To the extent that we are building archives without remote
backup, we, too, may see single-point failure which destroys both originals
and archive. Yet distributing the archive is violation of copyright unless
the source is in the public domain.

Without the spur of the Alexandria Library thread, would we have addressed
this contradiction? I doubt it. However, if we can get off the argument
about on- and off-topic, perhaps we'll find that any diversion we suffered
will prove to be constructive.


Mike
mrichter@xxxxxxx
http://www.mrichter.com/