I think it's a serious mistake to compromise the intellectual property
rights of professional musicians by placing their performances on the
Internet without their knowledge or permission. It would seem like there is
a subjective difference between distributing field recordings of
traditional singers performing material from the oral tradition like the
ones in the Hunter collection and recordings of professionals who earn a
portion of their livelihoods from sales of their recordings, and who depend
upon the quality of their recordings to generate new gigs.
In many cases, the San Diego Festival recordings might be
less-than-perfect performances or compositions that the musicians might
not want in circulation. It's simply wrong to assume that "most, if not
all of the performers will be happy to see their work of 30 or 40 years
ago come to light for public enjoyment and scholarly research," especially
if they do not receive any compensation. Putting these recordings on the
Net without permission is little more than theft of intellectual property.
As archivists, I believe we have an obligation to respect the rights of
the performers. We should never place recordings of living performers into
general distribution without the specific permission of those performers.
As soon as something is on a public Internet site, we (and the performers)
lose control of any subsequent distribution.
There's at least one case in which a performance from the San Diego Folk
Festival found its way to an LP without the knowledge or approval of the
performer. The producers of the LP (at KPBS-FM) assumed that their
broadcast release was adequate to distribute their recordings, but the
singer (who was also composer of the song in question) didn't know about
it until he found a copy of the LP. And of course, Murphy's Law meant that
it was a song that he did not want in circulation.
Here at Northwest Folklife, we are making festival and concert recordings
available to researchers and the public in listening stations, but we will
not place the actual recordings online. We evaluate requests for copies
form bona fide researchers on a case-by-case basis.
At 10/5/2005 10:38 AM, Russ Hamm wrote:
Our expectation is that most, if not all of the performers will be happy
to see their work of 30 or 40 years ago come to light for public enjoyment
and scholarly research. We shall see whether any 'cease and desist' orders
result.
Unfortunately, a lot of material like this resides in archives that are
difficult to access. Our model that we would aim for is that of the Max
Hunter Folk Song Collection at Missouri State University
(http://www.missouristate.edu/folksong/maxhunter/). Here anyone can access
the entire sound collection in several different formats, as well as
complete text of song words and musical notation! Check out their
statement about copyright -
http://www.missouristate.edu/folksong/maxhunter/copyright.html. The
statement essentially acknowledges the rights of the original performers
and encourages respect and consideration on the part of those who access
the archive - but places the burden on the user to not violate commonsense
considerations.
John Ross
Sound Archivist
Northwest Folklife
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