Re: [ARSCLIST] Brunswick Records rights/Universal

[steven c <stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Richter" <mrichter@xxxxxxx>
> James L Wolf wrote:
> > There is some cause for hope. Archeophone records, based in Illinois,
decided at some point not to care about the state laws that cover pre-72
recordings, and have declared all the contents of their CD reissues to be
public domain. Also, and unlike Yazoo and Revenant, they give all the
information about the source recordings. Perhaps the law in Illinois allows
them to do this. Perhaps they just have some huevos. But putting the same
material on the web presents different problems, especially for an
institution like the Library of Congress, so we have to be much more
careful.
> >
> Historically, the owner of rights to any material has the option to
> waive those rights and to place the material in the public domain
> regardless of publication date. AFAIK, no recent legislation has altered
> that option.
>
However, in this case Archeophone is (or assumes it is) placing someone
else's (i.e. the owners of the copyrights on the records they reissue)
material in the public domain! I would suppose the legal question here
is whether their reprocessed sounds are different from the originals?

Steven C. Barr