Re: [ARSCLIST] National Recorded Sound Preservation Study

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hopefully, someone with some pull will suggest something along the lines of this: if a recording is 
out of print for 5 years or more, anyone may lease a digital master for a reasonable rate and 
reissue the recording, paying a reasonable royalty to the copyright owner. I wouldn't care so much 
about the long copyrights if material could be kept in print. Since owners do not seem overly eager 
to keep more obscure stuff in print, this would be a mechanism for them to actually make more money 
from what they own and the public could enjoy a wider variety of material. What shouldn't be the 
norm are userous "minimum quantity" deals where someone wishing to license obscure material --  
which, by its very nature, is not going to sell a ton of copies -- has to front a large pile of 
money that he is unlikely to earn back. This seems to be the biggest barrier keeping a lot of this 
material from being licensed. At this point, there even exist already-amortized digital masters of a 
lot of material because so much material once available on CD is now out of print. In the classical 
and jazz genres particularly, there is a surprising amount of material once available on CD and long 
available on analog formats that is now out of print. The general health of the music business does 
not bode well for much of this material ending up back in print, except possibly as greatly lower 
quality iTunes files.

-- Tom Fine


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Lennick" <dlennick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2006 11:00 AM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] National Recorded Sound Preservation Study


> Don't know if this has been mentioned here. Forwarded from ToNY to 78-L.
>
> http://www.loc.gov/rr/record/nrpb/nrpb-clir.html
>
> Jim Baldwin wrote:
>
> > Heads up from another site:
> > ==================================================
> > > Don't know how many of you are aware of this but the National
> > > Recording  Preservation Board of the Library of Congress is
> > > holding public hearings in L.A. on  Nov. 29 and NYC on Dec. 19
> > > to solicit comment on (among other things) how copyright law
> > > might be changed to encourage preservation of and access to
> > > historic recordings.  This is a rare opportunity to go on record
> > > and perhaps -  perhaps - even influence public policy about
> > > access to old recordings.
> > > They're accepting written comments from corporations, archives
> > > and "the  considerable population of individuals with personal,
> > > often specialized collections  of recorded sound, including
> > > published and unpublished materials."  The  deadline for
> > > submissions for the L.A. hearings is past, but for the NYC
> > > hearing (to  be held at the Princeton Club on 43rd Street) it is
> > > November 28.
> > >
> > > Considering the controversy over copyright these days this could
> > > be lively!   Does anyone know if anyone in the press is planning
> > > to cover this?
> > > Details are at http://www.loc.gov/rr/record/nrpb/nrpb-clir.html
> > > _________________________________________________________________