Re: [ARSCLIST] National Recorded Sound Preservation Study

[Don Cox <doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 18/11/06, Tom Fine wrote:
> 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.
> 

I think the big companies would find some way of faking it so that
recordings were legally "in print" but not actually available to the
public. Such as printing ten copies.

Regards
-- 
Don Cox
doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx