Re: [ARSCLIST] National Recorded Sound Preservation Study

[David Lennick <dlennick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Don Cox wrote:

> 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

More to the point, and this is something I was going to mention but I got
sidetracked, the "big companies" are all over the world so there's no reason a
compilation of Bea Wain's Victors couldn't be in print only in Japan (which in
fact it is) and we'd never know about it unless we did a lot of research.

dl