Re: [ARSCLIST] Some potential bad news ...

[Nigel Barrett <nigelinseychelles@xxxxxxxxx>]

Why should anyone have an eartly interest in protecting 95 year old
recordings ? 99 percent plus of the public are not interested in a 1913
recording unless perhaps exceptions like Caruso.

Also why should  some undeserving relatives benefit from royalties from way
back to 1913 because they happened by circumstances to be linked to the one
who created the work ?
The good news is thank god for archives made available to the public like
www.wfmu.org Edison in West Orange.
I get extremely irritated at the BBC for hoarding from the public  a mass of
outstanding archival material peeing their knickers about copytright
concerns,modern fee rates for musicians who recorded works 50 years ago
etc. but I do admire the folks who do present these recordings like Malcolm
Laycock and his wonderful 20's and 30's bits of his Dance Band years show.

Nigel Barrett in Bangkok.

On Feb 16, 2008 10:31 PM, Don Cox <doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hello Tom
>
> On 14/02/08, Tom Fine wrote:
> > Seems like the big problem is not the length of copyrights, it's that
> > the way the law is structured now it encourages keeping stuff out of
> > print and/or charging unreasonable licensing fees. If the copyright
> > fees were established in the law and they were reasonable, and the law
> > were structured in some way where it would behoove an owner to keep
> > something in print, then licensing deals would be easy and common
> > because as I said earlier there are plenty of non-mainstream parts of
> > megaglomerate holdings that can be profitably marketed to niche
> > audiences but niche marketing is not an expertise of the
> > megaglomerates. Another issue is that a company focused on quarterly
> > stock performance will never appreciate the model of annuity-type
> > revenue flow, pennies at a time, from having everything available for
> > sale (ie in print). There's a whole theory about this, see "The Long
> > Tail." It works perfectly with low-incrimental-cost sales mechanisms
> > like downloads. It works terribly for expensive-in-small-quantities
> > media like printed CD's. The niche reissuers are all going to have to
> > move online or die off. To be clear, I'm not advocating moving away
> > from CD-quality audio (44.1/16-bit WAV), I'm advocating moving away
> > from costly inventory of printed CD's.
> >
> I don't agree that CDs are expensive in small quantities. You can get
> 500 CDs pressed for a sum that is probably less than the average
> restaurant spends on food in a day.
>
> Obviously if you want to build up a big list, there is some investment,
> but a specialist label can be useful to collectors with a list of a
> dozen titles.
>
> Regards
> --
> Don Cox
> doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>