Re: [ARSCLIST] Aren't recordings original sources?

["Steven C. Barr" <stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Patrick Feaster" <pfeaster@xxxxxxxxx>
> On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 1:14 AM, Mike Richter <mrichter@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> >   It may be irrelevant, but one should remember that until 1975 a 
> > recording
> > was not considered sufficient to "fix" the sound for the purposes of
> > copyright in the U.S. An attorney in an appropriate field may have an
> > opinion on whether the law recognized a sound recording as evidentiary
> > earlier than that.
> I'm no attorney, but the earliest successful use of a sound recording in
> this sense appears to have been George Gouraud's introduction of a
> phonograph cylinder into an international trademark dispute in November
> 1888 on behalf of the Jackson Manufacturing Company of Nassau, New
> Hampshire.  According to the *London Times *and other papers, the
> cylinder was accepted by Mr. Justice Kay in the London High Court of
> Justice as establishing a point of fact: the Chippewa pronunciation of
> "Ko'-ko-ko," which had a bearing on the trademark.  (Kay did finally end 
> up
> ruling against the Jackson company even so.)  As far as the U.S. goes,
> a precedent was set for the admissibility of phonograph recordings
> of industrial noises as evidence by a case in Michigan -- Boyne City, G. 
> and
> R. Co. vs. Anderson (1906) -- discussed in the *Michigan Law Review *that
> April.
>
> However, there also seems to be a hint in the discussion Mike Biel
> quoted that the problem isn't that the Colbert blowup evidence is a
> "recording" rather than something "written," but that it's a primary 
> source,
> so that referencing it would be forbidden "original research."  In fact, I
> see that they explicitly define all "audio and video recordings" as 
> "primary
> sources" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research. 
> Even
> a recording of an ARSC conference presentation would be a "primary
> source" according to them.  That's problematic too, but in a different way
> than Milo Ryan's horror story.  Other sources unacceptable for Wikipedia,
> according to the above URL, include patent texts, official census reports,
> and published experimental data.
Thus, it seems, Wikipedia doesn't want anything which can be demonstrably
PROVEN to be accurate...which might explain its less-than-impressive
repuation for truth and accuracy...?!

Steven C. Barr