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In the U.S. the copyright situation for music and sound recordings made before 1972 is a mess of different and conflicting state laws. That’s because there is no overarching federal law. The unintended consequence is that archivists, librarians and artists are often afraid to duplicate, distribute or repurpose very old recordings that – if they were books or movies – otherwise would be in the public domain, free of copyright. That’s because they don’t want to inadvertently violate a state copyright law or put their organizations in legal jeopardy.
Katharine Trendacosta is a policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who explains this situation, and why it needs to be resolved. And while there are bills in Congress to sort out copyright, they don’t go far enough to repair the problem with the public domain and sound recordings.
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Show Notes:
- EFF: CLASSICS Is the Future of Assaults Against the Public Domain
- Radio Survivor Podcast #1: The Free Music Archive
- The “most interesting” public domain songs at the Free Music Archive
Feature image “gramophone 02” by byronv2 on flickr, used under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC 2.0) license.
