Time To Say Goodbye To All Pre-1972 Music? from the PAY-US-screams-the-recording-industry dept As we've been covering over the past few years, there's been a big battle going on over the copyright status of "pre-1972 sound recordings." That may sound like a weird thing to be arguing over, but it's due to a weird bit of history in US copyright law. You see, for a very long time, Congress believed that copyright law could not cover sound recordings. However, various states stepped in and either through explicit state law or through common law, created copyright-like regulations for sound recordings. When copyright was finally updated in the 1976 Copyright Act, pre-1972 works were left out of the federal copyright system, even as federal copyright law basically wiped out all state copyright law for everything else. This has created some weird issues, including that some songs that should be in the public domain under federal copyright law are locked up in perpetuity. A simple and reasonable solution to this would be to just move pre-1972 sound recordings under federal copyright law and level the playing field. But, the RIAA has resisted this. That might seems strange, until you realize that the RIAA and its friends saw this weird quirk of copyright law as a wedge issue with which to try to squeeze more money out of everyone. READ MORE HERE https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...me-to-say-goodbye-to-all-pre-1972-music.shtml
Thanks for another interesting post! Aldan what the article says is the RIAA well... Which means they are interperting the law as they have copyright protection on pre-1972 even though they don't. Of course if RIAA ever learned of your hoard and tried to sue you they would have more layers than ever to get to you. I don't believe they have ever got a dime out of anyone. This is just going to make it much harder for pre-1972 recordings. I think we can both sigh in relief. I don't think the bad boys have tried to sue anyone for possession in over a decade.
