COPYCENSE

“Archivists and collectors have long lamented the lack of access to older recordings. So the Library of Congress commissioned a team to find out just how many are out of print. The report — released in August — suggests that over 70 percent of American music recorded before 1965 is not legally available in the United States.

“But it’s not just economics that keep older recordings out of print. It’s also a matter of copyright. Sound recordings made after 1972 are protected by federal law. Recordings made before that were covered by state and common law copyright. These laws do not have expiration dates.”

Joel Rose. Copyright Laws Severely Limit Availability of Music. National Public Radio. Jan. 9, 2006.

See also:

June M. Besek. Copyright Issues Relevant to Digital Preservation and Dissemination of Pre-1972 Commercial Sound Recordings by Libraries and Archives. Council on Library and Information Resources. December 2005.

Tim Brooks. Survey of Reissues of U.S. Recordings. Council on Library and Information Resources. August, 2005. (“The purpose of this study was to determine the legal accessibility of sound recordings published in the United States. The survey was designed to quantify the degree to which rights holders of historical sound recordings have made available, either directly or through licensees, past recordings that they control.”)

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“The Free Software Foundation on Monday released a draft version of its new GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 3 software license designed to address two increasingly important issues in the software industry: software patents and digital rights management (DRM).

“This document is the first major revision to the popular software license in 15 years and, if adopted, will change the terms under which a variety of open-source software, including Linux, Samba and MySQL, is used. It was released Monday at the First International Conference for GPLv3, a two-day conference being held at MIT.”

Robert McMillan. New GPL Takes Shots at Patents, DRM. Computerworld. Jan. 16, 2006.

See also:

NewsForge. GPLv3 Draft Analysis. Jan. 17, 2006.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. GPL 3.0 Looks Good. eWeek. Jan. 17, 2006.

Paula Rooney. New Open-Source License Draft Less Controversial Than Feared For Business. InformationWeek. Jan. 16, 2006.

Stephen Shankland. Public Debate On GPL 3 Draft Begins. News.com. Jan. 16, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“When Oscar season hits Hollywood, count on three things: teary-eyed speechifying, long lines at Botox boutiques, and tightened security on the “screeners” essential to the Academy Awards process. These days, screeners are high-quality DVDs. The movie studios send them to voters as a convenience, since academy members, at least the conscientious ones, have dozens of movies to watch before filling out their ballots.

“But there’s one big problem. Academy members and movie production workers may wring their hands over piracy in public, but backstage some of them are apparently file-swapping like tweens. Despite studio attempts to prevent leaks online this year, and the threat of jail time and steep fines for movie pirates, at least four screeners are on file-sharing networks already. More may follow.”

Xeni Jardin. Memoirs of A Free Geisha. Slate. Jan. 13, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“When the hard-rock band Korn hits the road in the coming weeks to promote its new album, it will be performing not simply a string of gigs but a running experiment in music-industry finance.

“Under the terms of the arrangement, Live Nation Inc., the nation’s biggest tour promoter, will share far more than is typical for a promoter, which normally receives a cut of the band’s box-office sales but little else. Instead, the company is paying roughly $3 million for an estimated 6 percent stake in the band’s box office, licensing, publishing, merchandise and CD revenue for its recently released album, “See You on the Other Side,” and its next album, music industry executives involved in the deal say. Live Nation will also be the exclusive promoter of Korn‘s concerts in the United States.”

Jeff Leeds. Korn Sells a Stake in Itself. The New York Times. Jan. 11, 2006.

(Editor’s Note: The Times allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper’s fee-based Archive.)

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“Steve Jobs has the twinkling confidence of someone who is battling the entire technology and media establishment—and winning. At his highly anticipated keynote speech yesterday at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Apple’s cocky co-founder laid out the next phase in his plan to turn his company’s hardware, software and online services into the digital media hub of the entire world.

“Apple, of course, controls only a slim percentage of the personal computer market. But as consumers begin to spend thousands of dollars a year on gadgets like the iPod, and the songs and shows to fill them up, digital media may be trumping the sale of PCs as the most important game in high-tech.

“And that’s a game Apple is currently dominating.”

Brad Stone. Apple’s EcoSystem. Newsweek. Jan. 11, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.