No.

[melannen]

I was going to make an interesting entry full of interesting things, but then I stumbled across the National Jukebox, and my brain is full of nothing but NO.

The National Jukebox sounds like it's really cool - it's a collection of streamable music from the early years of recording (1901-1925) made available over the internet through the Library of Congress. Sounds awesome, right?

The thing is, none of the songs are downloadable. It's streaming only. Why?

"Recordings in the Jukebox were issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library of Congress a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings."

NO. NO. NO.

There is no reason on God's green Earth why the Library of Congress should be accepting conditions from Sony on how they distribute music that was recorded and published 110 years ago.

NO.

Comments

[trouble]

D:

[melannen]

>X|

[alexseanchai]

I'm with trouble.

[unjapanologist]

That's just noxious. What's the point of being a massive world-renowned library if you can't even set an example and say "No, your demands make no sense and are not in the public interest" when a company asks something unreasonable?

[melannen]

Not to mention "You have no legal basis to ask for that, and even if you thought you did by some strange loophole, it would be in the public interest for us to take you to court about it."

[stultiloquentia]

*scrubs forehead tiredly*

[sophia_sol]

What the HELL. :(

[melannen]

Yeah, so having dug around the internets, it turns out that music recordings were specifically exempted from the earliest copyright legislation (and by earliest I mean "everything before 1972") and that Sony has previously made (and won) the legal argument that therefore by English common law there is perpetual copyright in all music recorded before 1972.

I repeat: NO.

[sophia_sol]

WHAT THE EVER LOVING HELL. That is the WORST EVER.

[trouble]

THAT MAKES NO SENSE TO MY WEE BRAIN.

[melannen]

On the plus side, it finally got me to send a nasty e-mail to my fucking Stop Online Privacy Act co-sponsor congressman! So there's that.

[lady_ganesh]

I just got one back from my fucking Protect IP Senator, and I think I'm going to give him the full force of my counterargument.

[lannamichaels]

Oh, what the flying fuck.

[mecurtin]

Do you have a good link for this? I'm writing a post on "Folk Copyright", you see...

[melannen]

I poked around a few places until I got to a posting of the decision in one of the court cases that established the caselaw, Capitol Records vs. Naxos. It's reasonably readable for a court document.

[holyschist]

I am bitterly unsurprised; between them, I am fairly sure the music industry and Disney will manage to kill the concept of copyrighted works going into the public domain, and we'll end up with a split between Big Corporate Media (copyright term: eternal) and Creative Commons/government-made public domain media.

Ugh.

[princess]

I don't even understand how that works! Like...uh...what?!

[synecdochic]

Yeah, I was coming in to say that. Isn't it fun?

The decision is slightly less insane than it looks like on the surface if you know copyright law, but only slightly.

[melannen]

Yeah, reading the decision I linked to, I can see how it might logically follow from existing laws (although I'm not sure I agree about the validity of the 'common law' it cites) and even appear to be the best possible compromise, at least if you buy that long, corporate-owned copyrights are a good thing in the first place - but really that is just evidence that existing law is deeply fucked up.

[synecdochic]

Oh, yeah, I won't argue that it's not fucked up. But it does follow logically out of existing caselaw.

(Copyright law = even more fucked than you think it is.)

[whatistigerbalm]

The States are really strange with copyright. :/

[smw]

Hell. I wish our society would stop disappointing me with its overvaluation of control.

[willwrite_fortea]

::head banging on desk-sounds::

NO ME GUSTA >:[

[seekingferret]

That? Oh, that I got bored of being angry about a couple years ago. Copyright law is just fucked and the LoC getting involved and working out this stupid compromise is the only thing that got this archive online at all.

[melannen]

I suspect I knew it before, and then blocked it out of my memory. Lately I've been getting most of my early recordings off of Archive.org, which has an extensive collection and seems to operate in a gray area on the basis that if the music/lyrics/etc. are out of copyright they are willing to argue that pre-1978 recordings of it are too. (Then again there's very little overlap between what's on the Archive & what's on the Jukebox. Maybe archive doesn't put up anything owned by Sony...)

[seekingferret]

There's always the archives of WFMU, where their Antique Phonograph Music Program is archived on the website:

http://wfmu.org/playlists/AP