> In a phone interview confirming the sale, Kahle said the goal of his organization is “to build the Library of Alexandria for the digital age,” referring to the library in ancient Egypt that famously burned down.
> Kahle has a particular interest in obscure recordings, he said. “High school marching bands, soundtracks for foreign movies you’ve never heard of — those are just treasures.”
If the purchaser, the Internet Archive, digitizes the entire collection, do they have the legal right to stream the content to the world without paying royalties?
They've been digitalizing media and only streaming it when it's outside of copyright. This means many 2050+ for recent music but ~1970s music and earlier is fair game.
Copyright for sound recordings is pretty complicated in the US. Recordings from before 1972 were protected by a variety of state level laws, so even recordings that should be in the public domain, like ones from before 1924, weren't guaranteed to be so until the 2018 Music Modernization Act[1], and even so have a 3 year grace period from when that was enacted. It gets even more confusing for recordings from 1924-1978, when rights holders had to file for copyright and then file for extensions, AND the law has changed numerous times for different dates within that range.[2] So no, it's not really fair to say that 1970's and earlier music is fair game.
Kind of sad to see this collection move so far away. Some of those records were almost certainly very rare. Too bad Seattle's alternatives have taken so many lumps in the last 15 years.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 40.6 ms ] thread> Kahle has a particular interest in obscure recordings, he said. “High school marching bands, soundtracks for foreign movies you’ve never heard of — those are just treasures.”
Love Kahle
In the mean time at least it is not lost.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/new-music-modernizatio...
[2] http://www.publicdomainsherpa.com/public-domain-sound-record...