A happy ending for Seattle’s Bop Street Records: a nonprofit buys the collection | Hacker News Reader

A happy ending for Seattle’s Bop Street Records: a nonprofit buys the collection

seattletimes.com

46 pointswallflower12 comments

> 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.”

Love Kahle

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.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/new-music-modernizatio...

[2] http://www.publicdomainsherpa.com/public-domain-sound-record...

Seems like he just has a large collection of records, not the original ownership rights to the recordings - so, no.

Then what will they do with the digitized content after it's been digitized?

I think the IA is considered a library by California so they could do it within the limits of what a traditional library loans media contents out.

They keep a lot of stuff that is currently unavailable to the public. Maybe one day it will be out of copyright and then they can publish it quickly.

In the mean time at least it is not lost.

There's a Hendrix record they had that I was interested in buying. If someone has a contact there, please let me know in a reply.

I can put a note in their mail slot, I live biking distance.

I'm about the same distance, but thanks for the offer.

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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