Copyright Woes

Posting recordings on the web sounds like a wonderful idea. Gives students, music lovers, researchers, and anyone else who might be interested access to them. Provides publicity for the performers and record companies that made them. Sounds like a win-win situation, right?

Wrong.

Or at least, not so fast.

Copyright issues rear their ugly head.

The problem is, whoever produced and issued the recording holds the copyright to it. Under the fair use provision of copyright law, the library can circulate its physical copies of copyrighted recordings without getting additional permission from the copyright holders. But posting it on the web is a whole other issue. That's "broadcasting". And just like radio stations have to have permission to broadcast their recordings, we do to.

Many of the recordings were produced directly by the University, and those are no problem. "We" own the copyright to the recording and can do what we want with it.

But some of the recordings were made by outside recording companies. Some were actually issued by commercial record labels, like Columbia or Philips or Mercury. Others were done by small, independent labels, like TR Records from Des Moines, or ISQ Music from Cedar Rapids. Many of them were issued decades ago. There are lots from the sixties, and several from as far back as 1956.

We have to get permission from the recording companies to put their products on the web. That means finding contact names and addresses, so we can send letters requesting permission. Which seems like a simple task. And it is, for recordings produced in the last few years. But for older records, it gets complicated. Some of the companies have been merged or combined or bought out or otherwise changed their names -- sometimes two or three times.

Philips was absorbed into Decca, which became part of Universal Music Group, for instance.

Other companies, especially the smaller ones, have simply vanished without a trace.

So my first task is researching record companies, trying to collect enough information to be eble to send a permission letter.

It can be frustrating. After a week of work, I've got letters written covering 32 of the 70 recordings for which we need permission. It put all the skills I learned in the Search and Discover class I took last summer to the test. Many of the rest of them are probably "orphan records" for which no copyright holder can be found, so permission can't be granted. I'm not sure yet what happens to those records -- maybe we can post them after documenting a good-faith effort to get permission, or maybe we simply aren't allowed to post them at all. I'll keep you posted.

But before we declare anything an orphan, I've asked the music librarian if she can suggest any other sources to check. I'm hoping that, being current with the field, she "just knows" who now holds rights to some of the older companies' catalogs. Or maybe she knows of information sources that neither my project mentor nor I could find. Hopefully, we'll hear from her soon.