The Fascination with Copyright Laws.

Reading reaction 5.

According to the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790, the term of copyright protection is set to fourteen years, so choose your release date wisely. The strong arm of the law is really flexing when we get into the plagiarizing penalties in Section two. For printing another author’s material without their consent results in your having to destroy all the printed material and a stiff “Fifty cents for every sheet which shall be found.” Section four tells the reader that a copy of every published work is to be delivered to the Secretary of State, and preserved. And Section six reminds the reader of the penalties assigned to publishing another author’s material without consent, if you do, you “Shall be liable to suffer and pay to the said author or proprietor all damages occasioned by such injury.”

Boy, 50 cents per sheet... Why'd he try to rip off Tolstoy's War and Peace?!

Along the same subject of copyrighting, Cohen and Rosenzweig discuss how digital historians can have a difficult time dealing with copyright laws of the various media they incorporate in their online productions. “Multimedia historians will probably spend a great deal more time fretting about legal issues than their text-based counterparts.” They’ll be consumed with finding copyright information about each item they use, whether it be text, image, audio, or video. If you do wish to copyright your works, it’s best to do it quickly, because “You can’t, in fact, sue anyone in federal court for violating your copyright unless you first register. You can, however, simply wait and register only if it becomes necessary. But if you wait, you can’t recover as much in a suit.” Yet Cohen and Rosenzweig suggest not bothering with registering your digital history site until the Copyright Office has simplified the registration process.

In the Historic Jazz Recordings reading, the copyright issue comes in when dealing with old recordings, as the reading specifies recordings from the “1930s until the end of World War II,” in which copyrights are often nowhere to be found on the remaining package. The common dilemma revolves around whether or not to use copyrighted work and hope that a copyright owner appears. “If the organization loses that gamble, the costs can be high.” That is exactly why museums and libraries and others do not use such orphan material. So what are music fans supposed to do? It’s not as though we’re working with words written on paper, this is music that was composed to be enjoyed by everyone. I can only imagine how happy any of these artists would be to know that we’re still constantly spinning their records a near century after their creation. In the case of orphan jazz or blues records, I would say that the copyright issue is simply a massive hinderance.

I hope you enjoy these.

Mississippi John Hurt from Andy Minnes on Vimeo.