Fan’s Rare Recordings Of Lost Beatles’ Performances Can’t Be Heard, Because Copyright Ruins Everything
from the copyright-gets-in-the-way-again dept
There’s a story in the Daily Mail that underlines why it is important for people to make copies. It concerns the re-surfacing of rare recordings of the Beatles:
In the summer of 1963, the BBC began a radio series called Pop Go The Beatles which went out at 5pm on Tuesdays on the Light Programme.
Each show featured the Beatles performing six or seven songs, recorded in advance but as live, in other words with no or minimal post-production.
The BBC had not thought it worth keeping the original recordings, even though they consisted of rarely heard material – mostly covers of old rock ‘n’ roll numbers. Fortunately, a young fan of the Beatles, Margaret Ashworth, used her father’s modified radio connected directly to a reel-to-reel tape recorder to make recordings of the radio shows, which meant they were almost of broadcast quality.
When the recording company EMI was putting together an album of material performed by the Beatles for the BBC, it was able to draw on these high-quality recordings, some of which were much better than the other surviving copies. In this case, it was just chance that Margaret Ashworth had made the tapes. The general message is that people shouldn’t do this, because “copyright”. There are other cases where historic cultural material would have been lost had people not made copies, regardless of what copyright law might say.
Margaret Ashworth thought it would be fun to put out the old programmes she had recorded on a Web site, for free, recreating the weekly schedules she had heard back in the 1960s. So she contacted the BBC for permission, but was told it would “not approve” the upload of her recordings to the Internet. As she writes:
after all these years, with the Beatles still extremely popular, it seems mean-spirited of the BBC not to allow these little time capsules to be broadcast, either by me or by the Corporation. I cannot believe there are copyright issues that cannot be solved.
Readers of this blog probably can.
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Originally published to the Walled Culture blog.
Filed Under: beatles, lost recordings, margaret ashworth, the beatles
Companies: bbc, emi
Comments on “Fan’s Rare Recordings Of Lost Beatles’ Performances Can’t Be Heard, Because Copyright Ruins Everything”
This is why…
…why not only do I upload my original material (and covers of public domain tunes) to Bandcamp and CDBaby (to be distributed to Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon, etc.), but also to the internet archive, because I realize my work needs to be saved for prosperity.
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I can see how adding it to IA would save it for posterity, but who prospers from IA having a copy?
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For what reason does someone need to “propser” from an IA-hosted copy of their work?
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Gee, I don’t know, the public? People who can’t afford to pay me for my music? Myself for getting my music to more people out there?
Damn, Bart Simpson has more imagination than you do.
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The internet archive has one of the largest public domain repositories of entertainment in the world!
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On second reading, you were not rude, so I’m sorry that I was rude to you. It’s just that we have far too many crypto-fascist trolls in these comment sections so that’s why many of us seem defensive or rude.
Once again, my apologies.
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I have fanfiction and original works posted all over the Web for anyone to access for free, and I’m prospering quite fine on the publicity alone.
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Define “prosper”. If you mean financially, then nobody. If you mean culturally, then everyone, which is why libraries and other archives exist in the first place. Not all benefits are measured financially.
I've started keeping copies...
Of any youtube content I’m a huge fan of, and also any livestreams I watch that I’m afraid will disappear forever afterward.
I’ve already been able to recover livestreams and other videos that have “disappeared” forever off the internet for fellow fans, but I only share them privately.
Some of us are out there archiving awesome copyrighted content that is disappearing just as quickly as it’s created.
They did a lot of that back then. The Doctor Who episodes as noted are a big one. It’s pretty much thanks to Terry Jones (RIP) literally buying the tapes from the BBC that we have all of Monty Python’s Flying Circus today…
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Largely because recording media was so expensive at the time and no-one had a sense of keeping things for posterity. A lot of recordings were simply taped over.
Unless the proper people can make money from it, it can’t be done.
Ah the wonders of copyright, enriching culture and providing just so many incentives for creativity…
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Hey, if they don’t enforce this copyright, the Beatles will not be incentivized to make more music.
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Frankly, if publishing the tapes would stop the remaining Beatles members from further musical output, I am all for it. There has been very little of convincing value after they fell apart.
Naive?
I’m probably naive about this, not the first time, but if the BBC doesn’t have the recordings, AND they aren’t the original creators; how do they have a say about copyright?
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Even if they don’t own the copyright to the songs, they may own the rights to those recordings, and they certainly own the rights to the rest of the program aside from the musical performances.
Radio broadcasts aren’t covered by fair use? Really?
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This is in the UK, where they have Fair Dealing, which is a much more limited safety valve than Fair Use.
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Hey, stop infringing on the copyright of my argument by making it before I can! 😉
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How much do I owe you in damages?
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Promotion. 😀
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Even under fair use, I don’t see the transformative use in posting these recordings.
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Transforming it from unavailable to available, perhaps?
Neither Fair Use nor Fair Dealing apply here
The Internet Archive suggestion is entirely sensible and legal. The same would apply to other archives dedicated to preserving cultural heritage. Section 75 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 specifically permits this:
“75 Recording of broadcast for archival purposes
(1) A recording of a broadcast or a copy of such a recording may be made for the purpose of being placed in an archive maintained by a body which is not established or conducted for profit without infringing any copyright in the broadcast or in any work included in it.
(2) To the extent that a term of a contract purports to prevent or restrict the doing of any act which, by virtue of this section, would not infringe copyright, that term is unenforceable.”
Incidentally, Section 70 of the same Act makes the home recording itself legal. However this section does not allow the recording to be exploited, even for free, by the home user.
IA
My big issue with uploading to IA is that money makers on other music sharing websites, like guitars101, have wised up to material being posted there and will load up from it.
Many of these broadcasts have been available on bootleg records for decades
The solution
To such a situation as this is to make the story as widely public as possible!
Every person on the planet should know the BBC’s choice!
Route around it...
An upload to any of a dozen major torrent sites solves this problem forever.
Re: … 😖
To get it out there. Yes
But the source being known, then must right the legal battle
How long copyright lasts
The uk gov website says copyright in broadcasts lasts for 50 years from first broadcast. The original broadcast is out of copyright. Funnily enough wouldn’t there be a case for Margaret Ashworth to claim copyright for recording of the broadcast, the rights for which will last longer than the original broadcast, seventy years due to the extension some time ago?
https://www.gov.uk/copyright/how-long-copyright-lasts