[78-L] Motown on 78 and weird Filipino labels

[Michael Biel]

From: "Margaret Still" <mgstill at bellsouth.net>
> Ah, but I appreciate your correction, and associate
> "word police" with censorship, not with precision.

Point taken.  Bad choice of words.  It was meant as a joke.
 
> I see your point about not throwing concerts and outtakes
> into the legal definition of "bootleg" because that would
> restrict access to "otherwise lost" and sometimes great
> performances - and because people who buy these recordings
> know what they are getting and already own all legitimate
> recordings by the artist. Access is paramount. But I haven't
> been able to put in perspective the correctness of, say, a
> soundboard person making copies and selling them at a profit.

We have a major issue of ethics here.  As a "consumer" and as a
historian, I look at these in three different levels.  Counterfeits have
no redeeming value.  They cheat everybody and add nothing.  They are
always illegal and unethical.  Pirates generally add nothing to the
absolute history but they do sometimes make the unavailable more
available and preservable, especially when issuing items that exist in
one one or a very few copies.  They perform a desirable service. 
Legality varies, and historically and ethically are often valuable and
proper.  Bootlegs add 100% of their content to history.  While they are
legally and ethically improper, historically they can be important.  

So the importance and ethics vary.  Getting back to the original start
of this, when the industry tricked everyone into calling all of these by
one term, bootleg, that lumped them all into the illegal and the very
unethical area that should have been reserved for just counterfeits.  

> I think this is permissible in the bigger picture because
> it has created access to something deemed not marketable
> by corporations due to the audience not being large enough
> to make releasing it profitable. Any help unfuzzing this
> reasoning is welcome.   Best,    Margaret G. Still
 
I don't know if it is any more unfuzzed, but you have hit the nail on
the head when it comes to why pirate reissues are necessary and should
be universally made legal.  I have been talking about this for over 30
years and some of my ideas have been incorporated into some of the
measures being promoted by ARSC and other entities.  American copyright
law has compulsorily licensing of mechanical rights which REQUIRES
copyright holders to license anyone to record a song once they have
allowed one recording to be made.  Of course statutory royalties will be
paid.  American patent law has trademark abandonment rules that cancel a
trademark if it has not used for a certain period of time. I have felt
that these two concepts be combined to allow for the compulsory
licensing to reissue abandoned recordings, allowing all recordings to be
reissued if they have been out of print for a certain period of time and
providing for the payment of statutory royalties to the originating
company.  Of course companies are always able to license reissues if
they want -- and at the fee they want -- but they are also able to deny
rights as well.  I think licensing should be made mandatory if a
recording is out of print for a time period AND that the licensing and
royalty fees should be statutory like the mechanical rights fees and
royalties are.   These compulsory mechanical rights rules have worked
just fine for 100 years since the 1909 copyright law, and I think a
similar abandoned rights rule will be just as good, and will be
advantageous AND profitable to all parties.    

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com  



 >>>>
 From: "Michael Biel" <mbiel at mbiel.com>
 
 > I don't know anything about how the labels were appropriated
 > and pressed locally, but assume it was on the shady side,
 > though not as shady as the outright bootlegs being pressed
 > in Taiwan at the time. Best, Margaret G. Still
 
 I don't want to seem like the "word police" (which is what I must seem
 to be to the people over on the ARSCList after I had to slap down
 someone who insisted that 16-inch pressings were not transcriptions,
and
 that coated discs should be called "laminated".) But although it became
 common to call any unauthorized records "bootlegs", that word has one
 specific defination in a court of law, and that is a recording that is
 unauthorized and has not been released by the legitimate rights holder.

 Concert recordings are bootlegs. Recording session out-takes are
 bootlegs. But if the recording has be legitimately released, and
 unauthorized release by another party falls into one of two other
 categories. A "counterfeit" is when someone tries to make a copy that
 appears to be just like the original. A "pirate" is when the
 unauthorized copies are not meant to look exactly like the original.
 
 And
 
 But bootlegs, such as
 concerts and outtakes are documenting performances otherwise lost, and
 are sold to people who know what they are getting and who usually
 already have all of that performers legit releases.
 
 

> The Taiwan recordings I've seen would be pirates. Taiwan
> also printed books that I would call counterfeits, since
> they attempted to reproduce the original, with the only
> difference being the addition of a very tiny area
> with Chinese characters behind the title page.
 
> The Philippine recordings (Dyna Records, for instance)
> seemed licensed, and were mostly of good quality, though
> I just can't imagine that everything on the royalties
> side was on the up and up.