[78-L] Question about re-releasing commercial European 78 rpm recordings

[Benno Häupl]

.
First of all, copyright laws are absolutely identical in all 28 countries of the European Union. 

Secondly, in order to get a new copyright, the artifact has to be a ''new'' artifact, which 
means that it has to be distictly different from the original (= a new piece of art). 

This also applies to photos or illustrations, btw.   If you take an old sepia tone photo 
and color it, then you have made a subtantial change to the old photo that makes it 
clearly a new artifact. 

I seriously doubt that cleaning clicks from a sound track - or spots from a photo - makes 
these ''new artifacts'' that can be copyrighted for their different (!) artistic content.  

However, you may deter copiers by publishing some legal poetry, like, 

''The contents of this CD as a compilation, and its individual tracks, have been copyrighted 
worldwide by "Déclaration de Dépot Légal" deposited at the "Bibliothèque Nationale de France" 
according to the "United Nations Universal Copyright Convention" and the "European Union 
Copyright Directive (2001/29/CE)" 
 
http://conference.ifla.org/past-wlic/2011/193-stirling-en.pdf  
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=15241&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html  

Good luck! 

Benno