Collectors, Con Men, and the Struggle for Property Rights

This chapter examines how collectors, listeners, and entrepreneurs took advantage of a legal gray zone—that composers deserved to benefit from recordings of their work but that record companies did not enjoy a copyright for their recordings—to rerelease old and out-of-print recordings, beginning in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inDemocracy of Sound
Main Author Cummings, Alex Sayf
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Oxford University Press 25.04.2013
Subjects
composers
copyright
collectors
property rights
Eli Oberstein
recording industry
sound recordings
record companies
bootlegging
popular music
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Summary:This chapter examines how collectors, listeners, and entrepreneurs took advantage of a legal gray zone—that composers deserved to benefit from recordings of their work but that record companies did not enjoy a copyright for their recordings—to rerelease old and out-of-print recordings, beginning in the 1930s. It considers how such activities landed bootleggers in court, often with indecisive results, and triggered a struggle for property rights. The chapter looks at the career of Eli Oberstein to illustrate the way some in the music business played fast and loose with sound recordings in the mid-twentieth century. It also explores the recording industry's lobbying to obtain federal copyright protection for its products, the issue of copying and distributing popular music, and the surge of bootlegging after World War II.
ISBN:0199858225
9780199858224
DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199858224.003.0003