Collectors, Con Men, and the Struggle for Property Rights

• Published in: Democracy of Sound
• Main Author: Cummings, Alex Sayf
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• 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
• DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199858224.003.0003
• ISBN: 0199858225; 9780199858224

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.