Proposal Withdrawn

I've found this past week of debate on the relative merits and naivete of my modest proposal (aka the harebrained CD copying scheme) to be only slightly better than a cold bath with Janet Reno. The detractors of my proposal are absolutely correct (although a bit too spooked by authority if you ask me). At any rate, it would be inappropriate to continue such a discussion on this list. Since there are some potentially serious legal ramifications, we should cease this thread before it does go too far.

Proposal withdrawn.

However, not without comment (and perhaps another harebrained scheme).

While it would be great to see Velvel reissue the JBC catalog, I am a bit skeptical about this possibility. Certainly the petition can only help, and I encourage all of you to sign it if you haven't yet. It's just that I've lost track of the number of times that I've heard about some small label planning to release back JBC catalog over the past decade.

What I'd like to know is why the hell anyone but Pat Fish is in charge of these JBC albums that are now well over 10 years old? It seems to me that at some reasonable point in time the rights should revert to the artist. For pop music (especially indy label releases) this usually seems to be five to ten years after the initial release.

At this point I think Pat would be in a much better position if he owned the rights to his own catalog and could deal directly with those who want to buy his music. He certainly couldn't do any worse on his own than any number of poorly run indy labels have done for him over the past 15 years.

Here's a hypothetical situation (which should not be intended as an attempt on my part to incite anyone to break Federal or International copyright law, or in any other way behave in a socially unacceptable manner).

If Pat actually held the copyright for the Glass titles we could put together a syndicate to produce and distribute his music on a small scale. Preorders could be taken through the list. It would be a sort of micro-license. It would also be completely non-exclusive and Pat would be free to license his product to other manufacturers as well.

I would bet that a loose confederation of volunteers manufacturing very small quantities of these CD's could do it much more affordably than some bloated record company. Which means more money for the artist (and copyright holder).

Of course this would only be possible if Pat were the copyright holder. Has anyone ever seen the original Glass contract(s)? Who currently holds the copyright to this material? How did they get it? For all we know the copyright may be in question.

Big questions.

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PGP Public Key Fingerprint:
52 D1 ED 84 32 82 13 75
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Finger kirkb@delta1.deltanet.com for PGP 2.6 public key Received on Sun Nov 23 09:49:56 1997