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I'm a long time fan of old time radio shows and back 2 or so decades ago there were some major copyright lawsuits over them. The vast majority of old time radio shows are NOT copyrighted anymore and for years collectors have been collecting them and trading them with each other, trying to get the best quality recordings of old shows they can. Also they've constantly made them available for the cost of media to anyone who wanted them. And more often than not even the media was free.
Then a guy named Carl Amari set up a big website, Radio Spirits to sell these old shows. All perfectly legal since they were public domain, even though he was selling the copies the collectors had been working so hard to accumulate for years.
This was pretty successful, or so I heard, and he began suing the collectors. He had no standing to do that but he had money and most of the collectors were old retired guys and quite a few had to mortgage their homes to pay legal fees to defend themselves. Some gave in and settled and lost their homes.
Some OTR was copyrighted, although very little was. Some contained songs that were copyrighted, although not many. The vast majority of these shows, something like 99.9% if I recall, were in the public domain.
I was in a number of forums at that time with these collectors and I got these stories directly from the people it happened to. Very bitter people they were, as you might imagine.
In the days when old time radio shows were the norm, before TV, there were no reruns. A show was broadcast and discarded. They were recorded and sent to stations all over the country, who played them and stored the records in closets till the closet got full and then put them in the trash to start over again. A lot of shows were lost forever. Were it not for collectors nearly all of them would have been lost. So Radio Spirits was suing the guys who made his business possible.
Copyright is a good thing but it can also be an opportunity for bad guys to make money harming innocent and defenseless people. Cars are also a good thing unless they're being used while drunk or escaping from a crime. I think in the case of copyright, even though it might be essential for progress, it probably does almost as much harm as good. It needs to be made more rational!
Barry
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