TheAuldGrump
First Post
Go looking for information on songfinders and songcatchers - while it was not supposed to work that way, it was how it ended up working in the years between 1909 and the early fifties. The recording studios helped enforce it. Olive Dame Campbell was the first songcatcher, and an honest one, but some of the folks who followed her into the mountains were less so.
In the mid '50s to the 1960s it started being reversed, which is where songfinders like Burl Ives and Pete Seeger joining ranks with the likes of Olive Campbell entered the picture. While the law was not substantially changed it became less one sided in regards to how it was enforced.
Mind you, much of the music found would otherwise have been lost, but trust me, the theft of music also made some folks a lot less likely to share, especially around Appalachia - the folks were ignorant of the law, and the studios used that ignorance against them.
(That ignorance of the law was also why I chose songfinders as an example in this case, while Widgets deliberately went and messed with the IP, AB and the original creator did not have that knowledge.)
Olive Dame Campbell was the inspiration for the movie Songcatcher in 2000.
The Auld Grump, and sometimes it seems that RIAA wants a return to those times....
*EDIT* If you can ever get writer Sharyn McCrumb to talk about song stealing, it is worth listening to. She also wrote the wonderful RPG convention mystery Bimbos of the Death Sun.
In the mid '50s to the 1960s it started being reversed, which is where songfinders like Burl Ives and Pete Seeger joining ranks with the likes of Olive Campbell entered the picture. While the law was not substantially changed it became less one sided in regards to how it was enforced.
Mind you, much of the music found would otherwise have been lost, but trust me, the theft of music also made some folks a lot less likely to share, especially around Appalachia - the folks were ignorant of the law, and the studios used that ignorance against them.
(That ignorance of the law was also why I chose songfinders as an example in this case, while Widgets deliberately went and messed with the IP, AB and the original creator did not have that knowledge.)
Olive Dame Campbell was the inspiration for the movie Songcatcher in 2000.
The Auld Grump, and sometimes it seems that RIAA wants a return to those times....
*EDIT* If you can ever get writer Sharyn McCrumb to talk about song stealing, it is worth listening to. She also wrote the wonderful RPG convention mystery Bimbos of the Death Sun.
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The laws were overturned, but doing so meant actually going to court to get rid of them. Universities showed up on both sides of the controversy, sometimes in court - mostly depending on their ethnomusicologists. Here in Maine one of the people supporting the return of folk music to the public domain was Sandy Ives - he actually shows up in one or two fantasy stories set in the United States, including one by Manly Wade Wellman 
