I just heard an interesting segment on NPR radio’s Fresh Air on Gospel Music Historian Robert Darden. He is an English professor at Baylor University and runs the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. Darden and his team are doing their best to hunt down gospel recordings from 1945 to 1970, restore them, and preserve a digital copy of them.
This sounds like a wonderful project and some of the clips of music played were fantastic. It is great that this preservation work is going on but I worry that the project will not be able to share the fruits of their labor widely.
In the interview Darden says he chose the period from 1945 to 1970 because it is the most “at risk” and speculated that perhaps 70% or more of the gospel recordings from this period are already lost. Older works which are out of copyright are not protected and thus can be easily re-released for the profit of anyone who thinks it will sell, such that a greater number of these very old works can be found. Much more recent works under copyright are not as difficult to find or are still in print.
However, the period from 1945-1970, Darden explains, contains a great many works which are probably still protected by copyright but which in many cases it is extremely difficult to hunt down the holder of the rights. He describes one case where, only after several years of hunting, they were able to find the owner of the license. In other cases, they never can be.
This is a classic example of the problem of orphaned works. I encounter this a lot as a history PhD student studying the 1930s and 1940s. There are a huge number of works out there of every form (texts, music, film, etc.) which are still protected by copyright but which are not in print. I can do almost nothing with these works because, even if I wanted to get permission to use them, the challenge of locating the owners of the rights is prohibitively difficult.
I very much hope that the next few years will see serious reforms of copyright laws which, instead of further restricting the creation of culture, promote its preservation and unleashes the possibilities of wider distribution of orphaned works.
For more info, pay a visit to Eldred.cc and consider supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation. See also the US government’s Orphan Works report, some developments in Congress. I am not sure what the most recent developments have been, the most recent thing I have seen on it is in this article at the EFF.