Music
Universal issues copyright takedown notice for songs it doesn't own on R.E.M. archivist's blog
by Tyler Munro
June 7, 2012
Proving once again that the music industry barely understands the laws of copyright and ownership, archivist and collector Analog Loyalist says his R.E.M. project has been shut down… before it ever really started.
The idea behind the project is simple and completely earnest: to recover and digitally archive rare material by the band in a way that allows it to retain its original integrity. What this means is songs are sourced from vinyl and cassettes, many of which were free releases by the band. They’re cleaned up—not remastered—and paired with high resolution scans of their album art.
Universal has a problem with all of this. When Analog Loyalist ran his first post on R.E.M., posting 1981’s incredibly rare Cassette Set on one of his blogs back in October of 2011, he eventually received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice. This was 8 months after the post went up. He complied, sort of, and the entire incident has led to reservations about continuing the project on a larger scale. His R.E.M. cycle blog has two posts so far: one announcing the project and another, in light of these recent developments, about how it might not happen after all.
“I have been having some second thoughts about this endeavour,” reads a post written yesterday. “Namely, that R.E.M.’s IRS-controlled catalog is itself controlled by Universal, notorious for slapping down blogs and posts without mercy.”
The post continues.
“Tell me, what role does the IFPI (of which Universal is obviously a member) have to do with *unreleased* material recorded when the band had no record contract? These were demos *freely* given away by the band. On low-fi C45 cassettes. And the IFPI thinks it’s their business how?”
It goes on to write that while one of the songs on Cassette Set did eventually see a release as a B-Side, it was archived here as part of a freely available, long since out of print.
As Rolling Stone points out, this is something Analog Loyalist takes very seriously. In addition to his own blog, he runs similar projects for the Smiths and Joy Division/New Order, so it makes sense why he’d want to be careful about compromising himself legally. Or, as he writes, wasting his time “as a writer/archivist/engineer”.
Record labels: just because a band has broken up doesn’t mean they wont stop trying to exploit them.
