Lawyer Article

This article is reprinted with permission from Legal Times.

This article was published in the August 8th edition of Southeast Tech Wire.

When copyright owners stop selling older works, maybe pirates deserve some legal cover.

Excerpt
Bob Wills was a true giant among American musicians. His Texas Playboys band not only defined Western swing but exposed rural audiences to a vast range of musical styles by amalgamating superb renditions of hot jazz, slow blues, hillbilly fiddling, pop crooning, folk songs, big-band arrangements, mariachi, polkas—indeed, just about everything short of grand opera. In the 1930s and 1940s, Wills' eclectic concerts, broadcasts, and recordings exemplified the essence of America's diverse culture. His collected work is a national treasure.

Modern enthusiasts can fully appreciate the magnitude of Wills' achievement only by hearing a wide array of his hundreds of records. Yet the only way to do that today is to seek out imports from England (a 109-cut four-CD set on the Proper label) or Germany (all 300 sides from his prime years on 11 Bear Family CDs). Here, in Wills' own country, his work is relegated to skimpy compilations that barely suggest the depth of his art.

Classical buffs fare no better when they try to deepen their historical insight. In the 1940s the brash energy and excitement of American orchestras—including Fritz Reiner and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Dmitri Mitropoulos and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, and Artur Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra—offset the refinement of European ensembles and substantially advanced the evolution of modern style. Yet you'd never know it from current domestic CDs. All were Columbia artists, but Sony, the inheritor of that extensive catalog, has reissued only a handful of that wealth of recordings and apparently plans no further releases. Dozens, though, are available on the French Lys label.

Why should Americans have to turn to Europe to recoup our own cultural heritage? As Wills might have said, "Somethin' ain't right."

That "somethin'" is copyright law.

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