the mystery of capitalism: why capitalism triumphs in the west and fails everywhere else by hernando de soto can very nearly be summed up in two words: property rights. more specifically, the formal recognition of property rights that allows property to take on value above and beyond its physical manifestation.
one question it brought to mind for me is whether it is possible that our current copyright system, with no registration necessary, is really stifling the value of so-called intellectual property. what is something like the broken record by twink, if not something built in an extralegal framework? (assuming that they haven’t really tracked down the copyright holders of the “hundreds of vintage children’s records.”)
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Okay, copyright is a very complicated issue. I'm not an attorney but I have some expertise as I have read several books on the subject. I'll try to do a very brief summation.
Basically, if the records were published before 1978 (and most were, since the golden age of children's records was roughly 1946-1970) and did not have a copyright statement on them, as required by copyright law, then the music is in public domain.
The music publishing is a separate issue, but if the songs are registered (though many childrens records used public domain songs like Old McDonald Had A Farm), they can file a mechanical license and pay the publishing royalties to the music publisher, currently about nine cents per song used, per CD. Well, there are a lot of little extenuating things, but that's basically it.