Off topic, but maybe of some interest about music ownership. The Internet Archive has a problem from a program trying to digitize existing 78 rpm recordings. The Great 78 project. It might be found it owes $700 million for trying to do so. The second article from Rolling Stone has more details and is more sensibly arranged article.
Labels push to spike cost of Internet Archive fight over old 78s.
arstechnica.com
Major record labels have sued the Internet Archive for $621 million over thousands of old recordings, raising the question: Who owns the past?
www.rollingstone.com
This rings a bell from old books. Google, Microsoft and various other bodies digitised vast amounts of public domain books from important libraries several years ago. Every so often I'm looking for one of those books. They aren't available from the places that did the digitisation.
Why?
Well, some invisible company started selling copies on Amazon. So they get taken down from public domain. Go buy one of those books, and you will see the library's and Google's stamps on the opening pages. So the libraries let the companies scan them to be made public and now you have to buy the very copy that was made for that purpose.
Yet some in-copyright books that accidentally got scanned in those sessions are still available from Google Books et al.
These things are all a matter for the law. The timings when items go into the public domain, in the US, are different in guidelines ("70 years from the recording date", I've seen in various places, but it's not true!). The same applies in other countries, and in some places copyright is for shorter periods.
I followed the lawsuits and issues with the IMSLP, and the hoops they had to jump through for printed music and some recordings. It may be that the 78 archive could learn from that experience, or that IMSLP would be a better home (it has the agreements in place) for such a project.
Ultimately, the copyrignt laws have to be made fairer. There should be strict limits for everything (perhaps exceptions where an item is inextricably linked with a company?) but there is no reason why White Christmas, the example they give, should stay in copyright for ever. Copyrights and patents are themselves really a kind of licence to allow the maker to gain appropriate income. Not their estates in perpetuity, nor corporations who may have gained the rights many years after publication and have no real link to the works.
At the same time, those estates and corporations need certainty over what they actually own and have rights to. I'm not sure that's the case at the moment, either.