The Beatles and the 50 year copyright rule | Page 2 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

More details and insight on the ongoing battle between Stargrove Entertainment and Universal + Sony in Canada over Stargrove releasing two Beatles albums containing material that has fallen into the public domain.

Two of the more interesting pieces of information in the Hypebot article

Thus, even though the recordings are in the public domain, suddenly Stargrove is blocked from releasing CDs with those recordings, despite the fact that CMRRA has always approved every other mechanical license request at the standard fee ($0.083 per song, per copy for songs less than 5 minutes). 

That’s such a negligible account it surprised me.

And on the matter of fake reviews of the two albums

Brian Greaves, an account manager at Universal Music Canada Inc., concocted negative reviews on Walmart’s website, complaining that Stargrove’s products were of poor quality. He encouraged other Universal employees to do the same and to help him with Universal’s “campaign” to discourage Anderson from distributing Stargrove’s CDs, stating that poor reviews would deter Anderson from distributing Stargrove’s products in the future. Walmart subsequently removed all the fake reviews from its site. Stargrove’s CDs had a low return rate: of the over 2000 Stargrove CDs sold, only one CD was returned.

An intriguing case.

Yeah it was meant to be amount. No idea where account came from.

I suppose the difference in this matter, and what has pushed Universal and Sony into action, is that its the regular commercial studio versions whereas the ‘I Saw Her Standing There ‘ and ‘Works in Progress’ compilations are filled with outtakes (the latter) and for ‘ISHST’ the 1962 BBC recordings, 10 Decca tracks (none that were included on ‘Anthology 1 ‘), rehearsals from the Cavern and some but not all of the Tony Sheridan numbers, some of which are not even the Beatles. The only two studio tracks are ‘Love Me Do ‘ and ‘P.S. I Love You which are now on a ton of albums. The sales market will be pretty small. With the two Canadian album you’re getting 20 proper Beatles tracks for CA$10, far less than what you’d pay for any of the official albums. The fake reviews highlight the efforts Universal went to try and put folk off, probably thinking and hoping Stargrove would roll over and not bother challenging two giants of the music industry.

Edit: Reading a review for the ‘I Saw Her Standing There ‘ album on amazon.com you find that the performance of ‘Medley: Kansas City /Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!’ is the incomplete recording with voice-over taken from the ‘Anthology’ documentary. Why not include the complete recording which surfaced a couple of years back? And can’t Apple block on it that basis? I have no idea how the copyright rule works.

Track 12 is a better-quality version of “Some Other Guy,” recorded September 5, 1962, followed on Track 13 by a short 59-second version of Leiber/Stoller’s “Kansas City ,” recorded the same day, which is partially obstructed by a Beatle apparently being interviewed (possibly George).

Here’s a strange oddity. On amazon.co.uk you can download every track from ‘Please Please Me ‘ for 79p each or the whole album for £5.49.  They are listed under the German version of the ‘Please Please Me ‘ album and were made available on the 1st July 2015. I wonder if Apple, Universal, Sony, iTunes and whoever else know and if they could even stop it. Is this another consequence of the copyright law – but then i thought that had been extended and covered material that had been officially released.

As far as i understand if a recording hasnt been released then the copyright remains with the original owners and i presume the law would cover the recording for a significant period of time upon release otherwise wheres the benefit for the group/artist. May as well not bother releasing it. So nothing changes in 2017 – but i very easily could be wrong.

We need someone to do the same as with ‘Revolution Take 20′.

I dont know about that, maybe its different for films or its because they’ve been reissued so many times. The music copyright was extended in late 2013 (i think) for all songs released in 1963 and onwards from 50 to 75 years.