Copyright and Fostex

I was looking at the Soundtrack to Local Hero, and something struck me. The copyright data for the album is incorrect, and actually fraudulant in some jurisdictions.

The songs for the album were written and performed sometime in the early 1980’s – about 1982/3. There is one song that was listed as being recorded in 1982, however the remainder of the songs are listed with a Copyright and Performance date of 1998. I find this rather strange personally.

Sure, the album was remastered in 1998, but the original music was written and recorded in the early 1980’s – about 15 years before. It can be argued that re-mastering the CD effectively extends the copyright on the performance, but it does not extend the copyright on the actual music.

Copyright in some jurisdictions lasts from 25 years from when the work was done. In others it is 90 years after the death of the last author of the work. So by not including all the details you can effectively extend copyright a few years in some jurisdictions.

Fostex.

I did some more work on the Fostex 8 track digital recorder. This is a nice piece of equipment that cost about US$50,000 about 10 years back. Yesterday I was able to confirm that there is an internal fault in the machine. this is a 6U box that is rather heavy running multiple processors, FPGA IC’s and lots of DSP. As nice as it is, I suspect it is fairly well un-repairable. The only part I could think of that could have failed is surface mount and does not look damaged. I wonder if that is faulty… Is it worth finding out?