how does copying your record collection onto cassette and then digitizing those cassettes give you the digital rights to distribute that music for free? I’m sure there is some music in there that is public domain or uncopyrighted because of it’s rarity… but it looks like it is mostly transfers of records - many of which are available on cd or other digital release that pays royalties to the rights-holders…
This album for instance https://archive.org/details/Duke_Ellington_Tape_X5_The_Elegant_Mister_Ellington_Oct._4_1959_Berlin
is available on itunes right now…
https://itunes.apple.com/nz/album/the-elegant-mister-ellington/id721517746
People like you are why we can’t have nice things.
Duke Ellington is deader’n shit. He is in no state to care.
Yeah, I had seen this elsewhere as a collection of “early” jazz, which I took to generally mean pre-Swing era, e.g. Jelly Roll Morton and other recordings that had long since lapsed into the public domain (in the U.S.). Then I got in there and saw Charlie Parker, which I wouldn’t consider early by any stretch. I think most or all of the Parker recordings may be in the P.D. in Europe, so maybe that’s how archive.org justified it, or they figured that someone adding narration made it a derivative work or some such.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t buy those grey market/P.D. CDs from Europe (though sometimes you get what you pay for), but I’m still surprised that a group in the U.S. would post recordings that (aside from whether we think they should be or not) are likely still under copyright in the U.S.
What boggles my mind is the use of WAV for these downloads – why not use a lossless codec such as ALAC or FLAC and save everyone a bunch of bandwidth and storage expense?
For instance, I’ve got ~ 48 days of digital jazz. 95% of these tracks are 16bit/44.1KHz, stored as Apple Lossless files; the whole collection weighs in at a svelte 320GB. The Niven collection should easily shrink down to under 300GB using a lossless format. (Unless, perhaps, there’s so much noise that compression doesn’t help very much…in which case I’d pass anyway.)
Yes, this is probably as illegal as the Disneyland Memorial Orgy. I careth little. While it lasts, I’m bingeing on Benny Carter, Chick Webb & Eddie Lang. The Archive deserves our support as do the memories of our favorite undiscovered artists. Old Man Niven, as his students called him while sneaking smokes behind the band bldg, has seen his private documentarianism blossom as audible sprouts glorifying his ethereal memorial, where the music of the spheres serenades us all. Hey, there are literally dozens of us who have boxed-up mixtape collections in the basement. This man shared some of the most important 20th C art as a legacy to schoolkids, for free! There oughtta be a law…
I want a torrent file for the entire collection. Otherwise, how on earth is anyone going to actually download 691 separate cassettes worth of files? 
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