Yes, but it shouldn't have to. The youngest recordings we're talking about are ~65 years old. Few people even have gear to play the discs. Have the authors of these songs, the players on the recordings and the publishers of these discs not had enough of a chance to make their money? I'll take whatever judgement I can get in favor of the Internet Archive, but I think we should be aiming for a principled stance of enough copyright is enough!

I'll never forgive the copyright monopolists for the closing of what.cd. The world lost another library of alexandria that day. Don't care what the law says, how many of their "rights" were infringed, how much money it was costing them. I'll never forgive them for it.

Isn't that supposed to be the role of The Library of Congress?

> Regardless of copyright, it does feel like there is a place for archival indexing of historical recordings.

Does anyone have a link to such an index for what.cd? Just the following:

* album/track string plus minimal metadata (release date or whatever)

* hash for the track that goes along with that given piece of unique metadata

Such a thing is obviously on the right side of the law-- you can't reconstruct the copyrighted content from the hash or the title. And the name of an artist/track title isn't copyrightable.

That would be a valuable index that shows the exact state of what.cd's database before it was taken down. And I don't think it would be that large.

They can archive things without breaching copyright. Why not digitise your 78rpm copy of White Christmas, stick it in the vault, and publish it when the copyright expires?

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