> 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.