The Recycled Radio show for October 25th is, at this writing, blocked from playing. The service I am using to stream the program sent the following message at 12:53 am this morning:
"Our automatic content protection system has detected that your sound "Recycled Radio 10 - 25 - 14" may contain the following copyright content: "Part 1" by Orson Wells, owned by Orange Leisure. As a result, its publication on your profile has been blocked."
At issue is the very beginning of the program which uses a clip of a few minutes duration of the 'War of the Worlds' broadcast of October 30, 1938. That broadcast, produced by the 'Mercury Theatre on the Air' and aired by CBS, has long been considered to be in the public domain. Copies of it may be freely downloaded or streamed from many websites such as archive.org; a webpage page dedicated to the Mercury Theatre; and etc. You Tube has it available from several different accounts. After getting the notice, I did a search and found that Orange Leisure sells a CD of the broadcast for $7.99. The disc offers the broadcast, plus a new additional track which I assume is the basis for their copyright claim.
Sadly, I have no paper work to back up my assertion that the Mercury Theatre broadcast is in the public domain, and I do not have the financial resources to be able to argue the matter if Orange Leisure continues to use their claim to prevent others from accessing the material. Of course, there are many publicly available sources to stream or download the entire' War of the Worlds' broadcast for free.
It's too bad.
It was a good show.
In the meantime, you can download my October 25th show from Google Drive at the following link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Ef_lS2knGHYTJCV2NKSUNZS1E/view?usp=sharing
If you have a google account, you should be able to stream it as well - on the menu bar at the top will be "Open", with a downward pointer. Click on the pointer, select "Music Player for Google Drive".
ADDENDUM - I forgot to mention one thing - in the notice from Soundcloud, as well as in the advertisement I saw for the Orange Leisure disc, they misspelled Orson Welles' name.
3 comments:
That is frustrating for you to say the least.
Outrageous! Orson Welles' "War Of The Worlds" broadcast is national treasure that should, after 76 years, be in the public domain. Are you certain it can't be rebroadcast from the original recording? If one company has cleaned out the static and added commentary, I understand their copyright protection, but to claim the original is surely legally questionable.
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