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Posted: |
Nov 28, 2004 - 4:49 PM
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By: |
Anteeru
(Member)
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Hello, all.
I don't know if you all know the German label "Membran", that offers "Original Soundtracks" for unreached cheap prices, but for those of you who bought CDs of that particular label or considered doing so, the following excerpt from an article of the German filmmusic site cinemusic.de could be quite of interest, especially for the folks at FSM, if they did not already get attentive. The translation from German to Englisch was made by myself so please excuse flaws of language or some mistkes:
From the Article
"The Membran Odyssey"
by Stefan Schlegel
put online by cinemusic.de on October 31st 2004:
"[...]The whole thing started in mid-March, when the hamburgian label Membran, actually even running its own internet site (www.membran.net*), released 60 American soundtracks at a single blow, of which almost all had already been released by other labels the years before and were all composed before 1954 – which means without exception all had more than 50 years behind them. From Erich Wolgang Korngold’s, Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk, Miklós Rozsa’s Plymouth Adventure and Madame Bovary, Alfred Newmans Dragonwyck and Prince of Foxes to Bernard Herrmann’s Beneath the 12-Mile Reef and Franz Waxman’s Sunset Boulevard everything of distinction in the Golden Age was featured. So, for the first time a label in a rude and obvious way has tried to bring CD-copies of already available CDs on the market officially and not just behind the back. This is something completely new within the soundtrack scene, something that never occurred before even on German labels like Tsunami or Tickertape, which at least did not produce bootlegs from CDs of other labels.
The major affected ones are first of all FSM (Film Score Monthly) and SAE (Screen Archives Entertainment), because of 10 CDs of each, which were released by them in the past four years, Membran-CDs do exist that are exact copies of these. Of course certain other labels like Rhino, Prometheus and Varèse as well as Tsunami and Tickertape are affected, too. In three cases even the inexpressibly Leroy-Holmes rerecordings, which were made by the United Artists record label in the 70ies, were used, but without making that noticeable on the cover or somewhere else. Here it’s also pretended that we are dealing with “Original Soundtracks”, that are none – even using the covers of the original LP!
In addition to that there are also bootlegs of bootlegs, which were available on CD some years ago, Newman’s Wuthering Heights and Hell and High Water for instance. And all that stuff can be released and offered here in Germany apparently completely legal. You really have to marvel, while there are big cheers about CD piracy in the media in this country, in case of these CDs, nobody’s interested in where the material comes from.
While FSM and SAE for example equip their CD-Releases with lavish booklets, restore the master tapes excellently and in addition to that have bought the licenses from big companies like Turner or Fox, Membran just copies these original CDs, adapts the covers and sets a gray graphic around it showing a film strip and a film roll. On the appendant plastic slipcase supplementary Chinese signs were added to cause more confusion, so no one is supposed to discover, where the CD was produced. Also a new own Booklet has been made with little text on two sides each – in German and in English language.
Obviously Membran relies on the law, that all this music gets public domain after 50 years, what as a matter of fact is not the case in Germany at all, for the copyright on film works and everything related to them drops after70 not 50 years in the European Union (E.U.) to which Germany belongs.
Apart of that the scores were never released on any sound medium in the 40ies and 50ies, but (in best cases) in the last few years – that means that the 50 year-long copyright protection for sound media by no means droped out, if the music was released on CD for the first time in the 90ies by SAE or FSM.
By the way: In pretense Membran also mentions an address in Athens with a phone number on the backside of the CD, so a layman is supposed to believe that the CD was produced in Greece. But Greece also belongs to the European Union and has to keep the 70 years copyright protection, too. Membran pretends just to be a distributing label with address in Hamburg. But anyone in the soundtrack community, who has a little knowledge, will call that whole game ridiculous. [...]"
Those of you capable of reading and understanding German - the complete article can be read on:
http://www.cinemusic.de/rezension.htm?rid=5053
Thx,
Matthias
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*Reedited by user
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