A short about copyright and how it can suppress content. I have a friend (who I will not name or highlight here for reasons that will become clear) who, among other things is a music collector.

He recently pinged me to tell me that he'd made an amazing find: an extraordinarily rare record that was recorded in the decades ago by a certain artist. This is an artist who is really only known in niche circles, for helping to "invent" a genre of music, but is not widely known

It had been widely believed (including by me) that this artist's first recording was a few years later, but my friend had found an interview in an obscure magazine where the artist mentions a different recording as his first, a few years earlier.

I'd never heard of it before, and it appears that the record is extremely rare. My friend was aware of only one copy sold in the previous decade (and he follows these things closely). So when one went up for sale, he pounced.

The recording was so obscure that in the interview, the musician himself mis-named the song that is on the actual record (it's close, but the artist uses a line from the chorus as the title, rather than the actual title on the record)

My friend paid notably more than your yearly Spotify bill to get this one record and its 2 songs. He then put both of them on YouTube, noting that the songs appear to be totally unavailable online (and... almost totally unavailable offline) & he thought people should hear them.

The songs are an amazing bit of history, and demonstrate this artist's earliest works (they're also quite good, in my opinion). But... it sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out the copyright situation.

And... in the end, I honestly couldn't tell you. It's likely that the songs are technically still covered by some copyright, though it's possible they are not for a bunch of complex reasons regarding both how music copyright works & issues with copyright of works published abroad

But the end result is that I won't point you to the songs on YouTube, because I'm worried that it would lead to my friend getting in trouble for the crime of... helping people hear an artist's work that is otherwise unavailable.

And I am greatly troubled by this. I get that there are projects (like those by the Internet Archive) to make these kinds of works available. But my friend should be able to do the same thing as well. Having this recording online is not harming the artist in any way.

In fact, it might bring renewed interest in that artist's works. But... copyright law basically doesn't care about that at all. I don't want my friend to get into trouble & and it's ridiculous that copyright law says he might.

And, of course, thanks to the CASE Act becoming law, the risk to my friend is now even greater. Copyright like this is the opposite of what we are told it is supposed to do. And the CASE Act makes it even worse. /end