SPYCAST STORY GETS STRANGER

The already odd story of a British record label suing the band Wilco over spies’ short­wave broad­casts just look a left turn into down­right weird.
As detailed below, Akin Fernandez and his London-​​based label, Irdial Discs, took the alt-​​country gurus to court for illic­itly using a record­ing, taken straight from the air­waves, of a woman repeat­ing the phrase “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” That’s the title of Wilco’s 2002 break­through album, and the band used a minute and a half of the tape dur­ing one of its songs.
Strange enough. But now, it’s unclear whether Fernandez even taped the “Yankee” short­wave broad­cast him­self. Simon Mason, a spy­cast enthu­si­ast and author of Secret Signals: The Euronumbers Mystery, said he gave Fernandez the cap­tured trans­mis­sion — one of many — in an infor­mal deal.
According to Mason, Fernandez asked him for his num­bers sta­tion col­lec­tion — much of which is freely avail­able online — when Fernandez was putting together the Irdial com­pi­la­tion. “I was happy to do so as I felt he was stick­ing his neck out and spend­ing his money on what I thought would be a very eso­teric col­lec­tion of about 300 boxed sets with a very lim­ited appeal, and that there was no money to be made on sell­ing them,” Mason recalled in an e-​​mail.
“All that money I could have made if I had copy­righted them!” Mason wrote. “Since I gave Akin the record­ings will­ingly for noth­ing, I don’t have any come back. But in hind­sight I would have come to some sort of deal that meant I would get a cut, but life is too short to get upset about it now.“
Mason may be main­tain­ing a Zen exte­rior. But some intel­lec­tual prop­erty lawyers are more than steamed at Fernandez for lay­ing claim to Mason’s record­ings.
“If Irdial sim­ply pub­lished some­one else’s record­ing ver­ba­tim, then under U.S. Copyright law, they don’t own any­thing,” EFF attor­ney Jason Schultz said in an e-​​mail.
“If any­one held a copy­right here, it would be Mason,” added Wendy Zeltzer, a fel­low at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
Fernandez’ admits that Mason was “one of the major dona­tors” to the Irdial set. But despite the familiar-​​sounding MP3 file on Mason’s web­site, Fernandez said “the record­ing used on Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was made by me.”

June 23rd, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.