WILCO PAYS UP FOR SPYCASTS

Critics and fans just about dei­fied singer Jeff Tweedy and his alt-​​country band, Wilco, when the group released its album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in 2002. But now, on the cusp of Wilco’s next mirac­u­lous release, a small British label has forced Tweedy to fork over tens of thou­sands of dol­lars for ques­tion­able sam­ples that gave his pre­vi­ous star-​​making record its title.
In 1998, London-​​based Irdial-​​Discs put out a four-​​CD col­lec­tion of broad­casts from so-​​called “num­bers sta­tions” — mys­te­ri­ous short­wave trans­mis­sions, allegedly sent by the worlds’ intel­li­gence agen­cies, of monot­one read­ers spew­ing alphanu­meric streams. On the first of the discs, a woman in an inde­ci­pher­able accent — a Mossad agent, accord­ing to leg­end — keeps repeat­ing three words: “Yankee … hotel … fox­trot.“
It’s the same record­ing that loops for a minute and a half dur­ing “Poor Places,” the 10th track on Wilco’s 2002 album. After a two-​​year legal fight, Tweedy agreed in an out-​​of-​​court set­tle­ment to give Akin Fernandez, Irdial’s owner and sole employee, a sub­stan­tial roy­alty for the record­ing.
Fernandez is trum­pet­ing his vic­tory as a “clas­sic David and Goliath con­fronta­tion.” But copy­right lawyers and intel­lec­tual prop­erty activists aren’t so sure. How exactly, they’re won­der­ing, does a guy get own­er­ship over some­thing he taped off of the radio?
My Wired News arti­cle has some par­tial answers — and some back­ground on the enig­matic “num­bers sta­tions.“
THERE’S MORE: Chris Smolinski runs a “num­bers sta­tions” super­site, Spynumbers​.com. Simon Mason offers excerpts from his book Secret Signals: The Euronumbers Mystery here. And some good arti­cles about the broad­casts are here, here, here, and here.
AND MORE: This is where you can find MP3s of Irdial’s spy­cast record­ings.
AND MORE: Over on the Irdial blog, owner Akin Fernandez defends his right to bring a copy­right suit against Wilco. And he pro­vides some insights into how he ulti­mately check­mated Warner/​Electric/​Atlantic, Wilco’s label, into a deal.

WEA is not going to fight a case to dimin­ish its own abil­ity to pro­tect its intel­lec­tual prop­erty; in other words, if we had lost the case it would have been a most unwel­come out­come for them and all of thier shell labels.
Anyone could have pointed to the cre­ated caselaw to defend the copy­ing of record­ings from CDs where the source sig­nal was not copy­rightable or not owned out­right by the recordist, mak­ing all the nature discs, CDs of prim­i­tive musics, and other audio exot­ica put out by labels copletely up for grabs by the sam­ple manip­u­la­tors.
There is no rea­son why we should not have brought this case. In fact, it would have been com­pletely wrong of us to know­ingly let this infringe­ment go unchallenged.

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