[ ] Unauthorised but legal releases

Does a release simply being legal in some territories make it 'official'? I'm leaning towards no, because 'official' to me means the band and/or someone they have a contract with signed off on it.

An explanation from a label about such a release is posted here:

[forums.stevehoffman.tv] http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/let-them-eat-vinyl-are-these-legit-lps-rad...
"This release is a legitimate LP within the EU.

This LP’s release, sale and distribution is legal under the the provisions of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 Sections 181 and 206 in respect of qualifying broadcasts. A qualifying broadcast is defined in Statutory Instrument 2008 No 667 The Copyright and Performances (Application to other countries) Order.

It should be noted that, with reference to US wireless broadcasts by US artists made prior to the year set out in the Statutory Instrument 2008 No 667, certain copyrights remain unprotected prior to the given year, in this instance prior 1 January 1996. All performances on the LP are from wireless broadcasts made in 1992. This release is therefore wholly legitimate within the territory of the European Union."

The example I came across in queue is REM - Songs For A Green World.

If it's legal, why not? I don't think you can say it has to be governed by contracts directly with, or one step away from, the band. By the time rights have been bought, sold, re-packaged, re-sold, consolidated, transferred and novated - I'm sure lots of albums would fail that test.

Well, partly because our rules use the word 'official'. I didn't mean to say the signoff can only lead one step away. Yes, the rights can be signed over to someone who sells them and so on, but in that case there's still a trail leading back to the band.

If you look hard enough you'll find countries that offer little to no copyright protection, so you could argue that all bootlegs are legal somewhere. There's also the problem of recordings falling into the public domain after a certain amount of time. You'd basically be allowing a band's discography to become a Wild West over time.

I suspect that we already have some questionable releases in the database for the reasons Harry pointed out.

We have more than 22,000 releases queued but not yet ready for the live database, so we could delay a ruling on this issue until we clear those. But if we wanted a guiding principle now to minimize "Wild West"-ing the database, we could focus on only those entries that are legal in the band's homeland.