20 CD's Of WWII Broadcasts Available!!!
 

I just purchased, from Half Priced Books, a collection titled "The Greatest Conflict" "News From The Front Lines of WWII." This set contains 20 cd's of original broadcasts from the frontlines of WWII as well as radio shows and commercials. The first couple of cd's were approximately 1hr. long so....I'm guessing there is probably 20 hours, give or take an hour or two, of great stuff here. I would love to share this with this great community but frankly do not know how I would go about doing it and most importanatly can I leagally??????

Give me some feedback guys on if I can and how. I appreciate all of the hard work each and every modder does for this terrific series as well as all of the help I have received from this great community and would love to share this set with everyone who wants it. :up:

A legal minefield :nope::nope::nope:

It all depends on the copyright laws of where you are. Most western countries, though, have similar principles underpinning their copyright laws.

With commercially released recordings (recordings an individual can buy for their own personal use, such as Cds, videos, DVDs etc), there are several copyrights involved:

a) the mechanical copyright owned by the original maker of the recording - in the case of a CD, the people who made and released the cd - NOT THE PEOPLE INVOLVED IN THE ORIGINAL RECORDING. There are, in some countries, time limits to these rights, but the minimum tends to be 50 years from initial release of the cd one buys.

b) the material which has been recorded may well also be subject to copyright. Music tracks certainly are. The actual performer(s) have a residual copyright in their original recordings, as do the composer(s), lyricist(s) and original publishers of the song. Again, most copyright laws have time-limits on these rights, but you're looking usually at 50 years after the original recording was made for the performers rights and, perhaps, 70 years after the death of the composer / lyricist.

c) for speech items, either the News organisation, or the writer ( sometimes both) hold copyright on everything they write for broadcast. e.g. The BBC owns copyright of all it's radio broadcasts from 1923 to date - even unscripted, on-the-spot reports from War Correspndents. Broadcasting organisations sometimes release material for inclusion in such compilations as you found, but they license their copyright solely to the producer(s) of the compilation ( and receive money for it.).

Sorry to bear bad news. The simple fact is that music recordings will eventually come into the Public Domain and be free of any copyright restrictions, but not until at least 50 years after their first release - and there's still the problem of the much more recent mechanical copyright on the compilations you've found. The news and other spech content in the compilations will have been licensed and, as far as I'm aware ( I work for the BBC ) there is no limit as to how long broadcasters can hold copyright on their material.

Some of the material on the 20 CDs may be out of copyright, but the only way to be sure is to check each one in great detail. HAving been involved in some copyright issues in the past I know what a long and maddening process this can be.

Thanks for the reply Von Manteuffel. I appreciate your expert advice and it sounds as though I might have over stepped my bounds here. I definitely do not want to become a criminal as far as copy rights are involved or in any other way for that matter but I really wanted to share this stuff since I cannot or do not know how to mod these great sims and am aware as to how much each of us enjoy this game and want realism to the max. Again thank you for your imput and good hunting!

Sorry all. Maybe you can do a Google search or check your local Half Priced Books and stumble across this truly great selection. I'm sure alot of this stuff is in the CBS, Radio Honolulu and many other mods.

Jimbo :roll:

I just love the RMAA, there such fantastic individuals :down: