Who Owns the Work?
I’ve been listening of late to the new Beatles album, “Love.”
Or is it the Giles and George Martin album?
If you’re not up to speed on the whole controversy, you might want to start at the Wikipedia article about the album: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_(The_Beatles_album)
To see the comments on Amazon, you would think that the Martins should be burned at the stake. Me, I’m looking at this from several different points of view (not unusual for me).
As a Beatles fan, of the moderate variety, I’m intrigued by the concept of the album, and happy that the project was approved by the surviving Beatles as well as representatives for George and John. I like some of the new mixes very much (indeed, I’d say it would be interesting to hear more!).
Wearing my librarian hat (NOTE: A librarian hat gives one the appearance of a severe bun, but it’s actually a wireless headset and bunkum detector), I am intrigued by the intellectual property issues. After all, George Martin had some level of intellectual contribution to the original recordings, although it’s not a role that is usually spotlighted in traditional library cataloging Why should he not create a new product from the source material he has?
The other Libraryland issue related to this is how one could apply the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model to this album. FRBR is a way of thinking about the relationships between different creative efforts and the people, companies, families, and other entities who create, modify, and adapt those works. Usually, these relationships are fairly clear; but thinking about how to represent mashups, remixes, and other types of repurposed material starts to curve your mind back on itself.
If you’re curious about FRBR, this is a good introduction, about as nontechnical as I am aware of.
