The Music Modernization Act is now US law and the final version of this bill, which seeks to fix a wide range of problems in music copyright law, is not perfect, but it’s better than the version we opposed a few months ago.

One portion of the MMA makes older sound recordings published before 1972 more available to the public. It expands an obscure provision of the library exception to US Copyright Law, Section 108(h), to apply to all pre-72 recordings. Unfortunately 108(h) is notoriously hard to implement. But, as we understand it, the MMA means that libraries can make some of these older recordings freely available to the public as long as we do a reasonable search to determine that they are not commercially available.

We took a look through our collections and found some vinyl rarities. Hopefully more to come. Enjoy!

