A music archive regarded as one of the most important collections from the golden age of rock – thousands of tapes and videos featuring such artists as Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Fleetwood Mac – is at the centre of a legal dispute in which Keith Richards and Pete Townshend could be called to testify in a Manhattan courtroom.

The dispute focuses on Wolfgang’s Vault, a concert-streaming service and memorabilia marketplace that owns the archives of Bill Graham, a rock promoter without whom the 60s music scene in San Francisco and New York might have looked very different.

At issue is whether the company has the right to stream thousands of archived concert films and music recordings. In a case brought by publishers contesting the copyright, the Rolling Stones and Who musicians, along with David Byrne of Talking Heads, are set to testify in the coming weeks.

The case reaches back into a famous era of rock. The material was amassed by Graham, who ran the Fillmore theatre in San Francisco – venue for acts such as Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane – and later the Fillmore East in New York.

Graham is regarded by many as the original rock promoter. He put on arena shows and developed the T-shirt merchandising business. Townshend once described him as “one of the great mavericks who redefined what freedom really meant in the US”.

Graham preserved merchandise and memorabilia from concerts, including T-shirts, posters, tickets and backstage passes, and also kept the audio and video recordings of many performances. Over his career, he may have staged as many as 35,000 shows. The Wall Street Journal called the stash “the most important collection of rock memorabilia and recordings ever assembled”.

Graham died in a helicopter crash in 1991; a decade later, the entire Bill Graham Presents archive was purchased for $5m by the Minneapolis entrepreneur Bill Sagan. But neither Sagan nor the seller, the radio giant Clear Channel, realised the archive contained a treasure trove of live recordings.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Keith Richards performs in Chicago in 1979. Photograph: Paul Natkin/Getty Images

Sagan then set up Wolfgang’s Vault as a marketing and streaming site, now at the centre of the dispute.

The National Music Publishers Association claims Wolfgang’s Vault has profited “in large part because of the significant use of unlicensed music”; in a counterclaim, Sagan claims he is “being forced to choose between depriving the music-loving public of the inimitable collection, or selling the assets to its member publishers at a steep discount”.

The recordings were made legally but distributing them without various permissions and revenue-sharing agreements is problematic. Part of Sagan’s defence is to cast doubt on artists’ copyright registrations, which is when his legal representatives began requesting depositions, which Richards and Byrne have so far resisted.

Complicating the situation are the songwriters’ own legal tangles, which in the case of the Rolling Stones means they do not own the rights to many of their early compositions. Neither the band’s representatives, nor Wolfgang’s Vault, returned requests for comment.

The Hollywood Reporter found that in the case of Townshend’s publishing rights, copyright registration could not be found. That was countered with the argument that registration wasn’t necessary because the Who’s songs were foreign works.

But a source familiar with the dispute said that only the size of the catalogue makes the case unusual. In every other respect it’s a simple case of copyright infringement. “There’s only so long you can get away with, ‘hey, it was the 60s and this was rock’n’roll in Frisco’. This was still a business in the 60s, and the law was still the law in the 60s. This can’t just be live and let live because it was the 60s in San Francisco, or anyplace else,” said the source.

But with the music business beginning to recover from the disruption of the digital era, rock fans will be hoping that performances by artists including Bob Dylan and Bob Marley, and concert tapes that include the last ever show the Sex Pistols performed with their original line-up, will not simply disappear altogether.

Among the gems is a recording taken from Led Zeppelin’s first US tour, in 1969 – when the band was opening for Country Joe & the Fish – which finds lead singer Robert Plant chatting amiably to the audience before he developed into a priapic rock god.

But after years of losses and piracy, music copyright holders may be in no mood to compromise. It was recently revealed that Alphabet, the owner of YouTube, which is now the largest streamer of music, pays copyright holders less than the tiny but vibrant vinyl record reproduction industry.

None of which diminishes the singular achievement of Graham, a German immigrant who, aged four, fled the Nazis in 1939 and, by some accounts, walked from Paris to Marseille before eventually reaching the US.

Early in his career managing the Fillmore, he booked the shows, took tickets at the front door, cleaned the bathrooms between sets, placed a mirrorball over the audience, and put a barrel of apples by the entrance to the ballroom with a sign that read, “Take One, or Two”.

Graham brought the Doors and Jimi Hendrix to San Francisco for the first time and saw an opportunity to bring the second wave of the British invasion to California. After booking the Who to play the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, he invited Cream to play six nights at the Fillmore. The band didn’t have enough songs, forcing them to extend what they did have, giving them a name for virtuosity.