Have a look at this story in Wired about the new round of copyright wars that the industry is finding itself in...
It is about how the Copyright Act in the US provides for the work to be able to be re-claimed from the record company or publishing company that it was sold to after a certain period of time. (56 years in the case of a copyright sold prior to 1978 and 35 years for a copyright sold during or after 1978).
Apparently the Eagles are planning to reclaim their records from WEA, and since they are managed by the extremely shrewd Irving Azoff, who would never do anything without there being a buck in it, you have to figure that there are going to be lots of bucks in it, even if he just sells the ownership of the exploitation company that he is building back to WEA.
Which by the way I would not be at all surprised at. I think this mainly because US capital gains tax law has a couple of strange twists in it for creative people who own their own copyrights.
Up until the second term of Pres Bush, songwriter owners of catalogues that sold their songs for a capital gain were taxed at the then marginal income tax rate, which was in the high 40's percent. That was fixed in Bush's second term to bring it in line with normal US capital gains tax which I believe is set at around 15%. It is now predicted by people I know in the US music business that at sometime in the next year or so capital gains taxes generally will be put up - the prediction is to 25%.
So if you were to be able to recapture a catalogue of material from the record company, put it into a web site sales environment, and thus provide a strong value adding component to the material and by doing that create a notional ratcheting up of value by about 1000% or so, and could then turn around and sell the same to the original record company, enabling them to save face, and enabling them to get their hands on what may become a useful tool to disrupting the control that Apple has on music distribution now, and furthermore you could do all this before an increase in capital gains comes in, you could make a considerable amount of money!
Watch this space...
