Talk:Sound recording copyright: Difference between revisions

• … that sound recordings did not gain federal copyright protection in the United States until 1972?

Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 17:26, 11 September 2025 (UTC).[reply]

Policy compliance:

Overall: New AFC draft moved to mainspace within the appropriate time; long enough. Sourcing is missing in at least five separate instances, although this has the appearance of an oversight that can easily be corrected. Earwig is returning some unusual hits, but again, this reads like an oversight; did you forget to use quotes or add sources at the ends of quotes? That’s what it looks like to me. The use of quotations in the headings seems to go against the MOS in my mind, although there might be exceptions that I am not familiar with here. @Voorts: I noticed the discussion about the title on the talk page. Has this been addressed or solved? Viriditas (talk) 21:47, 25 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In this case, I noticed that the URL rated with the highest similarity score is from Congress.gov, so it is in the public domain. A lot of the highlighted passages in the side-by-side comparison are actually formulaic legal phrases (e.g. “public performance right in sound recordings”, “copyright protection for sound recordings”) or titles of bills (“the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act”, “the Supporting the Local Radio Freedom Act (LRFA)”), which are not copyrightable. The longest highlighted passage is from 17 U.S.C. § 101.

Also, as for the quotation marks, I emulated the Terminology section of Copyright infringement, which does use quotes in the subheadings (“Piracy”, “Theft”). But I am open to changing them to italics if that’s more aligned with standard practice. Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 16:00, 2 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Qzekrom: “Wikipedia’s own rules require public domain material to be cited.” Can you add them please? Viriditas (talk) 19:23, 2 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Protection of sound recordings in various countries takes the form of either “copyright” (US, Canada, UK) or “related rights” (EU, Japan, etc.). We already have an article for Related rights; however it’s for a superset of these rights, including rights in unfixed performances or broadcasts and video fixations of them.

A number of secondary sources on EU law protecting performers’ and producers’ rights in phonograms refer to these rights as “copyright”, while others follow the EU directives’ related rights classification; some EU press releases also use the term “copyright”. Below is a sample of these sources:

“Copyright”:

“Related rights” or other terminology:

Despite these philosophical and conceptual differences, the laws in these countries work similarly whether they protect sound recordings under copyright or related rights. Should “Sound recording copyright” be treated as the WP:COMMONNAME for these rights, regardless of how they’re categorized? Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 20:40, 14 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don’t think this is really a COMMONNAME situation. I’m not seeing any source that uses the phrase “sound recording copyright” as a term of art. A title that would capture both copyright and related rights would be “Intellectual property in sound recordings“. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:07, 14 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You’re right, “sound recording copyright” isn’t a term of art, although “sound recording” is. However, WP:COMMONNAME means a commonly recognizable natural-language word or expression that indicates the subject of the article, not necessarily the n-gram that appears word-for-word in the preponderance of reliable sources. For example, we have Software copyright, but that doesn’t mean most papers would always refer to the concept using the phrase “software copyright”, but rather use phrases like “the copyright in a computer program” or “copyrighted software”.

The question I’m getting at is whether we can treat “copyright” as a common-enough term encompassing both copyright and related rights in sound recordings. This would be based on the fact that it is used in a lot of secondary sources even for jurisdictions that don’t call it copyright per se, as well as the jurisdictions that do call it copyright (I am treating each jurisdiction as a “point of view” for the purpose of aggregating sources). If so, I feel that “sound recording copyright” is a reasonable title for it, as it meets the other article title criteria (recognizability, naturalness, precision, concision, and consistency):

• Recognizability: The phrase “sound recording copyright” comes from the Unicode standard as the default name for the sound recording copyright symbol (℗).
• Naturalness: I think people are likely to search for this term, but I’m not sure if editors would naturally use [it] to link to the article from other articles.
• Precision: More precise than “Intellectual property rights in sound recordings”, for example. For example, although you can probably trademark a sound recording, this article is not about trademarks or patents.
• Concision: Admittedly, “phonogram” would be more concise than “sound recording”, but “Sound recording copyright” is still more concise than “Copyright protection for sound recordings” (which would be consistent with Copyright protection for fictional characters, for example).
• Consistency: Consistent with Software copyright, Software patent, Biological patent, Design patent, etc. (subject matter + type of IP)

If the title needs to be jurisdictionally neutral, then I’d suggest “Copyright and related rights in sound recordings” or “…in phonograms”. But that also brings up the question of whether we should treat “sound recording” or “phonogram” as the more common term for the type of work. Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 03:36, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]