Talk:Sound recording copyright

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Did you know nomination

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The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. You can locate your hook here. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Theleekycauldron talk 03:23, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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  • ... that sound recordings did not gain federal copyright protection in the United States until 1972?
  • Source: "Congress brought sound recordings within the scope of federal copyright law for the first time on February 15, 1972." (U.S. Copyright Office report, page 5)
Moved to mainspace by Qzekrom (talk). Number of QPQs required: 0. Nominator has fewer than 5 past nominations.

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

General: Article is new enough and long enough
Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
QPQ: None required.

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? Issues have been addressed. 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]
@Viriditas: 17 USC § 101 was already cited in footnote 2, but I noticed that quotation marks were missing. I've fixed that. Is there anything else that appears to lack a citation? Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 01:07, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Qzekrom: Yes, you are still missing citations throughout the article, from the second paragraph of "Terminology", sub-section "Sound recording", to the first paragraph of "History" sub-section "Introduction of sound recording copyright". It's also not clear if the material preceding the cite in the first section of "Exclusive rights" is sourced. The third paragraph in the "United Kingdom" sub-section of that same section also lacks sources. Viriditas (talk) 01:14, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I believe these concerns have been resolved with recent edits. Viriditas (talk) 21:47, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Voorts: I'm working towards closure. Do you believe the title dispute is significant enough to hold up this nomination from proceeding? Viriditas (talk) 21:47, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Viriditas:: No. Go ahead. voorts (talk/contributions) 21:54, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, Thanks. Viriditas (talk) 21:55, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
All outstanding issues have been addressed. I approve all hooks, although I think ALT0 is the most interesting. This article does a good job answering who, what, where, and when, but mostly avoids answering questions of "why" except for a few instances, and that bothered me. For example, why did it take until 1972 for sound recordings to receive federal copyright protection in the United States? Viriditas (talk) 22:57, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Article scope and terminology differences

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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]