iefje wrote:As most fans know, these [Italian Fremus] releases were legal under Italian law at the time, but illegal elsewhere. Not long after, Italian law changed and now these two CD's, as well as The Shadows' "Apache - The Classic Collection" and "Atlantis - The Classic Collection" and Cliff Richard's "Wonderful Cliff - The Classic Collection" and "Live In Holland '64-'65" (12 tracks by The Shadows and 12 tracks by Cliff Richard & The Shadows) have now been placed under the banner 'illegal' and 'bootleg'.
The 1994 pressings of these releases are just as lawful today as they were in 1994. There is nothing illegal about them and they conformed - when released - to the copyright law of the territory where they were released. Their status has not been changed by subsequent legislative changes. Only a new pressing would fall foul of that. It was also perfectly lawful to import individual copies of those CDs, with the different and differing copyright requirements of other territories having no effect.
I also have in my collection a 4xCD box set of Beatles recordings. It is essentially the full contents of the LPs "Please Please Me", "With The Beatles", "A Hard Day's Night" and "Beatles For Sale", as well as about half of the "Help" album. It cost me about 12 Dm in 1991, at Kaufhaus in Trier, Rheinland-Pfalz.
It was a lawful release in Germany, where copyright law - at the time - applied differently as between German and foreign recordings (with foreign recordings having shorter copyright periods).
Both Germany and Italy have now aligned their copyright law with those in other EU countries, but I suggest that there was nothing inherently unreasonable in the former German and Italian copyright positions, and that neither was there anything the slightest bit unreasonable in the EU-wide fifty-year cut-off, which has now been extended to seventy years, presumably on the basis that the recording artistes are living longer than the artistes of previous generations.