Kahle v. AshcroftWrathChild America - 3d
originally submitted by Dave Fancella:
In the early '90s there was an overnight sensation band called Wrathchild America that did a couple of records, changed their name, and ground their way to obscurity, ultimately breaking up. 3d is their seminal work, merging jazz and heavy metal (and other genres) into a working style that just, well, works.
Stifled uses
Dave Fancella:
Well, when I was broke I had sold my CD to buy food. It was already out of print. Later on, when I was doing better, I couldn't find it anymore. I searched for several years, even looking on eBay from time to time, and it just wasn't available. I managed to contact Brad Divens, the former bass player for the band, and he indicated he was no longer the copyright owner and couldn't authorize me to obtain it by any means, nor could he provide me his own work. I tried contacting the record company (the copyright holder) and was told that if it's out-of-print, that means I can't have it. They also wouldn't authorize me to obtain it through any download service that may exist. I did use Napster (it was before their Final Judgement) to assemble all of Wrathchild America's previous works together, but it wasn't exactly legal (even though it was a common practice on Napster to get out-of-print stuff). Ultimately, I got lucky and found a copy of 3d on eBay and was able to finally obtain it. It was probably a 5-year search.
All I wanted to do was listen to it. The reason I think my story matters is because the only reason it was unavailable was because the record company made it unavailable, and in this day and age, there's really no excuse for that. With the internet as music distribution, out-of-print records are nothing more than artificial scarcity. Nothing earth-shaking here, I suppose.
Derek:
I was in the same vote, as I to was trying to find 3D for many years...I tried ebay and found a couple copies but no credit card or knowledge of ebays payments. So finally I bought a copy on tape and had a buddy copy it to disc and tried enhancing it...it sounded like crap!!! So a year later I bought a computer and it took me 1 1/2 weeks to finally download it from Kazza lite, and now I've got a great copy of a band I've missed for years...