There's a very good rundown on audio copyright law at
http://boingboing.net/2013/02/04/vinyl-vault-lights-fuse-on-cop.html.
Interpretation of copyright law can get very tricky and often the legal implications depend greatly on the willingness and aggressiveness of copyright holders in pursuing their right of ownership. When the laws of more than one country are involved, it gets even messier.
The fact is, whether forum participants like it or not, LPs and broadcasts are copyrighted and have ownership. Often, due to the age of the recordings, and successive mergers and acquisitions, ownership becomes murky and difficult to establish. However, the principle remains -- if you didn't write it or perform it, it's not yours to freely disseminate. In some cases, those owners are very tolerant or supportive of wider distribution of their material, as they may not have the means, motivation, or interest in doing so themselves. That's great -- but we don't always know ahead of time who will turn a blind eye and who will not.
Some copyright owners enforce their rights very strictly. Back in the 1990s, a major recorded music dealership got into very deep legal hot water with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, when the BSO learned that it was reselling CDs of historic BSO concert broadcasts on an import label. "Cease and desist" came into play, and I believe they were fortunate enough to avoid monetary damages due to quick cooperation.
While copyright laws are different for print and recorded material, similar principles still apply. I spent many years as a librarian at a Fortune 500 company and saw firsthand what happened when copyright was abused by rampant photocopying, and the full legal weight of a copyright holder came crashing down. You do NOT want to be on the receiving end of that ton of bricks!
I firmly believe we should continue to exercise great caution here, lest questionable activity show up on someone's radar. If this forum became a home for high quality digitalizations, the likelihood will increase that someone will come upon this forum and make trouble. More likely, if someone downloaded high-quality files here, offered them for resale for profit, and then was sued by the copyright holder, that owner would then trace back the source of the files to here.
Bottom line, as I stated before -- I don't want to lose this tremendous resource!
