Recordings from the early days of stereo are now coming into the public domain, because certain European countries have a copyright term of 50 years for master rights in sound recordings. (The compositions themselves are often already in the public domain, so master rights are the main concern, not mechanical rights.)
QuestionCopyright.org has identified a donor with an extensive collection of such recordings on CD and LP, who has them already catalogued in an electronic database with the date and location each recording was made. A preliminary examination of the database indicates that between 5,000 and 10,000 individual pieces of music could be released to the public. The donor is willing to make the collection available for this purpose.
The Stereo Public Domain project intends to release these recordings and use them as a lever: after putting them online, we'll encourage their re-use by artists, music educators, and others; use them to encourage the release of more recordings from other collections; use their spread to help find funding for musicians to make new recordings under free licenses; and use them to help strengthen opposition to a proposed extension of EU copyright terms that would take such recordings out of the public domain.
Data Hosting:
The Internet Archive (archive.org) has expressed interest in hosting the data, and in making it as widely available as possible. They may also be able lend hardware, such as portable hard drives, to help with transferring the data from the donor to their servers.
Legal research:
Some legal research is needed to determine exactly how the recordings can be released, due to the complexities of international copyright law. For example, the date and location the recording was made matter, but the location of first publication may also matter in some cases. We will make the output of that research public, so other people do not have to repeat that work for their own collections.
Effects:
The release of such a large amount of classical music could have significant effects on music education and on artists who incorporate music into their own works: filmmakers, playwrights, musicians and other performers. It would reduce or eliminate rights clearance issues in many situations, and simultaneously help develop a new constituency for copyright reform — a large group of users suddenly more aware of what copyright restrictions have been preventing all along.
We'll need those constituencies, because there is already legislation in the Europe Parliament (see the references) to extend copyright terms for sound recordings, making future projects like this one impossible. These recordings are meant to be used by European constituents and institutions to influence their Members of the European Parliament, to postpone or defeat such legislation. The longer we can delay that legislation, the more recordings there will be time to release. That in turn makes the negative side of the law much more apparent, because the new term lengths would be taking away something people actually have, rather than depriving them of something abstract that they haven't touched yet.
Specific outputs:
References: