I couldn't agree more, but the fact remains that the law is on CM's side. They own the copyright and are entitled to stop someone else releasing it. Domino's release may have been a public service, and as I said in my previous post they hold the moral high ground, but that counts for nothing against the simple legal fact that CM's copyright has been infringed.

I could never understand Dave Bulmer's refusal to release any of the albums properly. Certainly a great deal of the catalogue was not commercial, but a number of them, including Bright Phoebus and Nic Jones's albums, would surely have have been commercially viable, even in the days of vinyl LPs which were quite costly to manufacture. It is now quite cheap to professionally reproduce CDs, and for those not expected to sell enough even to justify this, digital downloads cost very little to make available for sale, you no longer need a physical product.

CM is now apparently in the hands of Dave's son, who I believe is also a musician, and as a younger person hopefully has a better understanding of how to deal with the catalogue in the digital age. Done properly, I beleive it could be a commercially viable enterprise to make many of these important recordings available to the public, and to go some way to repairing the damage to his father's reputation. But we'll have to see.

Whether the artists will see anything is another matter. This has been gone over at length in the many previous threads. Legally, I believe the position is that the artists assigned their copyright to Leader (later acquired by CM) and may have no further claim.