I managed to download a lot of Honking Duck content for my own personal interest. I am not yet certain how much I have actually got, as the old site layout had many tracks catalogued under each and every name on the label of a record e.g. Uncle Dave Macon and his Fruit Jar Drinkers with Sam McGee might have appeared under U for uncle; D for Dave; M for Macon and also McGee etc. etc..... The same file downloaded each time.
I was in the process of converting the file codes to actual song names and renaming the files I had downloaded when I discovered that the site had been sabotaged. Because of the complications above, I don't yet know what, if anything, I have missed.
The newer layout of the site, with a better search facility for songs, displayed details about the recordings more understandably than the earlier Flat File layout, but is more cumbersome to navigate, so instead of just loading a page for the letter A, you have to load each song separately before you can read the recording details.
If I can save anything worth saving, I will do so, but that doesn't solve the problem that an incredibly useful source for musical research has been crippled by petty bureaucracy, presumable by people who actually couldn't care less about any of it.
Do any of you know - is this patricular Copyright Law one specific only to a particular US State, or is it something which would prevent somebody in the England or other non-USA parts of the world from opening a Mirror Site with the same basic content?
Geoff the Duck
Still Quacking, but not Honking.