Guest - There is no mysterious sectret about it - it's well known that Celtic Music does own both legal rights and master tapes, which (at least in the controversial cases we're discussing here) were bought from Bill Leader when the latter's record company went bust.

There are two issues here:

• The moral one of refusing to release recordings for which there is some demand and which would benefit the recording artists by paying them some royalties. For people like Pete Coe who is pushing plenty of stuff out under his own label it doesn't matter too much: he's making a living and we can buy his music. For Nic Jones, it's far worse because of his inability to record and release new material. He makes no money and we don't get to hear his music. Legal, maybe, but still outrageous.
• The legal cases where breach of contract can be oved.

It seems that there is at least one strong legal case if Pat Cooksey has got his evidence right.

As for the CDR releases, it's all rather on the edge. With CDR numbers being untraceable, it's not easy to prove anything sufficiently convincingly to make a case. All you can sue for is provable financial losses, and as has been discussed above, the figures for each individual concerned may not be very much, while the legal costs of proof are high.

Anahata