except that at least on torrent sites only the popular torrents stay alive. that's not helpful. what we really need is a digital library of congress, funded by taxes, where at least every publicly performed work should be uploaded. the internet archive is a good start, but they can only take stuff that they are allowed to. they should really be able to take everything and make it accessible for a fee and free once the copyright expires. the problem is that greed of the publishers prevents that, hence i think a mandatory system would be better.
Private trackers have incentives to seed poorly-seeded torrents, like discounted/free leeching or double seeding credits. Although I agree with the general sentiment.
> They don't even know exactly which rights they hold.
To be fair, having worked for a company that was dealing with music licensing and having to investigate how to put stuff into a coherent format ... I'm not entirely surprised. Things like Dave (Eurythmics) Stewart having 10[1] different names (because it'd been recorded differently by different companies / publishers / etc.) (but they all have to resolve to him), restrictions like "Europe but not Germany for the 1993 version of song Y", and the whole difference between mechanical, master, print, performance, sync licenses etc. Spent 4 months working closely with a licensing veteran but was still utterly baffled by the time I quit.
[1] I forget exactly how many but IIRC it was into double figures.
