European copyright law for recordings differs from the U.S. law — in Europe, artists‘ music falls into public domain after 50 years. This has opened up a small industry in the EU of bootleg recordings — meaning that anyone can legally press and sell CDs or digital albums of Barbra Streisand's early tracks which appeared on Columbia Records.
If you take a quick look at Amazon.co.uk's digital music albums, there are hundreds of Streisand albums being sold for £9.99 or less which are comprised of tracks from 1962's I Can Get it For You Wholesale up to 1965's My Name is Barbra album.
Most of these albums contain previously-released material that many Streisand fans already own on CD. In fact, none of the tracks being sold include anything new or unreleased (with a few exceptions, below) and all of these recordings are readily available officially from Barbra's record company, Columbia Records, as a CD or even digitally at iTunes or Amazon.
Finally, many of these digital albums have very bad artwork, have re-ordered the tracks, and provide no background, history, or context for the tracks they've included.
There are two Streisand CDs released in recent years that have garnered the attention of Streisand fans ... Since both albums took material from this website freely, without offering credit (and ignoring my copyright!) I am not a fan of these albums. European copyright may allow them to repackage previously-released Streisand tracks, but my words are copyrighted here.
A dictionary definition says:
A bootleg recording is an audio or video recording of a performance not officially released by the artist or under other legal authority.
The producer of this CD copy-and-pasted my text from this website as the liner notes. I received no credit nor payment. The producer overstated this CD's legitimacy and quality to fans on Facebook, confusing them into thinking this was an official CD, released by Barbra Streisand herself and Columbia Records.
The producer took the tracks traded online by fans, put them through Pro Tools software, stole my words, appropriated artwork and created this CD.
Don't give this man your money.
Again, these albums have recycled (a) previously-released tracks from Barbra's official Columbia Records tracks which have become free due to European copyright laws, and (b) previously-traded-for-free fan tracks from the RCA Demo and Barbra's live performance at the Bon Soir.
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