Copyrights What are they?

[ajqtrz]

Here I'm going to talk about music copyright issues. The music you have is usually copyrighted for up to 32 years. Each copyright has 4 rights attached. They are:
1) Distribution
2) Reproduction
3) Broadcast/Performance
4) Application

1) Distribution. The owner of the copyright has the right to control where and how their work is sold.
2) Reproduction. The owner of the copyright has the right to control how and onto what formats their works are reproduced.
3) Broadcast. The owner has of the copyright has the right to control how their work is received by the audience.
4) Application. The owner of the copyright has the right to control to what their work is associated.

These are the four rights. The following is a short discussion of those rights with some observations.

1) Distribution: The distribution right may include reproduction rights within the needs of the distributor. For instance, how can you distribute a song digitally without creating copies of the digital record? The distribution rights usually include a whole bunch of restrictions, including the right to profit or not. Some distributions include or exclude the form of distribution, like "paperback rights," "movie rights' (which overlap with application rights), "hard cover" rights, and so on. This includes distribution of the written form of the music as well.

Take away: When you purchase a song you are buying the broadcast rights under very specific conditions, covered under broadcast rights below. You don't own the distribution rights so you can't copy and distribute the digital (or other) form of the music. If you give a copy of the song to a friend you are in violation of the copyright.

2) Reproduction. When you purchase a copyrighted work you are not purchasing the right to reproduce it in any form. You can display/broadcast it under most conditions, but even those have restrictions. Taking a picture of a work of art may not be a violation of the copyright, but hanging that picture of the work in your home, may be. Certainly making a copy of the song and giving it to a friend, is since you have reproduced and distributed the song. Those rights are not part of the purchase price. This includes the written forms of music as well as the actual recordings.

Take away: if you copy a song for backup your fine. But if you copy it for a "mix" and give that mix to a friend/relative/enemy/stranger you are violating the copyright. You cannot make copies of printed material for backup. Xeroxing a textbook is verboten. Even if it's cheaper than purchasing the book.

3) Broadcast/Performance. This includes display. In other words, if it's a picture you may display it but there are limits. You can't, for instance, use a projector to display the image on the side of your garage. You can't use a set of loud speakers over a certain wattage to let your neighborhood listen to the work. In music the rules are generally that you can't use more than 8 speakers, can't be a place of business (bars and restaurants in particular), speakers can't be over so man watts (each copyright service has it's own standards whiether it's BMI, PRS, ASCAP, or whatever). In any case, the intention is that you can't broadcast the music in a "public manner," "public manner" being as in a manner that the public can enjoy it without the copyright owner receiving his/her dues.

This right includes covering the song in a public place. Thus "cover bands" have to pay for the songs they cover.

Take away: You can't use background music at your rent party unless you pay for it. You don't have the right to play music at the park loud enough to cover the whole park. And if you are "covering" sombody's work, you had better be contacting ASCAP, PRS, or some agency to make sure you are paid up. (For the most part it's not that expensive, a couple hundred dollars a year for the rights to cover just about everything you can imagine -- a single fee with some restrictions usually does it).

4) Application. Application rights insure the work not become associated with things that harm the reputation of the work or the artist. A movie depicting extreme violence might not be a good match for Mary Poppins singing "A teaspoon of sugar makes the medicine go down," and thus, the owners of the copyright, not wanting the song associated with that kind of film, may not grant you the copyright.

Takeaway: Your grandfather loved the song "In the Heat of the Night" by Frank Sinatra. When he passes you wish to include that song as the background of his funeral DVD. The good news? You can! The bad news? It will cost you $50,000. (True story. We looked into it when a good friend of ours died. Yep, $50,000 to sync it to the DVD). Thus, most of the songs you hear in funeral DVD's is in violation of copyrights.

Finally, there are "fair use" exceptions. But they are very, very narrow. Education can sometimes get away with it. But non-profits? Hardly ever. The key to understand "fair use" is to understand the limited scope of the use and the limited amount of the material being used. The narrower these two are the more likely you are to be allowed under fair use.

In case you are wondering, I've had to know about this to protect my own music, which is still in use today. I don't make a whole lot on it, but some.

AJ

 

[Darielle]

The best thing to do, if you want to search for tunes, is to find tunes published before 1926. Then you don't have to worry about any of it and can modify it any way you like, or change the lyrics or whatever.

 

[Sir Squirrel]

How do bars get away with playing music? Or what about karaoke night?

 

[Iyapo1]

@Sir Squirrel
They pay a fee that gives them the right to play umpteen million songs The amount paid and the organization paid determines which umpteen million songs they can play.

 

[hvariidh gwendrot]

ascap licensing, bmi and if you have the radio turned up at a picnic and not making any money or profit, no fees need be paid (99.9% sure on the last item)

 

[OIM20]

if you have the radio turned up at a picnic and not making any money or profit, no fees need be paid (99.9% sure on the last item)

That's going to depend on the rights holder. Remember the big kerfuffle over the "Happy Birthday" song?

 

[BrinDarby]

@ajqtrz ,
Can you do that for rights of the purchaser ?

 

[ajqtrz]

That's going to depend on the rights holder. Remember the big kerfuffle over the "Happy Birthday" song?

Yes, provided your speakers are not at a certain wattage -- enough to insure a significant number of people outside those at your picknic can hear. In a home or business and are using more than 8 speakers and are having a party, you have to pay the rights -- the technical aspects of what constitutes "personal consumption" and "broadcast" can be pretty detailed.

AND, "Happy Birthday" has now been moved to public domain. Restaurants were sued over singing it to their clients as that was violating the performance rights.

How do bars get away with playing music? Or what about karaoke night?

Again, it's the amount of speakers and their size that determines if it's personal use or not. But if you are running a business that uses music in the background, from any source, including radio, and you "distribute" it around your building, you have to pay. Fortunately, it's just not that expensive. A few hundred dollars a year and you can pretty much forget it and play pretty much anything you like -- provided you've paid one of the big ones -- BMI, RIA (are they still around?), PRS, or ASCAP, for instance.

Karaoke is licensed in the same manner, but the fees are usually built into the price of the machine as it comes with certain songs. Not sure about Karaoke bars but probably they, too, pay the fee.

Here's a short synopsis of what you are purchasing when you purchase any copyrighted materials. If you are the consumer it is expected you will not copy and distribute (for fee or not) the work. You have the right to read/play the work for your personal use, which means placing it in a place where it seen/enjoyed by the public, or heard by a significant number of people is not allowed.
Software rights generally give you the right to make one "backup" copy for storage. You cannot install the software on more than one device unless it comes with "X number of devices" by design. You cannot, generally speaking, put it on a person's device who is not part of our business or household. So if you have MS Office 2016, 5 user licenses and say, 3 users in your office, you can't take them to the guy next door and put the "last two" on his office machines. The BSA (Business Software Alliance, of which my company was a part) has the right, if you are caught, to seize the software AND, all the data in the files managed/created by that software, including backups. More than one company has been put out of business by this. They don't play nice and there's no excuse accepted for a business.

Hope that answers some of your questions.

AJ

 

[Iyapo1]

Of course then we can confuse it by layering in transformative artwork as a wiggle which is a whole next level of lawyer worthy copyright insanity!

 

[BrinDarby]

@ajqtrz ,
thanks, maybe I should've included "consumer" of copyrighted materials.
The digitalization of media really muck'd alot up.... Back in the day, whether
it was a cassette copy of a record, or a recording off the radio, you're average
person would also get humm, hiss, or static that the record companies would
dismiss cause it wasn't "saleable" unless from a real bootlegger, and those
they went after hard .... Also in the VCR days, it was also assumed that
"for personal use only" recordings would not be prosecuted.....

Where I was hoping you knew more than I was more in the area of "free TV"
yet still "copyrighted" because of the misinformation I seem to get reguarding
DVRs and legality, along with the hypocritical stance in this area Samsung has
taken.... where USA customers are involved.....

The simple fact that a digital copy no longer degrades, and can be copied
without any degradetion of the source material.... took the copyright issues
to a whole new level..... heh heh

 

[ajqtrz]

@BrinDarby There are two methods of rebroadcasting: direct re-broadcast, usually with your own ads and such; and vpn broadcasts. The direct re-broadcasts simply captures the stream and re-sends it. The problem with this is that unless you actually steal the stream the originator can quickly shut you down. Say you pay a flat fee to receive a particular game. You sign in and start re-broadcasting. It's very easy to find out you are rebroadcasting even if you encrypt it, and even then the ip address is pretty easy to snoop. Once the originator discovers somebody is re-broadcasting, within minutes you lose your stream, your account, and the money you paid. So you have to have a large, patient audience to make any money.
The second is more insidious. VPN allows you to connect to a network as if you were sitting there, in the same room. So your clients use VPN to connect their devices to your servers and you broadcast directly to them on a "virtual private network". You are still re-broadcasting, but because the data, technically speaking, never leaves your private network it isn't seen and can fly under the radar. Something called "point to point tunneling protocol" enables this. The problem with this method is that you have to get people to use VPN. In most cases people don't, and that's why it usually used to get people to access their home country's broadcasts, which are such a small number it isn't worth shutting down. A person who is from Poland might want to see the news from Warsaw and not want to pay for the service, so they VPN into a Warsaw based re-broadcaster and that, as they say, is that.

As for the rights, it's really very simple. You can watch what you have paid a recognized and authentic service to watch. Usually it means they will have an exclusive broadcast license and you will pay them directly. My recommendation has always been: If in doubt, don't. Or ask. Look on the originators site and see who is listed as the broadcast agent. It's usually pretty prevalent and easy to find. Then pay and watch worry free.

Finally, at the core of the problem of piracy (which it is), is the idea that "if I can get away with it, why not? It's not hurting anyone!" Sigh.

I did a series for local television once on technology. It was fun and for six weeks I was a "star!" LOL! The number of watchers was, officially, pretty small -- in the thousands. Unofficially, due to rebroadcasting, it was hundreds of thousands. Sadly, those hundreds of thousands didn't pay for the service they received and thus, funding wasn't continued. You can't afford put something out if you aren't getting paid enough. Sort of like this game. The devs need the dough to keep things going, and so do other artists/creative types, like me!

Hope this answers a bit more.

AJ