3 ms·
Music has that sorted already. There is copyright. There is publishing right. If you make a cover of a recording, it is the latter that you are involved with
by buro9 10y ago
Music has that sorted already.
There is copyright.
There is publishing right.
If you make a cover of a recording, it is the latter that you are involved with. You'd have to go to the publishers of a piece of music to license the right to publish your interpretation of the work.
Obviously this post simplifies, but it's already answered.
- rangibaby 10y agoRe: publishing rights, you can make a cover version of a song using a "compulsory mechanical license", whether the owner likes it or not.
- ionwake 10y agoSo are remixes allowed, or do you need permission from the original publisher?
- jstelly 10y agoAssuming the remix uses the actual recording you need permission from the person who made that recording (the recording is covered by copyright).
- squeaky-clean 10y agoFor a remix, you would also need the permission to use the specific recording, (which can be declined) as well as rights from the song owner. For example, If you wanted to cover Viva la Vida by Coldplay, you do it and pay the mechanical licensing fees. If you wanted to sample/remix it the recording of Viva la Vida, you would need to contact Capitol Records, who could decline or request specific payment. If you wanted to sample or remix the performance of Viva la Vida from Super Bowl 50, you would probably need the rights from CBS. https://loudr.fm/faq https://loudr.fm/faq http://www.ascap.com/playback/2011/01/features/limelight.aspx http://www.ascap.com/playback/2011/01/features/limelight.asp...
- usrusr 10y agoCorner case: Neil Innes' songs for The Rutles. They are so clearly not covers yet so perfectly recognizable.
- svantana 10y agoIf you had to get permission, these millions of sound-alike tracks wouldn't exist. There's a compulsory license for cover songs, but the question becomes: is it still a cover if a machine does it? Or does it infringe the recordings' copyright since it's merely a "processed" version of the original recording? And how would you tell the difference between a human-cover and a machine-cover? Interesting times ahead...
- wwweston 10y agoThere's some questions I don't think this addresses, though. Right now, I have the ability to produce covers of lots of songs. That's addressed in law: if I make a recording, I need to get a mechanical license, if I'm performing at a certain scale I or the venue need to have an agreement with the right publisher for performance rights. At a personal scale, though, I can perform covers in somebody's living room all day and nobody will care (or would be capable of doing much about it if they did). In fact, once I went looking for an agreement with a publisher for covers a small scale venue and they told me not to bother, because either the venue itself already had the agreement in place or it didn't matter. But what happens if/when we everyone can have software that is capable of performing a cover of any work it's familiar with? Even if it doesn't have any particular digital copy directly encoded in any way we might now recognize? If the law expands its definition of copyright to cover that situation, we're getting into territory in which it may be a copyright violation for me to remember a song. Or if enforcement of performance licensing laws starts to extend down to living-room scale performances, we're getting into really invasive surveillance. But if that doesn't happen, those personal-performance-scale one-off covers (not stored, just part of the capabilities of the particular learning-machine) are probably going to be legal in the same way that my living room performances are right now.