Copyright

The Copyright Law

The Copyright law is a legal concept, enforced by most governments, giving the fabricator of work the exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time. it gives the copyright holder the right to be credited for the work, to determine who may adapt the work to other forms, who may perform the work, who may financially benefit from it, and other related rights.

How does copyright law apply to music?

The music industry exists because of two types of copyrights. 1) the musical composition, and 2) the sound recording. A musical composition copyright protects the lyrics and melody in a song, and the sound recording copyright protects the audio recording.

Musical composition and Sound recording

If a musical composition is like the blueprint to build a house, then the sound recording would be the finished house. The musical composition gives us the blueprint for the song and the sound recording is the audio recording of an artist’s performance of the song. So, for example, if Beyonce and Barbra Streisand record their own versions of the same musical composition, as you can imagine, the resulting sound recordings would be very different.

How do music companies benefit from copyright law?

Copyrights can be sold and licensed. The practical result is that music publishers own musical compositions and record labels own sound recordings. So, when a songwriter is offered a “publishing deal,” they are signing an agreement to write musical compositions exclusively for that music publisher. And, when a singer is offered a “record deal,” they’re signing an agreement to exclusively make sound recordings for that record label. Sometimes the songwriter and singer are the same person, so it’s important to know which rights are involved in a contract, because the deals are very different.

Copyright is very important and is essential when creating our music video. The Copyright Law is designed to give the creator or publisher the ability to distribute a product including the right to sell and receive payment for their reproduction of the original product. Any violation of a copyright is known as infringement, something my group must avoid doing. This is used within the music industry to protect artists work and insure that the artist is gaining profits from their song therefore a benefit to the artist. It is clear, copyright protects the original artist and publisher from having their work copied directly and used for someone else own benefit.

Without at least applying for permission, we are unable to proceed planning, producing and publicly publishing our music video. If we did not, we would be at risk of having our video taken down from YouTube which would lead to legal action taken against us.

The artist we have chosen to use is Klangkarussell. We identified this two person group after conducting secondary research they belongs to Universal music, Vertigo records, Capitol records. After this step, we had to conduct further secondary research to gain a contact form the record label. The method of contact we decided to use was e-mail.