Home-Made Movies, Music, and Copyright

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,125233,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,125233,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp</a><br /><br /></div><i>"So you've just finished editing your vacation video, and you're going to put it online to show your friends and family. Now you want to add some music; perhaps a bit of thrash metal over the snowboarding footage, or how about "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas &amp; The Papas to accompany your trip down the California coast? You stroll over to your CD collection, grab a couple of your favorite tunes, then drop them into the video and upload it to your Web site. It becomes the next viral video, and thousands of people are downloading it. And then the police kick down your door and throw you in prison for illegally distributing music. Well, perhaps that's not quite how it would work out. What's more likely is that the video could get deleted from your Web site if the copyright holder complains to your hosting service."</i><br /><br />This is one of those things where the law and morality take different paths - I firmly believe there's nothing immoral about taking a song from a CD that I purchased and using it as music for a photo slide show that I'm creating for myself and my friends/family. But the waters certainly get muddy if I were to upload that to <a href="http://www.youtube.com">You Tube</a> and suddenly my little project is also a mechanism for distributing that song. There are some interesting royalty-free audio solutions, and this article talks about them. When I did my <a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/articles.php?action=expand,8187">video review</a> I was careful to not use any commercial music, because that review had an advertisement in it and was being distributed from a site that is my business. How do you approach audio in your projects, whether professional or personal?

[TomB]

The short answer is the laws in Canada and the USA are different. However taking another person's creative work, even when you own a $10 copy of their $50,000 recording session, or $50 million dollar film is not a good move in my book. There are tons of free stuff out there, so unless you are doing something JUST for yourself (it is never just for yourself is it?), go with the free stuff. What will generally happen is your work will eventually get beyond you and your close friends and then forget the RIAA, everyone generally suffers including the videomaker.

Here's how. I found a REALLY funny clip on the web and loved the music. I wanted to use and pay for the video in a project I was doing and get more music from the band. I couldn't track anything down on the author or more importantly the music. Why? The videomaker used content without permission, so he obviously couldn't credit his illegal work let alone the band. The band lost because no one knew where the music came from, and the filmmaker lost because I was ready to pay $$$$ for his work and then ask him to contribute a monthly PAID video to my project.

Here's another reason. A friend build an entire film around a piece of music by the Foo Fighters. He figured if something happened a distributor would take care of the music. A distributor loved the film! When the company went to EMI to licence the music, guess what? The Foo Fighters turned down the licence because they COULD! A year's worth of work down the drain and no amount of money could change that.

Stick with the free or paid royalty-free stuff, or the work of a band that WILL GIVE YOU PERMISSION to use their work. Trust me - at some point in your career as a creative you will thank me. Either that or you will see my point when someone uses YOUR work they paid $1 for on eBay and dropped into THEIR project - without your permission. ;)

[Philip Colmer]

For personal stuff like vacation videos, I do often use music that I've got on CD. This will never end up on a web site or be distributed, so I feel OK with that.

For other projects like weddings and keep-fit rallies, I pay the licence fees. There are two organisations in the UK that each have their own licence so unfortunately I have to pay for both of them. The reason is that for the examples I've given, I'm filming something where someone else has chosen the music so I don't have the luxury of using royalty-free music to go over it.

The UK licensing side of things could do with a bit of a work-over, though. One of the organisation charges for the number of copies you are making, and the other charges for the total music duration you've got!

The benefit of them, though, is that you don't have to approach each music label in turn trying to get a licence.

--Philip

[TomB]

Phillip - it is terrible in the USA! They charge for everything. How loud, how long, foreground, background, titles, middle credits. It is a nightmare. It once took me a year to clear a thirty year old Neil Sedaka song that was sung for twenty seconds in a film. You don't want to know how much it cost with ownership in the song split 22.5% 27.5 and 50% among two companies and one individual! In a way, Steve Jobs did a really great thing for mobile media by forcing the thousands of publishers out there to work together for his iTunes store.

So I certainly am not in love with the music industry and feel that there should be an easy way for amateurs to play with music legally. On the other hand, I still feel all creatives should get paid for their work. As far as personal use, I do agree with you 100%. The problem is few people who spend weeks shooting and editing their personal opus do it just for themselves. Once the video leaves their hands and it is any good, it will almost certainly find its way onto the Internet - and then the damage is done.