Hello everyone. We are going to turn our attention now to music copyright, and the things you need to consider when using music in various ways. Music copyright is very complex. [LAUGH] >> Yes. >> Both because there are always multiple rights involved, and because the music world has spawned a tangle of different licenses and licensing situations. The first important thing to recognize is that a musical performance and a recording of a musical performance always involves at least two distinctive copyrights. There's the copyright in the underlying musical composition. The music and the words if there are any. This is often an jointly owned copyright. Because often there are several people involved in writing the song. The lyrics, the music, the composition, etc. The copyright in this composition would be the only copyright involved if we were dealing simply with the sheet music for a song. These rights are often held by composers and music publishers, and they're administered and licensed by collective licensing agencies such as ASCAP and BMI. Once the sheet music, however, is performed and recorded, there is another copyright to consider, the right owned by the performer or the performers in that performance. In practice, this set of rights is often held by the record company. >> That's right, Lisa. And in fact, in the United States, there are two quirks in our law about sound recording specifically that make that a particularly treacherous area. First of all, performers, or record companies who usually hold the rights in a recorded performance, do not gap one of the majors sticks in the bundle of rights that is copyright. You all know, we have the right of reproduction, that is the right to make copies, the right to distribute the copies, a right of public performance, and that's where we have to pause. The performers who record a sound recording do not have a right of public performance. It sounds very strange. There is still a performance right in the underlying composition which is held by the composer. But the performer does not have a right to control public performances of the recording. This was originally an allowance for radio broadcasts. So radio stations have to pay a licensing fee to ASCAP or one of the other licensing organizations in order to broadcast music that is recorded. But they do not pay a fee to the record companies or to the performers themselves. As we record this course, Congress is considering legislation called the Fair Play Fair Pay Act. That's hard to say. [LAUGH] That would grant a performance right in sound recordings to the performers. Already in 1995, Congress did grant a very limited performance right only over transmissions via a digital network. >> So the Internet. >> The Internet, exactly. So Internet radio stations, although there are some exceptions, have to pay a separate fee in addition to the fee for the composition to an organization that represents performers. But that's a very limited right, and so we have this odd situation at the moment that performers have right in, and are entitled to collect the license and fee for, internet radio, when they broadcast the recordings of their performances, but not a broadcast over terrestrial radio. But, that situation may soon change if Congress passes the Fair Play Fair Pay Act. >> [LAUGH] >> The other quirk in copyright for sound recordings is that federal copyright simply does not apply to recordings that were fixed before, I have to get the date right, February 15th, 1972. We simply said when they adopted the new copyright law in 1976, that it wasn't going to apply to sound recordings fixed before that date. This is a particularly odd situation because it means that those pre 1972 recordings are actually protected by a patchwork of state laws that were in existence before the current copyright law was adopted. This is a real trap for the unwary, and it's also something that congress is considering changing. But for now, it has to be remembered that everything we say about sound recordings in this course may not apply to recordings that were made before 1972. Thanks for watching.