RIAA Questions

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RIAA Questions

Postby OnThePike » Tue Nov 15, 2011 8:17 pm

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if it's now (or has always been?) permissible to use music I've purchased (CD, iTunes, Amazon, etc) on my slide shows and upload them to my own website, You Tube, etc? I checked the RIAA website for "allowable use" and they make no distinction, but it seems to me that commercially available (radio play, etc) music is everywhere on You Tube and even on some of the the Photodex Presenter shows I've seen linked from this forum.

I have some cool shows I'd like to present, but they use music you'd hear on the radio. The rest of my shows either have the audio files included with PS or places like Dano/etc. My shows all sound the same and are boring me :-)

Here's an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6yC7b0VOzY Is this legal?
Or this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2-GqYkwjTM

Though I don't create professional looking stuff, I am very good at matching a mood to music. Problem is, the music I want to use -- and share with the world -- seems to be illegal.

Does it matter that my site is non-commercial and I make no profit from it or anything I upload?

Thanks for any clarification!

Jeff
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Re: RIAA Questions

Postby DickK » Tue Nov 15, 2011 9:48 pm

Such use is not included in terms of the license you acquire. Obtaining the appropriate rights is possible but difficult. The specific right you require is generically a derivative work, specifically (in most countries) known a synch license. This might help but the whole area is complex to say the least:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8583

Yes you'll find lots of commercial music on YouTube -- but as many here have discovered they also can, with or without notice to you, remove the audio or remove the video entirely. Indeed, they're required to if requested by the copyrights holder.

Dick
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Re: RIAA Questions

Postby OnThePike » Tue Nov 15, 2011 10:21 pm

Thanks much for the reply and the linked thread. That thread should probably be a "sticky" atop this sub-forum.

Really, my issue is wanting to share my "good stuff" with folks other than family and friends, but I won't take that chance (anymore) and keep using the free PS stuff, as well as whatever I find from the threads here.

I'd just like to add, for folks who might be interested, there are (what I call) "Copyright Infringement Ambulance Chasers" scouring the Internet, sucking up entire websites, filtering the content and looking for violations. If any of you do take the chance and use commercial music on your website(s), I advise you to inspect your access logs and see who's visiting.

Anyway, thanks again for the response. Any idea if PS will provide new audio?
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Re: RIAA Questions

Postby BarbaraC » Sun Nov 20, 2011 1:03 pm

There may be more sources for royalty-free music than you realize. That's another thing that would be great if it were sticky here in the forum. I should make a note to myself to provide a list of such sites either on my web site or one of my blogs. Knowing me, though, I'd probably lose my note and promptly forget. Anyway, I know what you mean about wanting to use commercial music. There's so much out there that I love and would enjoy using in a show, but it's just too expensive. At one point a few years ago, I wanted to submit one of my shows in the Photodex contest, but the show was absolutely dependent on Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein." I tracked down Winter and he told me who to contact. The result? It would cost $1000. I wrote back and said that it sure wasn't worth it for a contest that, at the time, had a top value of $200. Even it had been a thousand, I'm not enough of a risk-taker.

Barbara
Last edited by BarbaraC on Mon Nov 21, 2011 4:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: RIAA Questions

Postby BarbaraC » Sun Nov 20, 2011 1:16 pm

I forgot about this one: Free Music

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Re: RIAA Questions

Postby Tonel » Mon Nov 21, 2011 12:33 am

And here's a couple more. Read the Licence/Terms of Use info on each to check how you are allowed to use the music.

http://www.freeplaymusic.com/

http://ghostnotes.blogspot.com/

It can take time to find the right music for your project but there's some pretty good stuff. The first site has the facility to search by Style and Feel and it provides different lengths and formats.

With careful selection you can use Audacity to join pieces together and to blend them to get what I want.

But I agree, it's not the same as using a well known track by a well known artist. They often have memories or feelings associated with them.

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Re: RIAA Questions

Postby debngar » Mon Nov 21, 2011 8:48 am

With regards to Freeplay: Any use on the internet requires a paid license, at a hefty fee at that. I don't use Freeplay for anything I put on YouTube. There are lots of other companies that have way more reasonable license fees.

http://www.freeplaymusic.com/licensing/ratecard.php (Scroll to about 3/4 the way down the page). :shock:

Also, all Creative Common licensed stuff is not necessarily ok for commercial use. Most of the royalty-free music I use is either Creative Common Licensed and ok for commercial use or royalty-free music I've paid for the license to use commercially. Even at that, some music is still restricted and requires a more expensive license to use if put on TV for instance.

As Tony said, read the terms of use on each site, but I would also add that to be sure and check for the specific piece of music what the terms of use are because they vary. Often, pieces with vocals have a higher license fee, different TOU.

Scour the threads in the forum in this music section and you'll find many links to sites for royalty free music. It would take a long time to get through them all. If you are prolific in creating shows, there are reasonable deals to be had for royalty free music and sometimes the companies that offer it have sales throughout the year.

One final caveat - the last few of years, each time I've used a royalty free classical piece on YouTube, I immediately get flagged for possible misuse / copyright infringement. I respond by disputing the charge, providing the appropriate information as to who I bought the license for use of that piece from. I also usually include the Title, Artist and Publisher at the end of the show and post that info in the YT description box. That usually suffices. I always have to respond, even though I pro-actively provide the info in the description area upon upload. I don't want some strange company putting advertising on my videos unless I'm getting paid for that! For now, I'm choosing to not partner with YT to keep ads off my videos.

If you perform the piece of public domain classical music yourself used in your show, then you explain that in your dispute response and it should satisfy YT that way.

Good luck. :D
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Re: RIAA Questions

Postby BarbaraC » Mon Nov 21, 2011 8:55 am

...each time I've used a royalty free classical piece on YouTube, I immediately get flagged for possible misuse / copyright infringement.

I've had the same thing. With the most recent incident, I wrote to the man who had arranged and performed the piece, and he was just as surprised by it as I was. Either YouTube is using badly programmed software to sniff out copyrighted music, or there are people out there claiming to be Bach.

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Re: RIAA Questions

Postby DickK » Mon Nov 21, 2011 7:22 pm

Barbara -- the copyright infringement has nothing to do with Bach. It has to do with the performing artist. The rule on copyrights for classical music is that the performance is the creative act required to satisfy the requirement to generate a new set of rights. Many people can perform a work of the composer and each has copyrights for their performance. The rights holder is, as is almost always the case, the publishing company for each work and not the performer(s).

That said, I really don't understand how YouTube decides what to enforce and what not to enforce though. There are thousands of videos there which use commercial music and they've been there forever. In general, they seem to have some "black list" of publishers/groups who they actively look for and with everything else ignore all of it until a rights holder objects. Don't know which you might have tripped over but it's a very strange situation there and lots of other places on the net as well.

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Re: RIAA Questions

Postby debngar » Mon Nov 21, 2011 7:46 pm

The rule on copyrights for classical music is that the performance is the creative act required to satisfy the requirement to generate a new set of rights. Many people can perform a work of the composer and each has copyrights for their performance. The rights holder is, as is almost always the case, the publishing company for each work and not the performer(s).


This is what's happening to me when I've used classical music in my YT shows even though it was licensed through Digital Juice. Some other publishing company tells YouTube to flag any piece of music thing they've published even though dozens (or probably hundreds, maybe even thousands of people) have performed/recorded the same song, just in case someone has used their music illegally. Not sure how they can prove it exactly but they're probably hoping they hit the jackpot. If the user doesn't bother to dispute the charge, they claim ability to automatically place an advertisement on the video and make money off of it even though they should have no right to do that. If the user doesn't speak up, they can collect $ for doing nothing, for each hit on the video!
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Re: RIAA Questions

Postby BarbaraC » Tue Nov 22, 2011 5:21 am

Dick, I know the arrangement and performance are copyrighted in the case of classical music, and that's why YouTube's flagging of the performer's own arrangement was a surprise to both him and me.

I can't remember all the details, but one person decided to put the YouTube bot to a test, and the person found it was, if I'm remembering this correctly, something like the first 15 or 20 seconds of the song. So in this case, if the performer/arranger has used the same notes in the same key at the same tempo as someone else regardless of all the rest being different, the likelihood of the song being flagged is large. For instance, he could take Beethoven's Fifth, starting out with the utterly familiar first phrases and then mutate all of into his own jazz version, and yet the piece would get flagged.

Barbara
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