Copyright: Giving members more music and more options
Posted by Music staff | Posted in Music, Run your chapter, Uncategorized | Posted on February 12, 2010, 11:34 AM
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In reply to an earlier post on this blog, Tom Goldie shared some interesting suggestions regarding copyright laws and how the Society had get music into members’ hands more easily. With his permission, quoted below are Tom’s ideas (in quotes) and responses from Julie Grower, who manages the Music Library and Licensing for the Society.
Tom brings up some interesting possibilities. What do you think?
Julie begins:
Tom,
Thank you so much for taking up an issue which I know many barbershoppers feel strongly about. Your ideas are very positive and forward-looking. We always appreciate hearing about the issues that mean the most to members. I will attempt to address some of the comments below as best I can.
I believe a great place to start would be in copyright issues. An immediate change would be to allow society members the rights to record and post songs to which the Society holds copyright as long as its for non-commercial purposes. This would allow for many more performances to link to on YouTube, and for a lot more “free” distribution of high-quality .mp3s.
For those arrangements which we own and control entirely, the Society allows members to post on-line live performances at no charge in most cases. However, to make sure that we can keep a handle on the quality of the presentation, and context within which the music is used, we ask that members request permission and describe the use. For CD duplication and MP3 posting (mechanical) uses of these arrangements, if the CDs are for promotional and educational purposes only and not for sale, we also allow free use.
Down the road, the Society should think about expanding the PUBLIC DOMAIN by releasing all those arrangements which it does not publish. There have to be hundreds or thousands which have been donated that are not being commercially released.
In answer to the above, I will start by clarifying the term “public domain”. In the U.S., the term “public domain” refers to the fact that a song was originally published prior to the year 1923, or that the copyright was not renewed by the publisher. Any other song used for an arrangement is under copyright. These rules are set by the federal government. So it is not possible for the Society to expand or change what songs/arrangements are in the public domain. We continue to keep current on the latest copyright issues and laws and how they affect our membership.
All of the arrangements that we do not publish are owned by an entity other than the Society; either a publisher, or in the case of a Public Domain arrangement, the arranger who submits it. We are granted the right to make copies of them available to our members with the stipulation that these entities will be paid each time a copy is sold. If the song itself is in PD, the arranger probably controls the copyright of that arrangement and has the right to make it available to a chorus or quartet for no fee, if he/she so wishes.
It would be as simple as scanning them into .pdfs and letting the barbershop community put them into a more portable form, like .mus files.
Because of our legal obligations to the copyright-holders of unpublished arrangements, it is important that we control the appearance and number of copies that are duplicated. That is why we insist that copies be made from our Society-formatted PDFs. Some of our members have graciously volunteered to put the older, handwritten arrangements into Finale, which we greatly appreciate! However, these must be then reviewed by the Publications Editor and formatted with writer/composer/copyright holder info correctly placed.
Additionally, many of the arrangements that we do publish are licensed from third parties, and we have contracts in place that allow us to sell them with a percentage being paid to the original song publisher. In these cases, our rights only extend to the printed music and not to other uses.
That said, a good number of Society publications are based on public domain songs, and many are available for no cost on our website under “Free and Easy” and “Heritage of Harmony” at http://www.barbershop.org/resources/get-music.html. We are always working to expand these offerings. Additionally, we will definitely take your suggestion of making learning CDs for these arrangements available for free under consideration, keeping in mind that they do cost the Society money to produce.
Lastly, the Society should support the repeal of the laws which have extended copyright long beyond those limits envisioned by the Founding Fathers — fourteen years extendable to twenty-eight years. This is SPECIFICALLY for the development and preservation of the arts and culture. When “Happy Birthday” is controlled by a corporation, then something has gone terribly awry.
The Society’s stance on copyright is settled where two important principles are concerned:
1. Members should have access to the greatest number of songs possible—if they want to sing something, we’ll do our best to help make it happen!
2. Artists and copyright holders should be paid when we use their property. We will comply 100% with whatever laws are on the books.
I cannot speculate on any proposed changes in the law; however, I suggest it is unlikely that the Society will ever take a stance that could alienate us from the song writers and publishers we all depend upon for cooperation. That would jeopardize Society members’ access to their music!
Bottom line: If copyright holders aren’t happy, our members won’t be happy. Serving one necessitates having good relationships with the other.
I hope that clarifies some things. Thanks again for your input!
Best,
I disagree completely with the Society’s stance on not lobbying for a change to current copyright law in regard to the public domain threshold.
The current public domain threshold is not in keeping with the original intent of the constitutional clause concerning copyright, and should be changed.
If the Sonny Bono legislation had not passed, we would already be somewhere in the 1930′s for the public domain threshold, a major source of good material for barbershop arrangements.
So the Society is going to kowtow to ASCAP and the RIAA because they don’t want to lose access to the catalog which is covered under current copyright law? How big of a risk is that, really? Even if we lobbied for it, would a copyright holder really say “no” when we come to them for music which is covered by copyright? Are they going to say “no” to the revenue just because we’re lobbying Congress on the public domain issue?
If the law got changed, we would already have access to a good chunk of the material which we care most about. Do we really care if we get denied access to music beyond that? And if so, with the law changed back to what it was, we would only be a decade or so away from getting all of the ’40s music as well.
I just don’t see the risk. Unless you’ve had specific conversations with ASCAP, RIAA, and other copyright holders on this subject, and they’ve flat out said “we’ll stop licensing music to you if you lobby Congress”, I don’t see the problem.
I recollect some years ago when electronic forms of musical recordings first started appearing on the internet as mp3 files and such. The scourge of the industry was free file-sharing and down-loading sites. All those “criminals” downloading music files from other people needed to be prosecuted and fined to protect the 20th century distribution channels and methods of the recording industry.
Along came Apple with a better idea. They created an actual electronic market-place for those copyrighted recordings and put a reasonable pricing structure on them. Lo and behold, for the most part, they discovered that those “criminals” pirating music were just normal folks who were glad to pay 99 cents if they just had a way to do it. I’d gladly pay 99 cents for a viewable pdf and another 99 cents for a sample recording of a piece of music I was considering for my chorus if I only had a way to do it. Once I could actually evaluate that piece of music in a reasonable time-frame and at a reasonable cost, I would gladly order the additional pdf copies and learning tracks my chorus needed at a likewise reasonable cost per copy.
What i-tunes demonstrated is that people want to comply with copyright law for the most part, and will if the owners of the materials will just give them a 21st century mechanism for doing so.
I agree with Allan Webb. One of the reasons I let my Society membership lapse was my dismay at seeing it become a “copyright cop”, helping to enforce unjust laws against its own members, instead of representing their interests against the passage of these restrictive copyright laws.
The ideal of barbershop harmony as an art form is the promotion of casual, amateur singing. Modern copyright laws serve to discourage casual, amateur singing. It ought to be obvious which side of the fence we should be on.
Dan, nobody suggested not following current copyright law. What we’re saying is follow the law as it exists, but work to get the law changed at the same time.
It’s that second part that the Society is not currently interested in doing, and what I disagree with.
Allan
We need to recognize and support the fact that musical compositions and original arrangements are the intellectual property of the author. Any use of this property without the author’s consent and/or appropriate compensation is actually theft and therefore both illegal and immoral. The penalties for copyright law violation are severe, and can result in substantial fines and/or imprisonment So the issue is not simply maintaining the goodwill of ASCAP and its composer members.
Jeff White and others may not be happy with the law as written, but as long as it exists BHS has no choice but to observe it scrupulously. I’m sure Jeff feels that he did the “right thing” in letting his membership lapse over this arcane issue, but a better choice would have been to work within the BHS and the existing system to effect desired change. Leaving the BHS does nothing to advance either side of the argument.
So it’s theft, and illegal and immoral for four men to get together and sing a 70-year-old song for their own personal enjoyment and the enjoyment of others, without paying money to the great-grandchildren of the long-dead songwriter?
This is exactly the kind of blinkered thinking that is going to mean the demise of the Society. Unless it is prepared to change its way of thinking, there is no point in trying to “work within” the BHS to get copyright laws changed.
Jeff,
You mention in one response about the Society becoming copyright cops, and then in another reference 4-men singing a 70-year-old song for their own enjoyment.
The only copyright policing I saw from the Society were NOT 4 guys around a kitchen table, but very high quality, high profile groups singing songs WELL below 70-years-old.
Some may view that as simply a matter of semantics, but I think it is an entirely different shade of argument.
While I fully support the concept of Copyright Law (my son is a composer) in addition to the unreasonably long period of copyrights there is the further problem of who owns the rights at any time. Requiring those who have ownership to publish the titles they own by a fixed date in the near future and provide a list of fees required for use would make available any and all compositions and arrangements whose usage is currently restrained by lack of that knowledge – Any music after that date with no such data available would then be clear of possible infringement. I believe the BHS is the most appropriate instrument to achieve this end, and the good publicity we would get for taking the lead in this would be a great marketing tool consistent with our Mission.
There are composers, and there are singers. To completely give all to one or the other is wrong. I suspect the extended copyright law was lobbying at its best (not by BHS. I suspect record companies did that back in the 60′s-70′s). But remember the cassette tape, VHS, tape, the eight track and now the CD/DVD. Laws were challenged and one could record off of TV or Radio. While performing is another matter, the case could be made for a challenges, especially when the type of performance is for no gain. Ok, keep the original copyright years, but kick out the forever clauses. Maybe the BHS need a political arm. Some lobbyist for ourselves?
I suggest anyone wanting to get more perspective on this should read “Free Culture” by Lawrence Lessig.
But that’s a little farther than I want to go right now. I only advocate that if the Society owns the copyright and they are not making it commercially available, then they release it into the PUBLIC DOMAIN, or better yet, Creative Commons with limitations on commercial use.
As far as the Society’s stance on ALL SPEBSQSA-owned material that they wish to maintain the quality of the work, I think that’s a bit paternalistic. If we are Society members, and pay yearly for the privilege, then how about being allowed to perform it as we see fit, and let the public — or other barbershoppers decide? Could we have a place where we could post links to our performances and let the other Society members judge?
I think it’s the “permission required” part that stifles the spirit of Keeping The Whole World Singing (with permission of the BHS, who reserves the right to judge the caliber of your performance, and who may or may not approve it for the general public, provided you submit your performance in advance to the unadvertised entity inside the BHS in charge of such approval). See what I mean?
Let’s take it out of the realm of “legal” and into the realm of “art”, and let the market judge the quality. The BHS can still retain commercial use rights, or even have an up-front 50% stake in any commercial use. Either way, I’ll bet it’s more than they’re getting right now.
Remember that “quality” has many meanings. Are we concerned about performance ability quality? It’s possible, of course. We’ve all heard REALLY BAD barbershop. But the real concern is the integrity of barbershop as a wholesome art form that we pride ourselves on. For example (and this is not to offend any of the participants) a quartet of barbershoppers appeared on a TV talk show a week or so ago. They sang parody lyrics to “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” The second to last phrase ended with the word, “hit.” This lead into the final phrase being, “you’re all full of —-!”
Now even with the Society owning the rights, the quartet still chose to do the song (probably because the arr. is owned by SPEBSQSA) and sang the parody lyrics (likely provided by the TV producers). IMO this is not quite the quality of “wholesome” we as barbershop singers strive for.
This is not a case of paternalistic. Much of our concern is protecting the organization…YOUR organization. Not strifling creativity. If we were concerned about that we’d be policing anywhere there is woodshedding!
Are you surprised that the kind of folks who would violate copyright so blatantly really lack taste? Could it be that the only people that are restrained by the current policy are the people you would MOST WANT representing barbershop?
I think you’d be surprised at the quality of performance and art that would come out if you were to allow Society members to freely tinker with Society content in non-commercial ways. And if it DOES become commercially viable — say, as a synchronization to a really cool little video that someone wants to use in a big way — then the Society and the performers could perhaps share the wealth.
I guess these guys operated under the maxim that it is better to act and beg forgiveness. Let the more responsible parties act, too, and you just might find the E in SPEBSQSA grows a few points or picas.
Thanks for mentioning our national tv debut.
We’d hoped we were doing right by the Society by not showing up in t-shirts and sneakers, and refusing the spandex body suits and hula hoops. There’s no accounting for taste (less ness.)
What could be more wholesome than singing praises for Betty White? She’s an American institution.
Honestly, on my part there wasn’t a thought given whether it would be appropriate to make people laugh in this silly way. Barbershop Quartets strive to entertain, to showcase joy of life and make people’s lives better even for just a moment.
Our biggest concern, as a hometown quartet, was to sing well enough that people would enjoy the harmony, the genuineness, and the accessibility of the craft, and would laugh at the joke, not the quartet.
We had a great time, and hoped that barbershoppers would enjoy another moment of positive face-time for the craft.
The feedback we got was happy audiences, happy producers, and happy barbershoppers.
Now if we had been performing on the Ed Sullivan Show, he probably would have had something even less risky for us to do.
Hi Rick – a tangent perhaps – but I don’t see the “wholesomeness” of barbershop as historically based. I sense this aspect of our style was added somewhere along the way after SPEBSQSA was born.
It really doesn’t bug me that a quartet sang a “bad word” on TV. We are a modern vibrant art form just like a lot of other kinds of music and I don’t have an issue with lyrics more in the modern vernacular. This doesn’t mean I WANT to hear barbershop music laced with obscenities (I don’t consider the bad word in question an obscenity); I think the “old-fashionedness” of barbershop is somewhat comforting, just that I don’t see isolated instances like this as a big deal.
Copyright laws are required and should be obeyed, but they last much too long. Just think, a drug company or electronics company, or anyone, can spend a Billion dollars of research on a new product and get a patent to protect their design. But after only 17 years, anyone is allowed to copy their design. Put this next to copyright laws and it exposes its unreasonable extents.
I suspect there is a “public good” aspect to drug copyright laws, not to mention for drugs there is no single “composer”. We as a society don’t object to taking money out of a drug company’s hands because they can always develop new drugs to counteract the loss of patent protection on older drugs. Plus the need to continue producing revenue is an incentive for development of new drugs.
On the other hand, a composer may only have one great song in them. Music also has a much longer “lifespan” than a prescription drug. Nothing is coming down the pipeline to replace “Happy Birthday”.
And while music is definitely for the public good it’s not the same level of public good as a prescription drug. So it makes sense that copyright laws for these two are different.
This is not a defense of the Sonny Bono law at all.
This is a very involved topic, obviously. I only wish to comment on the feasibility of putting arrangements online for members to purchase and print out. I don’t know hardly anything about copyright laws, but it seems we ought to be able to provide members with sheet music quickly. Waiting for it to arrive in the mail is a time consuming and very inconvenient process, and I’ve had some negative experiences waiting for music to arrive in the mail from the BHS. I think that we should make the music more easily and quickly available for the members, and the learning tracks too.
What is the difference from the copyright laws standpoint between selling music by mail order versus online downloading (i.e. what extra hurdles would we have to go through to make it available online to the members)?