As with everything else, the music industry has switched majority of its processes to digital over the last few years. The biggest advantaged (and to some disadvantage) with digital product is the ease at which it is accessed. Because of this, there also has been a rise in the number of cases surrounding copyright law in the music industry.
With ease of access, a new type of artist has arrived, the remix artist. A remix artist is a musician who makes music by remixing and reinterpreting other pieces of music together into one final product. Those of which have mastered the craft have been able to come up with entirely new tracks that sound absolutely nothing like the original that they came from. The big question here however is “Is this legal?”
Well the short answer is no so I guess the real big question is actually “Should this be legal?”
With music (as with all tangible media), only the copyright owner has the right to make derivative works. Everyone else first needs to get permission to use the derivative work.
Now that doesn’t sound too bad right?
Well what if I also said there was no limitation to how much of the new work the original copyright owner requests for the new work to go in rotation. That means, you could sample 3 seconds of a song while creating a new piece of music and the person who owns those 3 seconds of the song could request 99% ownership of your work.
In fact, once a music work is fixed and in rotation, it is complete legal for anyone to cover that song and sell their own version of it as long as they pay a mechanical royalty. The music industry has decided that this statutory rate is only 9.1 cents. Now with songs being priced on iTunes at an average of $1.29 per song, that means you can copy and remake a song in it’s entirety and pay the roughly about 7% of what you make off the song.
So let’s compare that now. Someone else can make a song and I can make my own version of that song (as long as I don’t change lyrics and melody) and I only have to pay them 7% and at that they can’t even say no to it. On the flip side, if I want to use a few seconds of the song’s recording and remix it into something entirely new not only do I have to jump through hurdles to find the owner and get permission, but there is absolutely no limit to what percentage of my sales that the owner of that small piece of it can request?
Does this sound ridiculous yet?
Let’s take this a step further and talk about this video real quick.
Now, historically, whenever there are copyright infringement cases to deal with in the music industry, these super important people called Musicologists analyze the wavelengths and consistencies between the two tracks to determine whether or not they did in fact plagiarize. In this case, the musicologists said that they saw no direct connection between the two tracks yet the judge still ruled in favor of the Gaye estate. The decision was based on the fact that the “feel” of the tracks sounded similar. This is extremely controversial because (as mentioned in the video) it says that inspiration is enough to cause a plagiarism claim.
Is this taking it too far?
rickyveliz 