Quote:
Originally posted by Joseph Bottum:
Hey, Kevin--
I'm sure you've got lots of reasons to dislike the Republicans, but this one seems to rely on a misunderstanding of what copyright actually means.
The publication of a recording automatically confers a use right on the purchaser, which is why we can all play the music without getting some kind of direct permission from the author. The band Heart didn't write 10,000 letters of permission to every DJ and radio station in the country when the label released their song.
Commercial use requires payment of a percentage back to the copyright holder, which is collected by the organizations called ASCAP and BMI--and, man, are they serious about that collecting. Remember the stories a couple years ago about them going after the Girl Scouts?
Anyway, a copyright holder can complain about a use (maybe even preemptively, if they find out about it) and thereby remove the presumptive permission. But everybody who owns a copy of the record starts with that permission.
With the case of a song played at a political convention, we enter into the tangled legal areas of whether this was genuinely commercial use. Thank about it this way: If you play a song on a stereo at a private party, do you have to pay ASCAP? What if you charged admission? What if you play it over the loudspeakers at a high-school football game?
Now, what if a tape of that party or that game makes it onto the evening news? The TV stations typically claim fair use: we're just reporting what others are doing. But that gets stretched when the whole song appears in the filmed snippet.
Some of this was worked out back during the Carter administration, when somebody recorded a song called "Bomb, Bomb Iran," during the Iran hostage crisis, to the tune of "Barbara Ann," and paid the usual ASCAP fees for borrowing a tune.
The copyright holders of "Barbara Ann" sued, and, as I remember, the courts said that the publication of the song gave implicit permission for its use, parodic or not (and so no punitive damages could be collected), but that such implicit permission could be withdrawn.
(As I remember, it gets even more complicated; I think the courts said further that when ASCAP or BMI accepted payment, they were acting as licensed agents for the copyright holders, and so the copyright holders had given an additional explicit permission beyond the implicit permission.)
More info than we need, I know, but it does mean that, however many laws you think the Republicans have run roughshod over, copyright on Heart's "Barracuda" wasn't one of them.
Jody
|
Jody--
Are you honestly saying that the Republican National Convention was a private party? That's giggle-worthy. It's a public spectacle on the order of the Oscars. Invitations may be limited to the membership and their guests, but there's no question that it's meant for public consumption.
I'll admit to handwaving over the complex web of copyright, ASCAP, the RIAA, and referring to them all under the layman's blanket of "copyright" rather than the more inclusive term of "intellectual property," but honestly, if you want to use a song, securing an artist's permission is not that hard. I distinctly remember Bill Clinton using Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" as his campaign theme song, and I'm fairly certain he secured the band's permission and approval because they were there dancing around on stage at the inauguration. Contrast that with Reagan, whose campaign got sued by Bruce Springsteen for using Springsteen's "Born in the USA," the Republican party in this case displaying the twin gorgons of Arrogance and Cluelessness--Arrogance for not asking the artist's permission, and Cluelessness for not having listened to the rest of the lyrics and realizing it was the most left-wing anti-Vietnam-war song possible.
I really don't see how this can be so difficult. I mean, other people get it. I remember being at the Comicon International in San Diego a few years ago--a public-private-newsworthy media spectacle of roughly the same order--and Neil Gaiman was doing a Q&A panel for his new film MirrorMask. The film had not been scored yet, but for the advance montage they'd used some songs by Tori Amos--a friend of Neil--and he remarked something along the lines of "Nice to be able to use some music where you know you won't get sued."
I hadn't heard about the Girl Scouts, but honestly, with the Republicans, you would have thought they'd have figured it out back during the Reagan era with Bruce Springsteen. Obviously not.