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A physical letter with a law firm letterhead can have amazing effects. Your lawyer would of course need to look at your contract to see if there is any verbiage that says “no matter what we own your music from now on” and if not he can probably find something to threaten them with.
That will work some of the time, depending on how sophisticated the library is, the quality of its legal counsel and how valuable the music involved is, or is not, to them.
We lawyers puff at each other all the time with threatening language. It’s part of the game. Letterhead is only going to scare someone who doesn’t have the money to hire their own lawyer. I would guess that nine times out of ten it’s not the letterhead that produces results. More likely than not the library just decides the music isn’t worth fighting over. There’s a lot more where that came from. (I’m not referring to your music specifically Mark).
It’s worth a shot. Who knows? Maybe they’ll cave.
“More likely than not the library just decides the music isn’t worth fighting over.”
Exactly the point. But the contact needs to look professional, therefore the letterhead and a real lawyer.
An email from a composer is pretty easy to ignore. An actual document from a real lawyer saying ‘this is what we are going to do to you if you do not do this’ is pretty hard to ignore.International copyright litigators can be found on elance.com. It really is worth checking out if the music you lost is really important to you.
An email from a composer is pretty easy to ignore.
That’s an understatement. Hey wait, did you get my last email? 😀
@DI right, you obviously did not read the OP. He has asked the library and they said NO. Better to read carefully before posting things like:
“Moral: ASK!”
He did ask.That doesn’t quite make sense to me, but okay.
It seems like a lot of things don’t make sense to you Desire Inspires.
The OP, the person posing this question, told you that they had contacted the library to ask them if they could get out of the contract. The library said no.
You went on to give the great advice of telling him to ask the library if he could get out of the contract. And you did it in a very snarky way.
“Moral: ASK!”Get it?
But ok….He did ask.
That doesn’t quite make sense to me, but okay.Is there a full moon tonight?
Mark, do you ignore emails from your composers? Just wondering…
From our composers? No, never.
From random composers? quite often.The bottom line:
A lawyer can scrutinize the contract and see if there’s any wiggle room — any case to be made — for withdrawing the cues. This will, in the end, come down to the exact verbiage of the contract. (Most contracts nowadays are written smartly so that the library will make “best efforts” at marketing the music but can never guarantee placement, therefore an effort to find them in violation of the contract may be unlikely. But you really have to scrutinize the contract to find out. Every contract is different.)
I would chalk it up to a loss, but not so much of a loss that you couldn’t take the original session files, duplicate them, keep the instruments and mix, change the tempo, change the key, and rewrite a new similar cue with a new name, that you will then be free to license. (Note: you should be careful that no musical elements are borrowed from the original, so there is absolutely no case to be made that the cues are related.)
And you never know if suddenly that exclusive library may start paying off unexpectedly in the future…
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