Information on protecting music from misuse

[bbastos]

Hello!

I’m from Brazil and would like some information on protecting music from misuse.

I want to send my first song to libraries and I am concerned about protecting the rights of the song and copies/illegal uses. (example: someone using my instrumental song, in a shamelessly way, to create a commercial song).

I want to put my first songs on non-exclusive libraries and then work with exclusive libraries.

How can I protect my original song to be copied and used illegally? I know the rules of how to do this may be different in the U.S. from Brazil, but would like some information for the protection of my songs uploaded to  exclusive and non-exclusive libraries.

Thanks and sorry for the wrong words.

[Art Munson]

You can first copyright your songs but the reality is that there is no fool proof way to protect your songs from being misused. Someone may use it even if copyrighted. You may never know it unless it became a huge hit. In that case your copyright will protect you. There would be enough money involved to go after the perpetrator and prove you were the rightful owner.

Practically speaking there is a certain amount of trust involved in life as in business. I’d like to think there are more good guys/gals than bad.

Just my opinion and you should contact an attorney.

[Mark Lewis]

Funny thing, as much as I dislike the Youtube COntentID system it has recently been very helpful in finding exactly the types of illegal uses that bbastos is referring to. People who have taken the RF music and, for example, played a guitar solo over it and then turned around and called it their own and put it on an album and started selling it through lots of distribution channels. A real nightmare.
Thanks to CD Baby and IODA using Youtube ContentID for anything that is uploaded into their system I am now able to quickly find these illegal uses and send a DMCA letters to have them removed from distribution.
I’ve had 6 different cases of this in the last 4 months. 3 from France, 3 from the US, and I was successful in getting them all removed.
This type of follow-up and legal work I do for free for our composers so we can keep selling their music since it was not their fault that their music was entered into the youtube database.

-Mark

[MichaelL]

Mark…I’m not connecting the dots. How do you discover the illegal usage, if you don’t participate in Content ID?

Thanks,

Michael

[Mark Lewis]

From customer complaints.
The customer uses the music they license from us on Youtube and then gets tagged by CD Baby or IODA or iTunes with a third party ownership claim. The info in the third party claim shows me the company name, the name of the “composer” that stole the music and the name of the song they are now selling the music under.
I then do in depth internet searches for all info and instances of the song being available and contact all parties involved. Also, the “composer’s” phone number is usually on the internet somewhere and I start calling him, daily, until he does something about it.
(“composer” means a person who stole the actual composer’s music and is selling it as his own)

I had one “composer” who was hired to write relaxation music for their client. He simply came to our website and bought an ambient chill collection and sold it to his customer as music that he wrote. That client went on to sell the music as their own creation.
I was really happy when I caught him and the client on the other end that had been lied to was furious.

[MichaelL]

Good for you Mark! That’s really admirable of you to track them down on behalf of your clients and composers.

I could give the “composer” the benefit of the doubt and guess that they mistakenly believed that a RF license gives them carte blanche to do what they want with the music. But, that’s probably too generous. The brief exposure that I had on either side of criminal law taught me to never be surprised by the things people do. All I can say is that some cultures have very different ideas about intellectual property rights and/or what is and isn’t ethical in general.

AND…some composers think that you just “sit back” and collect money!  They couldn’t be more wrong.

All the best,

Michael

[Author]

Posts