The UK copyright law for music is included in the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which allows the creator of literary, dramatic, musical, sound recordings, broadcasts and films rights to control the way that their material is used by others. Copyright is an automatic right that people get when creating materials as long as it is deemed as original. A copyright will last for up to 70 years after the last remaining author of the work dies. A copyright allows the artists to protect their work from copying their work, rend or lend copies of the work to the public, perform, broadcast or show the work in public and adapt the work. An example of a copyright case was the one between Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke against Marvin Gaye. The charge was that Pharrell and Robin's hit Blurred Lines stole from a 1977 single by Gaye. However, Williams and Thicke argue that they was definitely inspired by Gaye's song but did not steal from him. They said "If we lose our freedom to be inspired, we’re going to look up one day and the entertainment industry as we know it will be frozen in litigation. This is about protecting the intellectual rights of people who have ideas."
As a group we contacted Good Soldier Songs Ltd who manage Birdy, we asked them for permission to use their song in our music video. We done this as it will prevent us from getting into legal trouble for using the song without permission. Using a song that has a copyright without permission from the music label/artist could result in the record label removing my music video from youtube as it has their song in it or in some cases you can be sued. Therefore, if we create our music video and publish it without permission, once the video is live the music label are able to remove the video from the web.
To ask for permission from the music label firstly we had to find out who Birdy's record label was, upon looking on the web I saw that it was Good Soldier Songs Ltd Following this we had to go onto the Good Soldier Songs Ltd official website and find a contact email address so that we could seek permission. The email address found was info@goodsoldiersongs.com and once this email address had been found i created an email suitable to ask them for permission to use the song. Once i had checked the email to make sure everything was correct I sent it to the record label. I also done a screen shot of the email as evidence.
We are still currently waiting for a response from the record label, however we are still planning to go ahead with our music video.
This post demonstrates some understanding of why music copyright is essential to carry out. You have included an example from the industry, which demonstrates your understanding of the law, but you need to ensure that you have explore it in more detail, by relating back to the points of the law.
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