Codes Of Practice For Final Major

In this blog post I will be discussing the codes of practice that needs to be used for music videos. I will be discussing:

• Music Copyright

• Filmed Footage Copyright

• Music Video Copyright

• Patenting Of Music And Videos

Copyright laws in the United Kingdom became a common law in 1911 under the Copyright Act 1911; the current act is the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. It gives creators of work from areas such as literary, dramatic, musical, artistic works, sound recordings (songs), broadcasts, films and typographical arrangement of published editions rights in which other people can use their material in different ways.

Copyright is an automatic right to the individual/company who creates/authors a piece of work of their own, if the work is not original and does not exhibit a certain degree of labour or skills. Interpretation is related to the creation of work rather than the idea behind it, for example, a person cannot put a copyright on an idea but they can put a copyright on a produced, individual piece of work, in some cases an idea can be patented instead of copyrighted which is a legal way to protect intellectual property dependant on the laws in the country or state within you are applying for the patent in. The owner of an original piece of work out of the areas of media is normally the individual or collective group of creators who will exclusively own the work and are referred to as the ‘first owner of copyright’; the copyright can be sold or transferred to another owner. Copyright rights cannot be claimed through a piece of work that uses other pieces of copyrighted material within.

It is an offence to perform any of the following acts without the consent of the original authors of the work:

• Copy the work

• Rent, lend or issue copies of the copyrighted work to the public without permission (piracy)

• Show the work in public or adapt the work

Copyright acts which are allowed are if you are using a piece of work for private research, performance, copies or lending for educational purposes, criticism’s, reviews and reporting, copies and lending by librarians, a parody or pastiche of the work, time shifting or producing a backup copy for personal use of a computer program.

Music video copyright

The areas of copyright within The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 which can be discussed in terms of music video are:

• Literary (for example elements such as song lyrics)

• Musical (recordings and score)

• Artistic (Logo’s)

• Sound Recording (different pieces of music used as a sample)

• Film (Video footage from films, broadcasts and other music videos even)

The main area of copyright within music videos is within the actual music itself and the steps into getting permission from the artist to use their music in your video or get it to accompany the video you are making. The copyright for a musical piece of work (song) to use in a music video can only apply on a piece of work for is 70 years from the end of the calendar year in which the last remaining author of the piece of work dies, then the work I available to use by anyone. There are two types of copyright that exist in music videos are the © copyright which applies to the composition, score, lyrics as well as artwork, they can all be used in a single registration for copyright if they are all put together. The second type is a P in a circle which just applies to the sound recording.

If you use samples of music by other authors in your work, for example if you are using a piece of music for a music video like I am doing in this project you have to gain permission from the last known publisher of the work which in this case is the music artist, you can either do this or purchase royalty free audio tracks to use in the video. Another process that you have to go through to get permission to use the track, especially if you are using bands, is to get permission of each band member to avoid copyright issues between the bands, you also need to contact previous band members if there are any to see if they are willing to give you permission just to avoid arguments about who the original authorship belongs to. The name of a band as well as a Slogan or a single phrase cannot be copyrighted, but it can be trade-marked and will be carri

ed out by a national trade-mark office, a ™ symbol basically establishes the bands identity and products. Clubs and venues will generally be licensed for public performance through the UK administration office of PRS for Music.

If you are looking at musical copyright through a music artist’s perspective you have to take a different approach to get your content (musical recordings and music videos) copyrighted. Companies such as PRS/MCPS and/or Sentric Music will work with you to collect performing and mechanical rights/royalties from licensed venues and manufactures/users of your media; therefore you will get royalty money on every play of your work. You can also get a creative commons license if you want to give your work out for free in a controlled manner. A music artist should also never use other pieces of work (samples of other tracks or footage) within your own music/music video as it is a breach of the Copyrights, Designs and Patents act of 1988.

If you are looking to use other people’s footage within your creative music video you have to look at the attributes which surround the clips, such as if the clips have copyright in them, if the clips are copy righted then you have to get permission from the creator of the video to use it in a contract or a simple permission grant. There are also some websites such as archive.org which consists of archive footage from throughout the years, all of the footage on websites like these is completely free to use, also other creators will also give away their work for free via Youtube or other sharing websites. Another way of using someone’s footage is to look at footage which has a creative commons license on it, if you were to publish a piece of work and put a creative commons license on to it, this means that the person who wants to use their work in their work, they will be able to use it for all non-commercial uses. A creative commons license also protects the people who use your work for getting sued for copyright reasons, it can also help you change what copyright scheme you want to use on your footage which is a handy tool for all creators.