Musicians: Avoid this quartet of legal miscues
Mita Carriman, a onetime indie musician herself and now a lawyer in entertainment, intellectual property and small business law, has offered some noteworthy, hard-nosed counsel to indie musicians, busting a quartet of music-law myths, fallacious notions that can harm composers and performers if they rely on them. The four myths she seeks to debunk include: Myth: “Poor man’s” copyright, the fantasy of gaining legal protection by e-mailing or snail-mailing yourself a copy of your work. Carriman points out that a copyright is triggered once an original work is “fixed” in a tangible medium of expression, such as by recording an original song on a CD or MP3 or by the act of writing down the lyrics and music. She underscores that those who create content must protect their works formally through U.S. copyright law by registering them with the Library of Congress; copyright owners then can avail themselves of remedies, with lawsuits for damages of $750 to $150,000.00, plus attorney fees per act of infringement via statutory damages. A leading case on how rights get fixed? Midway Manufacturing Co. v. Artic International Inc., in which a court held that aspects of a video arcade game could be copyrighted though its images appearing on a screen were transient. Myth: “50 second… 5 second … 8 bar … or 1 bar,” the false notion that some musicians think permits legal sampling...
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