Video and copyright

RC1

Ekka

I notice that most of the tree video's on-line have background music. Are there any copyright issue's to consider when adding music in this manner?

Iorek

RC1, I cannot see the recording companies chasing down people on treeforums, but the big problem is that youtube has recently been bought by google and they have a responsibility for checking copyright issues, so in the future they yoiu might not be able to post videos with music like allmark has done on youtube which are subject to copyright law.

Ekka

Of course there is, copyright is automatic regardless of registration. Now lets take it a step further ... a garage or covers band plays old hits, very common, hows that stand?

At the end of the day it's there to protect the original author, he has to make a living, if the owner of the works asks you to remove it you better, if the owner is not deprived of income it gets harder for them to get compensation.

Some-how I don't see tree video's being used as direct sources of music.

Also, in many places it's still illegal to record TV even though every house has a VCR or DVD burner. The law is there so there's power to convict and gain compensation for copyright breaches. It's all to scale, you hire a DVD from Blockbuster and start burning 100 copies and selling them ... you'll be in hot water. But if you put a Clapton "cocaine" track on your high school stoned picture album I don't think Eric would care.

Many of the file sharing houses (p2p) joints like Kazaar, Bearshare, Limewire etc are also getting busted as allowing people to "exchange" files over the internet means loss of revenue to the copyright holder. Some now are selling the files with royalties going back to the owners.

It's certainly a large minefield, but also common sense prevails, and litigation has to be profitable which it certainly wouldn't be for tree videos.

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RC1

Yeah it could get messy if you were unlucky. I suppose I was trying to establish where to draw the line. I am due to release a treework demo CD and would like to have add some background music, the music is obviously subject to copyright. What do you think?

Ekka

A safe way is to not use an entire song/track.

Copyright has what's called a fair use policy so you see TV do this a lot where they take snippets of music and put it through.

Can be done easy enough and perhaps should be done as you will be using your video to promote a product, sales and income.

So what's fair use? Enough that you don't get busted if challenged. There's no fixed rule. It's open to interpretation and what the original copyright holder thinks. If asked to remove it you should. Fair use could be 10 seconds or 30 seconds ... who knows.

Also running credits back to the author/copyright holder wont help.

You shoot the video, overlay the talking you need to do then slide in the music. You can purchase for minimal cost certain tracks ... search around.

With Ulead10 there's a set of tracks that are allowed and paid for, they call them licensed and you can buy more of them. Also it has the great feature of making a track perfectly fit your video in length with the right fade out ... all automatic.

Check out this website, it's where I can buy more licenced tracks automatically via Uleads download and update feature.

http://www.smartsound.com/index.html

There's a whole royalty free section here. You can preview them and they'll be able to automatically be sized right for Ulead 10! But I just run with the std ones they gave me.

http://www.smartsound.com/products/

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