Thursday, March 26, 2015

Music Business/Law Tips - "Avoid Infringements"

In the wake of the recent Marvin Gaye/Blurred Lines court decision, many songwriters are concerned about possibly getting sued for similarities in their works with others. In reality, copyright lawsuits are actually rare and hard/expensive to win, and are all based on the test of "substantial similarity". However, if a writer is going to borrow or be inspired by an existing work without a license, try and stay clean of any potential issues by keeping the following guidelines in mind: (1) make sure any sample is very short (like a few seconds or notes); (2) make sure the sample is obscure and/or distorted; (3) try to find a sample that is covered by a creative commons license (permission already granted); (4) try and use a public domain work (e.g., anything more than 70 years old is normally fair use). Ben McLane Esq benmclane.com

1 comment:

  1. These are some good legal tips. I used to produce music and we tried to follow some similar guidelines. We would encourage our musicians to listen to older music and gain their inspiration from those sources because it was legally less complicated. It depends how much you change it, of course, but it's still a good practice. Thanks for sharing these tips with us! http://www.souderslaw.com/businesscontracts.html

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