Cover Music copyright

[Plague Ephlik]

Does anyone know what exactly the rules are on doing covers of songs. I see that they exist on youtube but i recently did one myself of an instrumental from a tv show's soundtrack. I didn't have the original track playing in the video ,it was just a version i had made from scratch in fl studio and to my suprise the system picked it up for a third party content notice.

Is that supposed to happen? Not even sure how it recognized but i took it down out of discouragement anyway.

 

[XXLRay]

You would need a mechanical and a synch license or something similar. Some songs are set to share revenue with the artist but that may change.

 

[Mirandapanda]

I attended a panel about this at Vidcon last year. Copyright laws are super hazy, especially on youtube, but it is my understanding that just because you make a cover song yourself and turn it into creative content of your own, it does not necessarily mean you have the rights to publish this to youtube (which sucks btw). Generally speaking, it is difficult to detect and enforce this, so most covers go unnoticed. Even big channels will often go the "better to ask forgiveness than permission" route and make the cover anyway, forfeiting all or some of their monetization if the original music owner pursues them (although some will ask permission first, this can be difficult to obtain). It's not very common to be caught for this, especially so for a small channel. Maybe you were unlucky, the owners of that song are extra vigilant and protective of their content, or maybe your version sounds close enough to the original to be caught by the system.

Again, this is just from my recollection so I may be a little off on this.

 

[Idec Sdawkminn]

The lyrics and melody are copyrighted separately from a singer's performance of them, and you are using them for the same purpose as the original singer, so the transformative amount is small if any. You don't need to take it down, since if the copyright owner wanted it gone, they'd block it or take it down. They are okay with you having it up and it is another source of income for them.

 

[Plague Ephlik]

Thanks for the information so far. Does this mean remixes are more safe?

 

[daniel burgio]

I attended a panel about this at Vidcon last year. Copyright laws are super hazy, especially on youtube, but it is my understanding that just because you make a cover song yourself and turn it into creative content of your own, it does not necessarily mean you have the rights to publish this to youtube (which sucks btw). Generally speaking, it is difficult to detect and enforce this, so most covers go unnoticed. Even big channels will often go the "better to ask forgiveness than permission" route and make the cover anyway, forfeiting all or some of their monetization if the original music owner pursues them (although some will ask permission first, this can be difficult to obtain). It's not very common to be caught for this, especially so for a small channel. Maybe you were unlucky, the owners of that song are extra vigilant and protective of their content, or maybe your version sounds close enough to the original to be caught by the system.

Again, this is just from my recollection so I may be a little off on this.

That's pretty much Youtube in a nutshell. People just hope for the best and ask for forgiveness later. That's entirely how Let's Plays started. I mean, what is really all that transformative about them that makes them fair use? Not much. Funny commentary isn't really enough to cut it. They just had to wait for companies to start allowing it and even allow money to be made from it.

And covers aren't fair use at all because they involve people performing other artist's songs. Even if you change it a lot, a song is still being covered as THAT song, so labels and artists can still claim you're stealing it. The whole point of a cover is to basically be for a specific song, which makes it an easy target for copyright claims.

 

[subversiveasset]

Youtube has worked out arrangements with several copyright owners to allow revenue sharing for covers (as long as you are performing all the parts yourself and not using any aspect of the original recording as a backing track). You can see this by going into Youtube "Music Policies"...for any particular song in that system, it should let you know what will happen if you use that song, and it should also have a section for what will happen if you perform a cover of a song. (in my experience, there are a lot of copyright owners that have revenue sharing enabled, but you can definitely find some songs that will take your cover down, no ifs, ands, or buts.)

Covers *should* be recognized by Content ID, so that shouldn't be an issue. From there, you should have an option to respond by saying that that is an original cover of the song, which should allow you to share revenue (if the copyright owner has set this up with YouTube).

Please note that copyright for covers is a bit more complicated than this and that this solution is really more of an ad hoc shortcut engineered by YouTube with several (but certainly not all) music copyright owners. From a technical legal standpoint, the other commenters here are right: 1) covers are not fair use, so without permission, you are violating copyright. 2) XXLRay is correct about needing mechanical and sync licenses as the "official" form of permission. I presume that YouTube's revenue sharing arrangement is meant to "cover" (pun...only kinda intended) these requirements, and so far, I haven't had any issues when my covers have been detected by content ID (although not every song is in the system...video game music often simply isn't in content ID, so the situation is far more precarious.)

 

[Idec Sdawkminn]

Thanks for the information so far. Does this mean remixes are more safe?

Remixes are safer than covers, but only by a small amount and only if they are done for a different purpose than the original. Most remixes are essentially just covers.

 

[subversiveasset]

Remixes are safer than covers, but only by a small amount and only if they are done for a different purpose than the original. Most remixes are essentially just covers.

I don't think I would agree with that. How do you define a remix?

I would see a remix as using the original recording (if only to sample it, perhaps), and that means that they run afoul of the master recording copyright, rather than simply the composition copyright

 

[Idec Sdawkminn]

I don't think I would agree with that. How do you define a remix?

I would see a remix as using the original recording (if only to sample it, perhaps), and that means that they run afoul of the master recording copyright, rather than simply the composition copyright

That's why it's hard to give a definite answer. I was trying to be careful not to say that remixes were safer than covers in practice, only that they have the potential to be. On one hand it has potential to be more transformative since the purpose is usually to give it a different sound, but on the other hand it uses more of the copyrighted content (like you said). Plus, remixes are often used in the same way a cover would be, so in those cases they are actually worse than proper covers.