Currently Fighting Two Claims on My Latest Project

Personally I don't know why things that are such a problem. I feel like if you credit the creators of a song, there shouldn't be an issue.
 
subversiveasset said:
are you compensating them for the use of their content?

It's not simply about attribution. From their perspective, you are depriving them of revenue.
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Right. As long as you're just using it flat out. If you're critiquing or parodying it, then I think you should be left alone.
 
Shakycow said:
...and, in your parody, did you use their audio or did you create your own in order to parody theirs?
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Used theirs, which is still allowed, especially if it's not the entire work. Television won't do it because it's a big mess and lawsuits WILL happen.
 
daniel burgio said:
Used theirs, which is still allowed, especially if it's not the entire work.
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It sounds more like you're parodying the video while using the original audio... which is not allowed. You could recreate or modify it, but to use it as is would be a violation of the music's copyrights.

The audio has (multiple) completely separate copyrights than the show/ movie. By using it unchanged, you're not parodying the music, the recorded performance of it, or the music's composition.
 
But say I use the Doctor Who theme to parody the opening of Doctor Who by making a stupefied version. Shouldn't that be covered? Because I'm pretty sure it should.
 
daniel burgio said:
But say I use the Doctor Who theme to parody the opening of Doctor Who by making a stupefied version. Shouldn't that be covered? Because I'm pretty sure it should.
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There's simply not a lot of case law out here for parody as part of fair use (which is definitely a problem, because fair use is something whose detailed are fleshed out through case law -- as noted, it's a legal defense, not a right), but what
Shakycow is getting at is the difference between the copyright associated with the composition (e.g., the concept of the song, including melody, harmony, lyrics, etc.,) vs the copyright associated with the master recording (e.g., the actual sound files)

So, presumably, parody is a defense against infringement of the first (you're using some part of the compositions, such as part of the lyrics OR part of the concept of the song, but probably not both/all) by using those elements to critique the original piece (and there's a difference between parody and satire -- so your critique must be related to the original work. You can't just use it to criticize something *else*)

OK, so that previous paragraph just describes the composition. That "covers" (pun fully intended) if you were to re-record the relevant parts or re-record the lyrics in the same style (or to use different lyrics). (The pun is that cover music usually violates the this second copyright.)

But what you're saying is that you're using the master recording -- that is, the actual sound files recorded by the other musicians.

So, now you have to defend the infringement of the sound recording itself. And this is a considerably different task, since IMO, most "arguments" about parody relate to the *composition* and not the actual *recording*.

I mean, the closest thing I can think of when the recording copyright comes into play intentionally is sampling, but there haven't been too many (if ANY) parody cases regarding sampled music. There are some fair use cases for sampling, but for the most part, the trend has been to say that sampling is NOT fair use. (And of course, some of the most well-known fair use cases involve less intentional sampling...such as the "Dancing Baby" case where the music was playing in the background, when music was playing in the background of a news program, etc., The Dancing Baby case didn't decide fair use...it just said that a company has to consider it first before throwing a blanket claim [but still...this isn't asking for a lot, since most companies aren't going to know what counts as fair use, and the court didn't decide conclusively.])

Even if you successfully made the case that your use of the composition was parody (and that would have to be determined in a court of law, of course), you'd have to make the case for why using the master recording is parody, and I don't know how you would do that.
 
subversiveasset said:
There's simply not a lot of case law out here for parody as part of fair use (which is definitely a problem, because fair use is something whose detailed are fleshed out through case law -- as noted, it's a legal defense, not a right), but what
Shakycow is getting at is the difference between the copyright associated with the composition (e.g., the concept of the song, including melody, harmony, lyrics, etc.,) vs the copyright associated with the master recording (e.g., the actual sound files)

So, presumably, parody is a defense against infringement of the first (you're using some part of the compositions, such as part of the lyrics OR part of the concept of the song, but probably not both/all) by using those elements to critique the original piece (and there's a difference between parody and satire -- so your critique must be related to the original work. You can't just use it to criticize something *else*)

OK, so that previous paragraph just describes the composition. That "covers" (pun fully intended) if you were to re-record the relevant parts or re-record the lyrics in the same style (or to use different lyrics). (The pun is that cover music usually violates the this second copyright.)

But what you're saying is that you're using the master recording -- that is, the actual sound files recorded by the other musicians.

So, now you have to defend the infringement of the sound recording itself. And this is a considerably different task, since IMO, most "arguments" about parody relate to the *composition* and not the actual *recording*.

I mean, the closest thing I can think of when the recording copyright comes into play intentionally is sampling, but there haven't been too many (if ANY) parody cases regarding sampled music. There are some fair use cases for sampling, but for the most part, the trend has been to say that sampling is NOT fair use. (And of course, some of the most well-known fair use cases involve less intentional sampling...such as the "Dancing Baby" case where the music was playing in the background, when music was playing in the background of a news program, etc., The Dancing Baby case didn't decide fair use...it just said that a company has to consider it first before throwing a blanket claim [but still...this isn't asking for a lot, since most companies aren't going to know what counts as fair use, and the court didn't decide conclusively.])

Even if you successfully made the case that your use of the composition was parody (and that would have to be determined in a court of law, of course), you'd have to make the case for why using the master recording is parody, and I don't know how you would do that.
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Well, I could just argue that the master recording is part of the bigger intro that I'm parodying as a whole. Now I'm intrigued to see if that would actually work. Either way, my channel's sort of dead on the water anyway, so I'll just see where this goes.
 
daniel burgio said:
Well, I could just argue that the master recording is part of the bigger intro that I'm parodying as a whole. Now I'm intrigued to see if that would actually work. Either way, my channel's sort of dead on the water anyway, so I'll just see where this goes.
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Right, arguing that the master recording is part of the bigger intro that you're parodying as a whole would be admitting that you're sampling (generally, samples don't use a large part of the original master recording, right). The problem is there isn't a lot of case law to suggest that sampling can be parody.

I mean, realistically, this is not going to go to court, and that's ultimately the only place where the arguments matter. Although I think it would be great if there were more copyright infringement cases that made its way to court (so we could have more established precedent about what is OK and what's not), that's realistically not going to happen because no one wants to spend the time and money on it.
 
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