Political rallies/campaigns/etc and songs

Parent Cafe
1

This is NOT POLITICAL so please don’t make it that way.

It seems that every election cycle, there is a kerfuffle over someone’s music being used by a candidate and/or her/his campaign and the artist objecting to the use of their music. So I’m curious… what happens in cases like this? Can the artist order the campaign to stop (I mean, I know they can, but is the order legal binding or just a request which can be ignored)? Can the campaign/candidate be sued? Does the campaign/candidate legally have to seek out artist permission before using her/his material?

I tried googling but my google skills are failing me :frowning:

2

I read this on CBS today. Hope it begins to address your question.

“Political campaigns don’t need musicians’ express permission to use their songs on the trail, just as long as they obtain a blanket license under performing rights organizations like ASCAP or BMI. Some licensing associations, like BMI, can also make special exceptions for their artists and include provisions in artists’ contracts that would allow them to exclude certain songs from the license.”

3

Yup… I read the same explanation earlier today. While I understand the blanket license and I’d heard about that contract before, you’d think there must be more to it because most politicians do indeed stop playing the songs that the artist requests. I would be interested in hearing if there are other situations where artists make use of the special exception option and request that their songs stop being used. Or is it only political campaigns (I doubt it)?

4

Well, for example, you couldn’t use a blanket ASCAP license to use a song in a commercial or even a movie. My guess is that if it were ever challenged in court the candidate would lose.

5

This guide explains it very well and lists the three major causes of action a musician can pursue against a political campaign:

http://www.ascap.com/~/media/files/pdf/advocacy-legislation/political_campaign.pdf

6

Right, but I’m thinking more along the lines of events… weddings/receptions, parties, conferences. All of those are events where an artist ‘might’ disagree with some philosophical aspect of the event or participants. I realize I’m reaching here, but I’m just curious if this ever comes up anywhere else, or if it’s just politics.

If anyone knows anything more about how the ‘special exception’ option works, I’d be interested in learning more. Do most artists opt in for provisions, and if so, are they allowed to specify which kinds of organizations it would apply to? Or are they allowed to make it retroactive once they are made aware of a politician or cause that they do not agree with using it? That seems to be how it has been used in political campaigns.

7

Ted Cruz’s campaign is being sued for copyright infringement for using songs without permission. A tech company has figured out how to “digitally watermark” music so it’s use can be tracked.

http://www.nola.com/business/index.ssf/2016/05/audiosocket_ted_cruz_copyright.html

8

Awesome. Intellectual property is property. How would Ted Cruz (or anyone who likes to steal digital content) feel if a bunch of squatters pitched a tent in his backyard? The yard is big… There is plenty of space.

9

Music has all kinds of crazy rights around it, there is the music itself, there are broadcast rights, performance licenses and so forth, a piece of music can have multiple rights holders…and from what I have seen, can be confusing as heck.

In terms of whether a campaign can use music or not, it depends. First of all, they would need to obtain a license to use the music and play it (assuming here that the politicians are likely playing a recording of the original song, which would involve I believe what they call mechanical reproduction rights(anyone familiar with that on here?),rather than performing it. It depends on who holds the rights and what kind of contract they have from what musician friends of mine have told me with the licensing agencies. So if BMI or ASCAP grants a license to use the music and play recordings of it, and the artist didn’t specifically have the right of refusal put into the contract with the agency, then the poitician could use it. Use in political campaigns does not have a broad waver from licensing, technically no one does, even groups like the Girl Scouts ran into problems with licensing agencies for songs sung around campfires (which quite honestly, was pathetic, it made the licensing firms look like greedy, ugly people, I believe they backed down when they realized how badly it made them look).

When conflicts have happened with artists and politicians, a lot of the time the politicians had not gotten licenses in the first place, they simply assumed they could use it, and if the artist disagreed with the politician it made it easy to get them to cease and desist. In other cases, the politicians had gotten the rights, but when the artist objected, rather than getting into a public fight over it, decided it was easier not to use it (there is sort of a parallel to this, parody is one of the few forms of music that does not require the person doing it to get a license/permission, but Weird Al for example makes it a point to get permission when he uses other artists music, he said he respects their feelings about how they want their music used. Funniest one had to be Paul McCartney refused him the right to use “Live and Let die” As “Chicken Pot Pie”, because Paul is a vegetarian:). Among other things, they simply may not want the ‘negative endorsement’ of a popular entertainer who objects to them using the music.

10

Musicparent, are you a copyright attorney?

11

You don’t have to be a lawyer to run into music rights and legalities and start learning… I’m in a musical organization and it’s an ongoing issue. Recordings, arrangements, performance, on and on and on…

Why do restaurants not sing “Happy Birthday” and instead have their own lame song? Well, someone sued over it years ago. They owned it.

12

Of course one needs to educate himself about the basics, but there is a reason copyright lawsuits are handled by the pros.

And FYI, you are incorrect about the happy birthday song. Apparently, that matter has been settled:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/warner-music-pays-14-million-863120

I will defer to our copyright legal experts to comment on the case.

13

Excuse my rant.

Yeah, that was settled this year. Not the year it got started.
Legal experts don’t need to comment. I had my own comments years ago and sang Happy Birthday above the "La La La "(clap, clap) that went on.

End rant :slight_smile:

And I speak this as someone who has copyrighted a song. Not that it is hard to copyright a song.

14

Isn’t anything over 75 years old free of copyright? So you could play any classical music without worrying. Or, would you then have to worry about the particular music you play, in terms of satisfying the legal rights of the conductor, orchestra, etc.?

15

I agree with Musicprnt; most clear-headed politicians, in the name of self-interest, will cease use at the first objection from the artist as to avoid an embarrassing public spat. Years ago some national Republican dropped broadcasts of Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Be Happy’ at rallies when the artist objected. And Springsteen famously told Ronald Reagan’s campaign to stop broadcasting ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ over the loudspeakers at Reagan rallies.

Not with regard to music per se, but the funniest musician-politician disagreement I can recall was Bruce Springsteen’s refusal to invite Gov. Christ Christie to come over to chat with Springsteen on an airline flight. Christie is a notorious Springsteen fan and was excited when he spied the Boss on the same flight. Christie asked a steward to approach the Springsteen with the request. The Boss gave the Gov “the E Street Shuffle,” in a manner of speaking.

16

@bunsenburner:
I am not a copyright attorney, but I have a lot of friends who are musicians, plus my son looked into it when he tried to start a small business of his own, and the copyright laws are not always that clear from everything I have been seen and told. If you notice, I wasn’t giving anyone advice on what to do, I simply was explaining what I have learned from my musician friends and people in the industry, plus my son’s experience (for example, there are different copyright laws for recorded performance, in the US it is like 1920 and before becomes public domain, in Europe and Canada is it later than that). Usually when artists work with rights agencies, according to my friend who has a band and is a songwriter, there usually is a blanket contract that covers licensing rights, so a politician could likely get a license from the licensing agency, for a mechanical license (recorded music) or for the right to have a band perform it or the rights to the music itself (the sheet music), and there are other nuances to it that are beyond my level. According to my music friends, very few people likely have right of refusal in their contracts, though a major performer might have the clout to negotiate something like that.

There was a stink years ago when ASCAP or BMI went after the girl scouts, with songs they were singing around the campfire, it was a major black eye and they backed down, among other things given the nature of the girl scouts and other non profit groups, it is pretty crappy to be claiming that is covered by the performing rights portion.

17

Musicparent, knowing someone who did something in the field is akin to staying at a Holiday Inn Express and should be disclaimed as such. I am a co-inventor of 10+ US patents… That does not make me qualified to give advice on patenting and litigation strategies because I am not a lawyer with relevant experience. :wink:

18

@bunsenburner:
You might have 10 patents, but you have problems with reading comprehension. No one asked for legal advice, and I gave none, I simply commented on music copyright law as I know it about Politiicans and fair use of music.If someone had a situation like this, I would refer them to a lawyer, but no one did, and I don’t know what induced that fantasy. As far as someone in the field telling me about these things, one of them is a lawyer who works for my firm who worked for a record label for several years after they got out of law school, so it wasn’t guess work…but again, we were talking about a situation out there, I was not giving legal advice to anyone, especially since no one asked for it.

19

Nope. No problems with comprehension. Neither you not I are qualified to answer Teri’s questions. :wink:

20

Music copyrights are property, but they aren’t property like any other type of property.

Basically, ASCAP and BMI license 99.9% of the available copyrighted music in blanket performance licenses. The price for these differ if you are a catering hall, a bar, a dance studio, a nightclub, a radio station, or a stadium (or, for that matter, a travelling political campaign), but if you have the licenses you can pretty much play any music available in any medium over the PA system within the scope of your license type without committing a copyright violation. I’m not positive what the situation is with online play – at one point, Congress was creating a blanket license and license fee, but the rights-management companies (ASCAP & BMI) may be involved now.

The regular performance license also permits someone to come in with a guitar or a piano (or a cover band) and perform a version of a song written by someone else (or even by him- or herself, if someone else holds the copyright, which is usually the case).

If you want to record a song, and you don’t personally own the copyright, you need to get a different sort of license. If you want to alter the song in some significant way, you need specific permission for that. If you want to sample someone else’s recording of a song, you need a completely different license, often from a different company altogether – the record company, vs. the publisher or a rights-management company. And if you want to incorporate someone else’s recording or a copyrighted song into a film or TV ad or internet clip, you need yet another kind of license. All of these sorts of licenses are negotiated more on a case-by-case basis, which lets some artists, say, keep their music out of commercials (and other artists license their songs to commercials for cheap in order to get exposure). Sometimes it gets very hairy – there was an article in the New York Times this weekend about a young indie artist who had to recall and trash every physical copy of his new album because Ric Ocasek never agreed to a license to sample “You’re Just What I Needed”. And the DVD of Cameron Crowe’s movie Almost Famous included a sequence that was dropped from the movie because they couldn’t license “Stairway To Heaven” for it. On the DVD, it was provided without a soundtrack, but with instructions when to start playing the song on a separate device.

In general, nothing in copyright law or the terms of standard performance licenses would stop a candidate from playing a particular song at a political rally. If the venue and/or the campaign have an appropriate blanket performance license, what they are doing is perfectly fine from a copyright perspective. (Not true if they are putting footage of the rally and the song into campaign ads, though.) But, as the ASCAP sheet points out, there is non-copyright law – law that is much harder to enforce, by the way – that attempts to prevent one person from giving a false impression that another has endorsed the first person, or from otherwise profiting from an unlicensed use of the other person’s image and reputation.