Frustration with local businesses

[Peter Riding]

Its pretty clear that if you take a copyright sound track from a CD and use it as background to your online video you are in breach of copyright.

But there are so many shades of grey in between and I've never been able to find a definitive answer. OK in the UK you can sidestep the offline usage legitimately by buying affordable licenses for offline limited quantity use only.

But online?

Take this scenario: you are shooting a hip downtown walkabout sequence that is improvised and cannot be re-shot. A car driver waiting at traffic lights has his roof down and copyright music blaring out for a good 30 seconds whilst he waits for the lights to change. You cannot help but have it in the shoot, it was part of what happened. Music industry would no doubt say tough luck.

Or this one: shooting bride getting ready. She has a music channel playing on the TV. Tough luck again?

Or a more common one: The first dance. Who wants the sterile sound of tracks taken direct from the DJ's deck? No. Much more attractive to be able to include the hoots claps and cheers of the crowd, and almost inevitably the technical quality of the music track will not be anything like CD quality.

At what point does music become incidental to the production and copyright not relevant?

I've found you have to put some serious time and effort into finding suitable royalty free tracks. I have about two dozen usable ones now. I think they are usually more desirable than recognisable hits anyway; I use instrumentals so they are easy to cut and trim. From the clients side commercial tracks may seem like a good idea at the time but their tastes may change, the artist may be involved in some scandal that taints the memory, the tracks may quickly become dated uncool etc.

Pete

[Chris Davis]

Originally Posted by Thomas Smet

Or unplug all your microphones during the reception where you will be recording dozens of songs? Technically recording a DJ playing music could violate copyright as well if we really wanted to be conservative about music copyright law.

Recording the music isn't a violation of copyright. Using the recording of that music in our own work is.

That's why I quit wedding video. I'm convinced the way the laws are structured in the USA, wedding video as we know it is technically illegal.

[Noa Put]

I'm convinced the way the laws are structured in the USA, wedding video as we know it is technically illegal.

The same applies for Europe, but since your dvd's are destined to be used in a private environment the music industry doesn't care that much, they only care if you go outside that private circle to promote your business and even then it depends on how "visible" you are. Like with Joe Simon where one video got viral, drew too much attention causing a full check up on all his videos. As his video's where on Vimeo they could easily spend more time to take a lot more Vimeo's videos (and their owners) down due to violation of copyright, but they didn't, so why is that? This whole music business is one big corrupted mess and gives me a headache, even when you think you are safe you are sometimes not and it's very difficult to find out like I did some time ago with Songfreedom claiming to have worldwide synch rights on a particular song but not necessarily the streaming rights. Only that was said after I found out they where lying to me and when I confronted them with it. So where does this leave me as a paying client who wants to do it right?