Guest Blogger on NewMusicBox
I’m honored to have been asked to write a series of posts during September on music and copyright for NewMusicBox, the online magazine of NewMusic USA, an organization that supports creators, performers and presenters of “new music” (sometimes referred to as contemporary classical or experimental music, including jazz) by American composers. Although these posts will […]
No, You Don’t Own Your Arrangement of That Hit Song
[Note: A slightly edited version of this post has been published in Vol.35, No.9 of The Licensing Journal (Wolters Kluwer, October 2015)] A guitarist contacted me recently. He creates arrangements of popular songs and puts the PDFs of the music for sale on his website. The first thing I asked him is whether he got […]
What’s Next for ASCAP and BMI as SESAC Buys The Harry Fox Agency?
A lot of people are wondering what it means for the music industry since it was reported that the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), the leading trade organization for US music publishers, has sold its wholly-owned mechanical licensing subsidiary, The Harry Fox Agency, Inc. (HFA) to SESAC, Inc., the smallest of the three domestic music […]
Bieber, Usher and the Fourth Circuit Dancing About Architecture
On a certain level, the June 18 decision from the Fourth Circuit in Copeland v. Bieber is fairly routine, with only the click-bait of pop star defendants Justin Bieber and Usher setting the case apart from any other copyright infringement case involving music. However, since this is an appellate decision, unlike the jury verdict in […]
The Director’s Cut Out of the Copyright by the Second Circuit
In its June 29 opinion in 16 Casa Duse, LLC v. Merkin, the Second Circuit, citing the Ninth Circuit’s en banc decision in Garcia v. Google, held that a director does not have an independent copyrightable interest in a motion picture. In addition to affirming the District Court’s granting of summary judgment in favor of […]