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Friday, March 14, 2014
Can choir instructor photocopy purchased sheet music?
Law Offices of Gordon P. Firemark: Entertainment Lawyer Gordon Firemark answers a question about the rights to copy sheet music for use in a school setting.
I’ve always wondered how schools got away with this. I just always assumed that a school pays for a special license when they purchase an arrangement for performance.
I don’t see how this is very different from a piece of software. If you purchase 30 seats of AutoCAD, it doesn’t matter if you make a backup of the install disk (in fact, with digital delivery, that’s your only option sometimes) or what disk you use to install it, it’s the license to use the software that you pay for. I don’t see what a publisher should have an issue with a music instructor distributing 30 “archival copies” to students, as long as the genuine intent is to provide the students a copy to annotate, and as long as there is a genuine intent to destroy the music at the conclusion of the process.
At my high school our big thing was show choir and we often did covers of songs and for a while it was no big deal to make an arrangement of the song and photocopy it to no end. Then a friend of mine's mom, who works as a legal person for some people in the music industry, told us that we can't really be doing what we are doing. We have to pay for the rights to the song because it is someone's IP. People all over get away with just taking other people property and don't realize what exactly they are doing. It took legal help for us to realize what we are doing.
2 comments:
I’ve always wondered how schools got away with this. I just always assumed that a school pays for a special license when they purchase an arrangement for performance.
I don’t see how this is very different from a piece of software. If you purchase 30 seats of AutoCAD, it doesn’t matter if you make a backup of the install disk (in fact, with digital delivery, that’s your only option sometimes) or what disk you use to install it, it’s the license to use the software that you pay for. I don’t see what a publisher should have an issue with a music instructor distributing 30 “archival copies” to students, as long as the genuine intent is to provide the students a copy to annotate, and as long as there is a genuine intent to destroy the music at the conclusion of the process.
At my high school our big thing was show choir and we often did covers of songs and for a while it was no big deal to make an arrangement of the song and photocopy it to no end. Then a friend of mine's mom, who works as a legal person for some people in the music industry, told us that we can't really be doing what we are doing. We have to pay for the rights to the song because it is someone's IP. People all over get away with just taking other people property and don't realize what exactly they are doing. It took legal help for us to realize what we are doing.
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