The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #1

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    Surely, the playing of copyright Jazz standards at gigs without paying any royalties, is an infringement of copyright material. Hmmmmmmmm....................................

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  3. #2

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    In the US, that's right, and venues therefore normally a blanket licensing fee to ASCAP and BMI.

  4. #3

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    Venues that play live music, radios, tv's need to pay licensing fees, it is generally not the responsibility of the performing musicians.

    Music licensing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  5. #4

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    Quote Originally Posted by dingusmingus
    In the US, that's right, and venues therefore normally a blanket licensing fee to ASCAP and BMI.
    Thanks for the info, so It's the venue who pays. I'll checkout the situation here in the UK, it's probably similar.

  6. #5

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    Thanks, I've just looked into it, in the UK, the venue needs a PRS license.

    "PRS licenses:
    • The use of the actual lyrics and composed music in any public performance of music, on behalf of the song writers, composers and publishers.
    • This includes using the radio, CDs, and streaming on the internet, music on television and also live music performances.
    • Again a public performance is considered to be anywhere outside of a domestic environment in front of an audience, which can be one person."

  7. #6

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    yeah...and no money is going to Wes, Tal or Joe or Barney anymore...unless we mention their successions...
    Thank god Gershwin is out of their reach now...well let say, I said I was schooled in the other thread on the youtube rights but well was just playing the "clueless" who knows exactly who is ca$hing on artists and make sure no one forgets...
    But we don't make the rules...
    Last edited by vinlander; 07-25-2014 at 09:40 PM.

  8. #7

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    Quote Originally Posted by vinlander
    yeah...and no money is going to Wes, Tal or Joe or Barney anymore...unless we mention their successions...
    Thank god Gershwin is out of their reach now...well let say, I said I was schooled in the other thread on the youtube rights but well was just playing the "clueless" who knows exactly who is ca$hing on artists and make sure no one forgets...
    But we don't make the rules...
    It's a very confusing situation because there are lots of players playing Jazz standards on Youtube, Soundcloud, etc, but who's paying the original composers their copyright royalties...............

  9. #8

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    Quote Originally Posted by GuyBoden
    Thanks for the info, so It's the venue who pays. I'll checkout the situation here in the UK, it's probably similar.
    Same in UK - Performing Rights Society (I think) collects from license paid by venues.

  10. #9

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    Quote Originally Posted by GuyBoden
    It's a very confusing situation because there are lots of players playing Jazz standards on Youtube, Soundcloud, etc, but who's paying the original composers their copyright royalties...............
    Royalties are payable on these but in most cases they are probably not being paid.

  11. #10

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    IMO the Standards should all be Public Domain by now, but they keep extending the length of copyright. A culture's art needs to be freely available so people can enjoy and learn about their heritage.

  12. #11

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    Quote Originally Posted by GuyBoden
    It's a very confusing situation because there are lots of players playing Jazz standards on Youtube, Soundcloud, etc, but who's paying the original composers their copyright royalties...............
    PRS for Music and YouTube sign licensing deal

  13. #12

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    Quote Originally Posted by docbop
    IMO the Standards should all be Public Domain by now, but they keep extending the length of copyright. A culture's art needs to be freely available so people can enjoy and learn about their heritage.
    Music is the property of the creator, and most work as long and hard at it as any other legitimate profession. Is it wrong for them to want to have their property be part of their estate to benefit their heirs for other generations like anybody else? When you die should anyone have the right to take your property/investments away from your family just because you are dead?

    Some one like Frank Zappa spent his whole life financing the production of his "serious" work out of his own pocket, paid a salary to the Mothers to keep them together and employed even when they weren't recording or touring. His music is pretty much all he left to his family, and as long as there is some kind of exploitable market for it, it should help feed his kids and grandkids. IMO

  14. #13

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    Quote Originally Posted by docbop
    IMO the Standards should all be Public Domain by now, but they keep extending the length of copyright. A culture's art needs to be freely available so people can enjoy and learn about their heritage.
    I agree with Cosmic Gumbo's response to this but wanted to stress another side of it: the presence of copyright doesn't keep the general public from learning about or enjoying standards. Libraries make recordings and sheet music available for free. Even if record companies were not paying royalties to, say, the estate of Irving Berlin for a performance of "Blue Skies," it doesn't follow that the recording would be free, or even cost less. Or that the sheet music for it would be free. Or cost less.

  15. #14

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    Quote Originally Posted by cosmic gumbo
    Music is the property of the creator, and most work as long and hard at it as any other legitimate profession. Is it wrong for them to want to have their property be part of their estate to benefit their heirs for other generations like anybody else? When you die should anyone have the right to take your property/investments away from your family just because you are dead?
    Look at it another way. I do a job. I get paid for the job. if I want to get paid again, I have to do another job. There is no expectation that I will continue to get paid over and over for the original job and never have to work again to continue to have an income, nor that this will transfer to my heirs.

    Check into the research as to why copyright laws were created and why (originally) copyright was time limited. Basically it boiled down to motivation. Copyright gives the creator a monopoly over the creation, allowing him or her to financially exploit the creation. This is intended to motivate creativity. Copyright used to be limited- 20 years in the US for a long time- because the theory went that losing that monopoly would incentivize creators to continue to create new things. When copyright expired, the creation entered the public domain. The granting of a temporary monopoly allows for private goods which ultimately become public goods. This was the accepted order of things for many, many years. The same rationale applies to patents, which is why you can buy generic acetaminophen at 1/4 to 1/3 of the price of Tylenol.

    Enter Mickey Mouse.

    When copyright laws were first created and standardized, artistic creations did not amount to billions of dollars in revenue. Mickey Mouse did amount to this and each time copyright came near expiration, lobbying of Congress resulted in retroactively extending copyright protection.

    Note that copyright protection covers several things. One half of royalties paid goes to the creator and one-half goes to the publisher- in theory. In reality the game is often rigged that the creator ends up signing away all their rights and gets little or nothing over the long term. According to Gene Lees's book, IIRC, that happened to Coltrane who reportedly got $500 for the Giant Steps LP. In the 60s, record companies made money hand over fist by lawyering up and stripping creators of their copyrights. The publishing industry is rarely the friend of artists and copyright law is geared to protect them more than it is artists.

    You may think that by paying royalties you are benefitting the creator and his or her family, but in many cases you are not. Frank was a smart man and understood about keeping the publishing and creator's rights; many if not most artists are not inclined to think along these lines, being instead concerned with their art. Gregg Allman is still owed just shy of $1,000,000 by Capricorn Records and he will never see a dime of it. U2 fully owns all the rights to their music and leases it to the record company, an approach they more or less pioneered and which has gained quite a bit of favor among savvier musicians. The Grateful Dead operated by allowing the audience to tape their concerts and trade them for free, basically destroying any profitable bootleg industry for their music (but there were other issues of people exploiting their name and trademarks for profit) and they were one of the top-grossing live acts for years.

  16. #15

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    Artists don't get paided for decades because they painted a classic painting, they want to keep money coming in they need to produce more art. I see song writing the same a song shouldn't be a lifetime paycheck, you're good you should be able to write more songs. I know back in the day record companies had staff songwriters and many of there songs were hits, but they got a pay check and that was it. So let them get royalties for ten years and go PD after that. If they are a good song writer they should be able to write more saleable material in ten years.

    We all do jobs and get paid and that's it. I was a programmer for a number of years and there is code I wrote still in use should I be getting a royalty for that, no I got paid to write it and I better write more code to keep getting checks. Plus all the extending of copyright wasn't to help the writers, it was to once again do something for large corporations who own the rights. They either bought the material or paided a employee to write it, so the real creator isn't benefiting anyway. Look at Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson who make a lot of money from buying rights to others catalogue of songs, again the origiaal creators aren't making anything, they got paid and moved on.

    That's just how I feel about it.

  17. #16

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    There are a couple of issues at work here.

    The creator or owner of the work has the right to set the terms of use and to expect others to respect those rights. The creator and the owner (if different) will typically agree a contract and money may change hands accordingly. The creator has a responsibility to ensure they are signing a contract that works for them.

    The second point is that if the same, or many, third parties are repeatedly making money, or aiming to make money, through the use of a work, they should pay for that use - unless the creator/owner stipulates otherwise.

    So, I might work a 9-5 for a salary, on the understanding that my employer owns (and likely protects) the copyright of any work I do. Or I might write music and hope to place it in a TV ad that plays thousands of times on prime time TV. In this case I'd expect to receive royalties as the owner, or more likely, shared royalties if a publisher placed it.

    Likewise, if a jazz act played my tune at a gig (dream on!), and the band received a fee and the venue owner made money from the event, in the UK at least I'd hope the performance would be logged with PRS, so there's a possibility of a royalty payment. I expect that savvy players submit these logs anyway when they pay their own tunes on gigs, if they are rights society members.

  18. #17

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    Quote Originally Posted by docbop
    Artists don't get paided for decades because they painted a classic painting, they want to keep money coming in they need to produce more art. I see song writing the same a song shouldn't be a lifetime paycheck, you're good you should be able to write more songs.
    The difference here is that there is only one Mona Lisa. Copies of versions of "All The Things You Are" are in the millions. I don't think just because I have a CD burner that I should be allowed to burn and sell copies of Miles Davis records.

  19. #18

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    Quote Originally Posted by vinlander
    yeah...and no money is going to Wes, Tal or Joe or Barney anymore...unless we mention their successions...
    Wes, Tal, Joe or Barney didn't a whole lot coming anyway because they didn't write a whole lot of music.
    We're not talking performance royalties here.

    To me the painting analogy is an apt one. Paint a picture...get paid for it. Want more money? Paint another picture.

  20. #19

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    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    The difference here is that there is only one Mona Lisa. Copies of versions of "All The Things You Are" are in the millions. I don't think just because I have a CD burner that I should be allowed to burn and sell copies of Miles Davis records.
    You're mixing up copyright and mechanical rights.

  21. #20

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    Quote Originally Posted by Flyin' Brian
    To me the painting analogy is an apt one. Paint a picture...get paid for it. Want more money? Paint another picture.
    This is a bad analogy. Paintings are individual pieces. There is only one Mona Lisa. Recordings may be duplicated (and sold) endlessly. The same song may be performed by a thousand different people in a thousand different venues around the world at the same time, or played on a thousand different radio stations at the same time.

    Another way to look at this: if you paint a picture and sell it to me, you give me the canvas and I have to whole of it. If you write a song, you don't sell "it" to a publisher. You work out a deal for certain rights.

    Or to put this another way: if you pay for a picture, you own it for ever (or until you sell it), and it is entirely yours. But if you pay for a band, you get one performance. Do you think if your band is paid for one night's gig that the venue owner now owns your band forevermore because he paid for it? No, no, no.

  22. #21

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    Quote Originally Posted by docbop
    You're mixing up copyright and mechanical rights.
    You're right that I mixed those up with that example. I apologize for that.

  23. #22

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    Ahem, artwork, paintings, photography, etc...are licensed for use the same way music is...or can be purchased and owned...same as music. I think you'd rather pay $12 to buy a CD than pay the musician full price for the exclusive ownership of the songs...

    Most artists do not sell many paintings, some do, but the career pros mostly license their artwork for reproduction..posters, magazines, internet, etc. The stuff you see hanging for sale in galleries represents only a small fraction of the actual revenue generated in the art industry.

    There seems to be little understanding of the actual basis on generating income with intellectual property. If it didn't work this way it would be cost prohibitive to provide content in any medium for public consumption.

    Anyone who creates work for hire and accepts a flat fee or hourly wage from a business that will financially exploit it a thousandfold is free to stupidly do so. Copyright is just meant to be an equitable proposition that allows business to flow smoothly and fairly from creator to marketer to consumer.

  24. #23

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    Guy,
    I have sent a PM to you on another subject I hope you
    don't mind, I am confident you will be able to answer
    my question(s) please.


    regards