Infringement issues with music often deal with sound recordings (e.g., downloading an album off a torrent site, using a song from your iTunes library in a YouTube video without a license, etc.), but in this case, we are more concerned with the copyright on the compositions of songs.

mp3 or, in ages past, a CD or cassette tape. The sound recording is the recording of a musician’s performance of the song, the thing you’d buy from iTunes or Amazon as an. Think of this as the sheet music, with all the information one would need to perform the song. The musical composition is the music itself as written by the composer(s), in other words, all the notes that comprise the song along with any words. The copyright to a work includes a whole bunch of distinct exclusive rights regarding the use of that work, including the right to publicly perform the work, the right to sell and distribute duplicates, and the right to make derivative works.Ī typical recording of a song has (at least) two separate copyrights:

Therein lies a potential problem with this feature: musical works are protected by copyright, and music copyright in particular can be a tricky, complicated onion: there’s a bunch of layers (I almost typo’ed that to “lawyers,” which could also be accurate), and they can often lead to tears when not handled properly.Ĭopyright protects “original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium,” for example, literature and music. “Who’s been playing MY music?!” Copyrights on Music

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