Copyrights ???

Copyright is a legal right created by law according to the country to grant exclusive rights for the creator a of original work for it’s uses and distributions. In Australia there is a copyright council which was founded in 1968 and copyright law is set out in the copyright act 1968 (Cth). The main role of Copyright council is to represent the work of professional artists and content creators that are working in Australia creative industries and Australia major copyright collecting societies.

So who owns the copyright of music? In a single piece of music there can be more than one copyright owner. The composer who wrote the music owns the copyright of musical works, the artist who performed the music owns the copyright in a sound recording in their live performance and if there is lyrics in the track the lyricist who wrote the lyrics owns copyright in the literary works.

For this trimester university projects I had to work on Sound a like, Jingle and Remix. So those 3 different contain different attribute of copyrights ACT. In Australia there are 3 different copyright collecting societies and all of them are non-for-profit organisations which works for uses of copyright material on behalf of their member to collect license fees and distributed to members. Those three different societies are APRA, AMCOS, PPCA. When music is played in public or broadcast, permission is needed from the copyright owner. APRA becomes the owner of the public performance, broadcast and cable transmission rights. So composers, songwriters and music publishers join APRA. AMCOS is Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society. AMCOS administers a license for cover versions and also offers various miscellaneous license that includes the reproduction of music and also recordings in some cases. PPCA, The Phonographic Performance Company of Australia is an organisation which licenses the broadcast and public performance and some forms of communication of sound recordings. But since we are doing University projects for education purposes it can be exempted fro the copyright act.

For sound a like project it contains visual content of the original. But there are number of special exceptions in the Copyright Act that effect educational institutions. And sound a like is also a different version and almost similar but not original. So I believe we might need AMCOS license for it if we are doing for non educational.

For the remixes we are using material creating by others. For music such as notes, musical, phrases, melodies and other elements that make up a song and also song recordings. Copyright protects each of them separately. We need to ask permission to use the original materials from the owner to work on remix. Or I can put it under creative commons that the copyright owner may attach different conditions to the Creative Commons license that signify the ways in which that material may be used. If we want to use something without first getting permission it can use material that has been licensed CC-BY (attribution only), so this type of material can be edited, chopped up and remixed without permission as long as the original creator is credited.

For Jingles work I need to get copyright for visuals and samples I used in the jingle production. For Visual there is Audio-Visual copyright society limited that administers the license for audio-visual. But it allow educational institutions to copy and communicate. And also the samples we used in our jingle also depend on it some are paid and some are release under creative common and some are free to use.

So depend on what we are doing we need to check with three main societies APRA, AMCOS and PPCA in Australia.