Many choir leaders demonstrate and teach songs by singing them. But can you lead a choir without being able to sing? Similarly, do you need to be able to read music to be a song arranger, or be a musician to write songs?
The simple answer to these questions (I believe) is “No.” Here’s why.
I’ve written before that even if it’s a folk song, somebody wrote it.
The identity of that individual may have been lost over time, but to honour the song, you still have the responsibility to try to find out who it was.
We saw last week that copyright law is an attempt to protect the rights of the creator(s) of a song. These rights include being acknowledged as the song’s writer(s) and having control over how the song is used by others. The song writer is said to own the song as a piece of intellectual property.
But what if we don’t know who wrote the song or if the song writer is dead or if the music publishing company has gone out of business or if two different people each claim to have written the song?
Before we can even begin to speak about what rights somebody might have over a particular song, we need to know who owns it.
When a song is first composed, the owner of the song is the person or people who wrote the music and the lyrics. These song owners then have automatic rights over their creation for a period of time established by law.
If the song is later written down and published or recorded in any way, then those publishers have ownership of the publishing and recording rights. Publishing and record companies are free to sell their songs to other people, thus getting further and further away from the original song writer.
For example, Michael Jackson used to own the publishing rights to pretty much every Beatles’ song. To beat bankruptcy, he sold his share of the rights to Sony in 2006.
Traditional songs that have been handed down from generation to generation seem to have come from nowhere, but somebody wrote them at some time. Unfortunately, we often don’t know who that individual is since such songs mutate and evolve over time. That is why there are so many songs credited to ‘anon’!
Many world cultures have never written their songs down and don’t even have the concept of ‘authorship’. In these days of global communication, it is very easy for Western musicians to appropriate such songs and claim rights over them.
The Smithsonian recently held an online conference on the subject of Who owns music? looking at the ethical and even philosophical questions which Smithsonian Folkways Recordings must wrestle with as it gathers the music of cultures around the world.
Click on “Access Archive” to hear a recording of Folkways’ D. A. Sonneborn telling stories of the music makers he’s met in a session that considers the idea of ownership in its largest sense.
For a variety of reasons, song writers sometimes decide to sell their songs to somebody else. Maybe they need to make money, or they’ve been tricked somehow, or they think that by selling it the song will get wider recognition.
Many of us are familiar with the pop song “The lion sleeps tonight” which was a hit for Tight Fit in 1982. This song is an adaptation of an earlier version called “Wimoweh” recorded by The Weavers in the 1950s.
The original song, “Mbube” was written by Solomon Linda in 1939. It was a huge success in his native South Africa. Linda sold his rights to the song for 10 shillings (less than $US 2) to the record company shortly after the recording was made.
The original recording was discovered by American musicologist Alan Lomax in the 1950s who passed it on to his friend Pete Seeger who was in The Weavers. Seeger assumed the song was in the public domain so The Weavers credited it to Paul Campbell, a fictitious entity used to copyright material.
Years later the song was used by the Disney Corporation in their movie The Lion King, earning an estimated US $15 million in that movie alone. Solomon Linda didn’t see a penny of this and died in poverty in 1962.
In February 2006, Linda's heirs reached a legal settlement with Abilene Music, who held the worldwide rights and had licensed the song to Disney.
Another example is You are my sunshine. First recorded in 1939, the song is copyright 1940, words and music by Jimmie Davis (who later went on to become Louisiana’s state governor) and Charles Mitchell.
The song was first recorded by the Pine Ridge Boys on August 22, 1939; the Rice Brothers Gang recorded it on September 13, 1939; Jimmie Davis bought the ‘rights’ to the song from Paul Rice for $35 in late 1939. Davies never claimed to have written the song, but Paul Rice claimed to have composed it in 1937.
But the song wasn’t Rice’s to sell. According to an article by Theodore Pappas in 1990, There are still people alive, who remember hearing the song long before 1937 - in particular, a mid 1930s performance of the song by Riley Puckett himself - and what these people remember is the name of the musician with whom both Riley Puckett and Paul Rice played in the early 1930s: Oliver Hood of LaGrange, Georgia.
There are many other examples of disputed ownership, some of which have never been resolved. Here are two examples.
Tsena, tsena is another song recorded by The Weavers! It is a very popular Israeli song composed by Issachar Miron in 1941.
In about 1947 an American, Julius Grossman, added a third part to Miron’s song which ended up being published in 1949 and credited entirely to Grossman. Miron took Grossman to court in 1954 and won.
The court case makes fascinating reading and gives an insight into the complexities of copyright law. One interesting claim was that neither party wrote the song at all, but that it was in the public domain long before 1941 so was freely up for grabs!
The song Malaika was made famous by the South African singer Miriam Makeba although it was first recorded by Kenyan musician Fadhili William and his band Jambo Boys in 1960.
Authorship of the song is often attributed to Fadhili William, but that is somewhat disputed. It appears that the song was written in the 1940s by a Tanzanian, but at least two song writers claim it. There are also claims from Kenya and other East African countries. It may be that William wrote one of the verses, but it’s almost certain that he didn’t write the whole song.
There is no clear owner of the song, although Fadhili William is now generally recognized as the composer for royalty purposes.
Whether consciously or not, many song writers end up ‘borrowing’ tunes or lyrics from other songs. Some even go as far as claiming a song as their own composition even though they know it was written by somebody else.
A famous example of ‘borrowing’ bits of tune was George Harrison’s court case claiming that he had plagiarised the melody for “My sweet Lord” from the 1963 hit single “He’s so fine.”
Many songs appear to be in the public domain (i.e. not covered by intellectual property rights) because they are very old or nobody knows who owns them. But the way that copyright law works, even if the original song writer is long dead, somebody may still ‘own’ the song.
A couple of years back I released a live CD with my community choir WorldSong. Before we could produce the CD, we had to check whether we had permission to record each of the songs.
One of the songs we wanted to put on the CD was How can I keep from singing? This song is a Christian hymn written by American Baptist minister Robert Lowry (1826 – 1899). Since he died so long ago, I naturally assumed that the song was now in the public domain.
When I received the paperwork back from MCPS (the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society) I was informed that the song’s UK copyright is held by Harmony Music Ltd. and the song is credited to Sankey and Plenn.
The song was published by Lowry in 1869. He claimed to have written the music, but he didn’t say where the lyrics came from. In 1878 the American gospel singer and composer Ira D. Sankey published his own setting of the words, writing that the words were anonymous.
Doris Plenn learned the original hymn from her grandmother, who reportedly believed that it dated from the early days of the Quaker movement. Plenn contributed an additional verse around 1950, which was taken up by Pete Seeger and other folk revivalists who modified much of the overtly Christian wording.
So it seems that the song is still in copyright because of the extra lyrics added by Plenn in the 1950s. I still haven’t found out how come the copyright is held by Harmony Music!
Just because a song is old, doesn’t mean that it’s automatically in the public domain.
Next week I’ll be looking at how you go about getting permission to use a song in order to perform it, record it, arrange it, etc. Also how to claim rights over your own song writing. This will refer to the situation in the UK only I’m afraid.
This is the fifth in a series of seven posts about songs and copyright:
Every song was written by somebody and it seems fair and reasonable to acknowledge (and maybe reward) that person. This is the basic principle underlying the copyright laws, even though such laws may seem heavy-handed at times.
Last week I looked at the kinds of things we might want to copyright and what kinds of rights we can give people over these things.
Now we come to how all these good intentions have become embedded in law.
If a song is protected by copyright in any form (sheet music, CD recording, arrangement, etc.), then there are certain things that you can do, certain things that you need permission to do, and certain things that you can’t do.
The one thing you definitely can’t ever do is to claim work as your own if you didn’t make it. The creator of the song has the moral right to be identified as its creator.
The most important thing that you can’t do is to copy a song in any way without permission. Hence the phrase ‘copy right’.
What you can do, having bought the sheet music or recording of a song, is to play it or sing it for your own enjoyment, but you can’t make copies for your mates or choir members.
When you buy a song in the form of sheet music or as a recording, you have effectively been granted a license which allows you to do certain things with it. The terms of these licenses vary, but basically they allow you (within reason) to do what you like with the song for your own personal use.
Usually (unless otherwise stated) you can’t do anything with it from which you will gain financially (teach it, lend it, perform it, play it at a club, sell copies of, broadcast it). And as we’ve seen above, you can’t copy it, although in practice it’s probably OK to burn a CD of some MP3s that you’ve bought so you can play them in your car. But even then I’m not sure it’s totally legal!
Depending on the medium of the song (written music, recording, etc.) there are many different ways of copying it, some more obvious than others:
There are other ways of copying a song which people think aren’t really copying so it doesn’t count:
These are all forms of copying and as such are subject to copyright laws.
In a traditional choir which uses written sheet music, the choir have to buy one copy of the music for each and every choir member. To save costs, it’s sometimes possible to borrow or rent a whole set of scores for a one-off performance.
But in a choir that doesn’t use sheet music, the situation is different. The choir leader may buy the sheet music and then teach the song by ear. In which case, the composer/ publisher/ arranger is losing out on their ‘normal’ revenue. Some song writers and arrangers ask you to pay the equivalent of buying one copy for every choir member even if you only need one copy because you’re going to teach it by ear.
And what if your choir leader uses their single copy of the sheet music to make some parts CDs which are then sold or distributed amongst choir members so they can learn their parts? This is a form of copying so is breaking copyright law.
Some song writers and arrangers don’t read or write music. They pas on their work by recording their songs or producing teaching CDs with the individual parts on. You may find that buying a song in this way is a lot more expensive than buying sheet music. The reason is that the arranger/ song writer knows that you will probably be teaching their song/ arrangement to your choir or workshop so factor that in to the price (rather like publishers insisting you buy one copy of the sheet music for each choir member).
It is all too easy, especially when teaching by ear, to just buy one copy of the sheet music, or make parts CDs without realising that you’re making money from somebody else’s work.
In the UK, copyright in a musical or literary work generally lasts for 70 years after the composer or author dies. A sound recording is typically protected for 50 years from when it was made (although some artists are lobbying to have that extended!), and a printed edition is generally protected for 25 years from when it was first published.
You are probably familiar with the © symbol. This is the copyright symbol used to indicate that something is protected by copyright. To explicitly assert your rights to a piece of work that is written down, simply put the copyright symbol (or the word ‘Copyright’) followed by the year of publication/ creation then your name.
The symbol for sound recording copyright is a ‘p’ in a circle. You will need this on CD recordings of your song for example.
Other symbols you may come across are the registered trademark symbol ®. Trademarks that have not been registered use the symbol TM. A trademark is typically a name, word, phrase, design or logo. This may apply, for example, to your choir or band name or logo if you wish to protect it.
Pretty much every piece of sheet music or recording is copyrighted, even if there is no explicit copyright symbol. Just because it appears to be an old song, don’t assume that it’s in the public domain (i.e. not subject to copyright).
It is up to the creator of a piece of work whether they want to restrict what you can do with their song. You may find at the bottom of a piece of sheet music “Feel free to photocopy and pass on”. There are also other ways in which creators can protect or license their work (see a later post in this series), so you can’t assume that all work is protected in the same way. Do your research!
It is so much easier these days to copy material due to its digital format (no loss of information – remember those hissy tapes that your mates used to pass around?) and our networked world (mobile phones, internet). That just means that illegal copying is harder to keep control of than before. The same fears were around when the printing press was invented. Prior to that, sheet music and lyrics had to be copied by hand.
Illegal downloads and file sharing abound. Copying a CD for your mate is a breeze. Making a half-way decent recording of a live gig is almost undetectable. So copying is easier, but it’s still against the law.
But which law? Because of our global connectivity, it is becoming increasingly difficult to know which law applies and who is responsible for breaking it (the downloader, PC owner, ISP, mobile network?).
We’ve all read recently of the heavy-handed and perhaps misguided attempts by record companies to give huge fines to individuals who are found to have downloaded material that they hadn’t paid for. We also know about the cheap knock-off DVDs that are sold at car boot sales alongside pirated copies of the latest release of Windows.
Most stories that hit the news are about recorded movies, music or software and involve large multi-national corporations. If someone rips off a Madonna or Robbie Williams song and makes a fortune from it or passes it off as their own, the lawyers will be all over it in seconds.
But what about the world of choirs and community singing? Are the police likely to raid a concert where you’re performing your illicit, unlicensed arrangement of a Beatles song? Will the music publishers be down on you like a ton of bricks if you teach said song in a workshop?
What if you’ve very properly bought a licensed arrangement of a Beatles song as sheet music, but then go on to teach it by ear to your choir or even produce parts CDs? And if you your friend passes you the recorded parts of this amazing African song that’s been doing the rounds, are you definitely going to check that the arrangement is not in copyright or the song is really in the public domain?
The reality is that we can (and almost certainly do) get away with these things. But are you comfortable making a living from other people’s hard work? For instance, that African song I was sent recently turns out to be a modern arrangement that has been published as sheet music which I really should have bought.
It may seem OK doing a few Beatles or ABBA arrangements and making a few quid teaching them in a workshop, after all, they probably don’t need the money! But what if the song in question was from a struggling singer-songwriter who is desperately trying to make a living? In a later post I’ll show exactly how you can get permission to do all these sorts of things without breaking the law (if that makes you feel better).
But a lot of what we do ends up being about individual conscience. Next week I want to look a bit deeper into the moral aspect of copyright. Is it just a capitalist invention? Can there really be such a thing as intellectual ‘property’? Who ‘owns’ the music of a particular culture or tradition? Can the ‘ownership’ of a song be bought and sold? Who owns the song?
This is the fourth in a series of seven posts about songs and copyright:
Last week I wrote about the basic principles underlying the concept of copyright.
This week I’ll look in more detail at the kinds of things we might want to copyright and what kinds of rights we can give people over these things.
In the beginning a song exists just inside somebody’s head. It may or may not have words or harmonies. It might just be a simple tune or it may be a lush arrangement with many verses and lyrics. At this point the song writer has complete control over their creation.
At some point though, in order to communicate the song, it has to be sung to somebody or written down in a form that other people can understand. This is where it can get messy. People can then take your song and copy, steal, adapt, mis-represent, sell, or perform it whenever they like without your permission. This is where copyright comes in.
There are two basic elements to any song: the music and the lyrics. These are separate entities and each is subject to its own copyright:
This makes sense as it’s possible to put different words to a musical work, or to set a literary work to a different tune. Also, it’s often the case that the person who writes the music is not the same as the person who writes the lyrics. They each have independent rights over their work.
But there can be other elements to a song that also need protection depending on what people want to do with it.
As a writer of a song, you will want to decide who can do each of these activities and under what arrangement (financial or otherwise).
As a user of a song, you will need to know what permissions you have and who you have to ask.
As you can see from the list above, there can be a lot of people involved in using a song and they all have rights that can be protected. Here is a list of some of the people who need some kind of control over their work.
The person who
This is by no means an exhaustive list.
We’ve seen that there can be many forms of a song or elements to it that might need protecting (music, lyrics, recording, sheet music, etc.) and many individuals who are connected with these (song writer, lyricist, arranger, publisher, record company, etc.).
Because of the complex world we live in, it is not necessarily the case that the person who wrote the music owns the rights to that music, nor is it necessarily the case that the person who originally recorded the song owns the rights to the use of that recording.
Because of this, any law that attempts to protect all parties involved is going to be necessarily complex and may not get everything right. To make things more difficult, we live in a global society so not only do we have the laws of our own country to consider, but also international copyright law.
Next week I’ll dip a tentative toe into the legal side of copyright. I’ll consider what you can and can’t do with a song, how long copyright lasts and how the law is enforced. I’ll be focusing on British law (since that’s where I’m based), but many of the principles are similar in other countries.
Do drop by and leave a comment if you have any copyright questions that you’d like me to answer, or if you have any comments on this series so far.
This is the third in a series of seven posts about songs and copyright:
Last week I introduced the idea of songs and copyright: Even if it’s a folk song, somebody wrote it. Every song was written by somebody and you should at the very least acknowledge that fact.
This week I want to look in more detail at the basic principles behind the idea of copyright and what it is trying to achieve (even though it might not succeed). In later posts I will be covering the specifics of what the law currently says and the different kinds of rights that exist.
Copyright is an attempt to help those who create songs to control who makes use of their work and the circumstances in which it is used.
The law of copyright attempts to provide a balance between the interests of those who invest skills, effort, time and money in the creation of works on the one hand, and those who want to use and enjoy those works on the other.
Any song writer wants their music to be heard and enjoyed by as many people as possible, but they also want to have some control over how their songs are used and disseminated.
I can think of three main rights that a song writer would like:
Notice that none of these necessarily involve money, although it is often the case these days that song writers are trying to make a living from their work. These three rights seem to me to be about common decency and respect.
In most countries laws have been created to give basic rights such as those above to song writers.
Unfortunately, over the years, some of these laws have become draconian and are more likely to involve large multi-national corporations than individual song writers.
There is much debate on copyright laws and how they might be changed ranging from those who want to extend the laws, to those who want to relax them or dispense with them entirely.
Despite the sometimes heavy-handedness of the law, the basic principle of giving rights to song writers is still important.
There are alternatives to the main copyright laws which I will discuss in a later post (e.g. copyleft, Creative Commons). Basically they involve granting a license under intellectual property laws to authorise the use of a work in specified ways.
The users of songs don’t really have the same kinds of rights to protect, but they do have their own needs: to sing songs, to arrange songs, to record songs, to play songs that they didn’t write themselves. And of course the song writers themselves welcome and encourage this. So there is a need to find a way that both parties can be satisfied. A difficult juggling act!
Next week I’ll be looking at the different kinds of rights that someone might want over a particular song. For example they may want to record it, write it down, perform it, broadcast it, arrange it, etc. Also, what exactly is it that is being copyrighted? Is it a piece of sheet music or the notes themselves or a particular version on a CD?
This is the second in a series of seven posts about songs and copyright: