Hey Danny, I like the thinking, but it seems like there are some issues. In case the following hand-waviness doesn't make it abundantly clear, IANAL and TINLA.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 4:58 PM, Danny Piccirillo <[email protected]> wrote: > Thinking subversively, are there standard contracts that studios and labels > use? Have they been leaked somewhere? Fairly standard, but of course every one varies. You can find, say, a standard studio contract in almost any book written about the music business for musicians. Moses Avalone's written a few good ones, and there's a classic by Donald Passman. I imagine the same thing exists for the movie industry, to a greater or lesser extent, but of course there are many different contracts for many different roles. Are there loopholes that would allow > creators to, while remaining under contract, exercise their own copyright by > declaring their works under free licenses FAL, FL, CC-BY-SA, or otherwise? > Or are are the copyrights generally fully transferred to the > studio/label/whatever? Generally the latter, is my understanding. There was a big push by the record labels to make studio recordings "works for hire", which would mean that the copyright would never lie with the original artist, but there was enough pushback that they stuck to a transferral. That's subject to the termination of transfer clause in the '76 act (see http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/11/copyright-time-bomb-set-to-disrupt-music-publishing-industries/) but that's only after 56 years. > > More practical and subversive, I'm wondering how copyright law holds up when > representing one creative work in another form. For example, what if you > created some software that could encode music in beautiful imagery? It would > no longer be a song, it would be a picture, a piece of art on its own, but > it could be translated back into that song, and used to circumvent copyright > that way, or would that still be illegal? This is an interesting hypothetical, aesthetically speaking, but I think these are just derivative works. So if you don't hold the copyright on the "underlying" work (the music being transformed into the image) you couldn't readily claim copyright on the resulting work (and would be subject to infringement claims). BUT y'know, go ahead and try it out if you can pull it off! > > Yours, > .danny Hope this was helpful. Some very good thoughts in here! Thanks, Parker > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss > FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss > -- parker higgins san francisco, ca http://parkerhiggins.net gmail / gchat: [email protected] twitter / identi.ca: @thisisparker skype: thisisparker please consider software freedom before reading this e-mail on a proprietary platform _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss
