At 8:03 AM -0400 9/23/06, dhbailey wrote:
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but to the best of my understanding the
following is true:
In the US, accredited educational institutions are exempt from
performance royalties, if the performances occur during the normal
school hours and are a part of the curriculum. Evening
performances, things billed as "concerts" are still required to pay
performance royalties.
There may have been a court case with this outcome, but this is NOT
in the Fair Use Guidelines. The wording is something like,
"performance in the normal course of instruction," but nowhere is the
time of day specified. If an evening performance is "normal" it
would be covered. The exemption is not tied to actual classroom use,
as are some of the other provisions. What the publishers wanted to
do was to close the loophole in the 1909 law that only allowed them
to collect performance royalties in for-profit situations, a
situation which led my father and most other school chorus, band and
orchestra directors to go to a "suggested donation" format for
admissions. (Well, the real reason AT THE TIME was to avoid the
entertainment tax levied to help pay for WW 2, but the result was the
same.)
Some of the restrictions on this exemption are that admission not be
charged, or if it is charged the proceeds be used only for
educational or charitable purposes, and that no one profit from the
performances, including guest artists. Those provisions alone
suggest that it is exactly "concert" performances that are meant.
An interesting "gotcha" in the Guidelines is that the exemption
applies only to non-profit educational institutions, which if taken
literally means that private, for-profit schools are NOT exempt from
paying performance royalties. That's the kind of thing that lurks in
the background until a court case results in an interpretation of the
law, or in this case of the Guidelines agreed to by the Music
Publishers Association.
You might be thinking about the religious exemption, which exempts
performances in the course of religious services but does not exempt
performances that simply use the church's facilities without their
being a religious service, and which quite often do take place in the
evening.
And like David, I'm not an attorney, just a musician trying to puzzle
out this whole mess!!
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
