On 5/23/20, Francesco Petrogalli <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Valentin - I am all new to these things and every time I look into > this I get more confused.
No problem. (I’m adding back the list, just in case others may correct me if I say something wrong and/or stupid.) > Say I give a CC BY license to the work, and I publish it on github. > Will I still be able to collect the royalties if someone plays it? No. If that’s what you’re looking for, I think you should indeed register with a Rights Management Organization (RMO): Ascap, BMI, or any other one. (Like I said, Ascap *used* to be one of the least worst options. Not sure nowadays; the race to the bottom rages on.) Two reasons for that: - first of all, if someone plays it then who’s going to tell you that it’s been played somewhere? Who’s going to collect the money? That’s what a RMO is for. - second, if you choose a license such as CC-by, you’re giving many authorizations to everyone: basically, all CC-by does is force them to credit you as the author (or as a co-author, if they’ve modified your original song to create a new work). So, you can’t _both_ authorize people to copy, perform, and create modified versions of your work… and forbid them from doing so unless they give you money. A bit less open that CC-by, are “copyleft” licenses: CC by-sa, or the Free Art License (http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/) which I personally use. They give the same permissions than CC-by, _but_ if anyone creates copies or modified versions of your work, then they have to share it under the same license as the one you’ve chosen initially. Since traditional publishers and big media companies are very reluctant to take any risk, that ensures that no “big” commercial player is going to take advantage of your work. Then, still a bit less open, are so-called “non-commercial” licenses; CC-by-nc for example. Their purpose is to give you even further protection: you’re authorizing people to copy, perform and make modified versions of your work, but ONLY in a non-commercial context. The problem is that no one, so far, has any good legal (and enforceable) definition of what “commercial” means; if a school performs your song to gather money for a school trip, does that count? If someone plays it in the street, with a hat placed before them on the sidewalk to encourage donations, does that count? etc. Then, even less open, you have no-derivatives licenses: CC-by-nd. This allows people to download and copy your work, but ONLY as you published it in the first place: modifying it is not authorized by the license. Which is a problem when it comes to art; a music score, for example, is bound to be reinvented and interpreted (which is to say, “modified”) every time someone plays it. And what about remix? And “theme and variations”, as composers used to do? And musical quotes (for example in jazz improvisations)? There isn’t a single composer in the 18th and 19th century who wouldn’t have ended up in jail (or in debt) if the law had been what it is today: no more Bach turning Vivaldi’s violin concertos into harpsichord pieces, no more Telemann, well, at all; no more Ravel orchestrating Moussorgsky, and so on. Note that I said “not authorized by the license”. No matter the license you choose, anyone can still get in touch with you, and negotiate a “license exception”: some special, limited authorization outside the license’s terms -- which you can grant if that person’s offering you money, or if you decide to help them or whatever. … BUT that last sentence only applies if you’re managing your rights on your own. If you sign up with a RMO, then all bets are off; _they_ will decide for you which authorizations to give, how much money to ask for, whom to sue in your name,… and you will have NO control whatsoever over it. (Most of the time actually, you won’t even know what’s happening with your work until months later or even a couple years after the fact.) > I would feel too bad if the CC license on the PDF wouldn't allow > me to record this with a band and register the recording (not the PDF > itself) with ASCAP. Unfortunately, that won’t work: imagine someone else, with another band (or a guitar, or whatever) downloads your score and records your song. If _your_ recording has been registered with Ascap, that makes this _other_ recording a counterfeit in their eyes, and they won’t hesitate to sue them. (Unless it’s a more famous and powerful band already registered with another RMO or even with Ascap itself, in which case you’d be surprised how fast they’ll let it slide and give you mere pennies for your trouble). Actually, it goes even further: since you’re not allowed to authorize exceptions by yourself, YOU cannot even share copies of your own work as freely as you’d want. You won’t be able, for example, to upload a video of your song on YouTube without half a dozen of copyright robots immediately complaining about “infringement”, demanding to slap ads on it, or even to mute your video (yay, a music video without sound! Nice.). To be honest, that’s unlikely to happen unless your recording gets “protected” by a record label in addition to Ascap; but if it does (speaking from personal, if indirect, experience), let me tell you that sucks. In that sense, since publishing under a Free License allows your work to propagate much more widely, it *may* actually give you *more* safety than the usual publishing model: the more your work is visible and available online, the more likely you are to hear if someone’s been using it without your consent in a TV ad or whatever. (Whereas a RMO, again, might not care unless you’re famous or worth a lot of money -- *even* if you’re registered with them.) BUT, as I said, if your handling your own rights individually, then if it’s royalties you want, you’ll need to watch out constantly for unauthorized performances, call anyone that play your song and repeatedly try to collect your money. That’s more or less a full-time job, and I don’t think anyone can really sustain that without ending up registering to an RMO. > Are you totally handling your royalties on a per case basis? How do > you do that? You print your email address on the music and ask people > to contact you if they want to play it / record it, and then you set > up a contract? Well, I’ve tried several different models. - As a composer, the simplest thing to do is rely on commissions rather than on post-facto rights (residuals, royalties, etc.): I ask to get paid (comfortably) for the amount of time I’ve spent writing the piece, but I’m not asking for anything after I’ve put the final \bar "|." It’s somewhat of a bargain: if the piece is hugely successful, that won’t make me rich for the rest of my life. If it’s a disaster, then I don’t care since I’ve already been paid anyway :-) - Free licenses sometimes may allow you to engage differently with your audience (and most importantly, your performers). Contrary to the usual capitalist dog-eat-dog paradigm where all of us are trying to survive and make a profit whenever we can (even if/when that means forgetting any moral standard), when you put your work out there and tell people: “go ahead and enjoy; my goal is not to sell you something but to do my best and hope you like it”, well, many people (not all, but quite a few) look at you quite differently. As an example, I spent a few years performing in a musical play where I had written most of the songs; every night after the play, I’d go out and address the audience: “all the songs you’ve been hearing tonight are available under a free license; you may download them at <URL>, but there are also some paper copies available for you at the exit; you can have them for any price you’ll choose.” After a few dozen of performances, I noticed that this was actually a success: people paid on average nearly €12 per copy (50 pages of LilyPonded black-and-white contemporary music)! Not to mention that they had *already* paid for their ticket to the performance… - If you’ve looked around in the past dozen years, there’s a huge trend towards alternative funding models these days: from Kickstarter yesteryear to Patreon today (hey, remember Flattr?); all these new intermediaries are not exempt from criticism (far from it), but you’ll notice that none of them rely exclusively on the sacrosanct “all-rights-reserved” paradigm, the way RMOs do. - I mentioned earlier that free licenses are popular with priests and religious people; as an atheist and an anarchist, that would be the last sort of circles I’d be expecting to find myself comfortable around, and yet I’ve given quite a few lectures and contributions in such venues. I think it’s somehow relaxing, at times, to choose to just trust your fellow human beings (neighbors or remote people) rather than expecting everyone to be trying to take advantage of you. That doesn’t mean you should be naive; some people WILL scam you if given the chance; but the energy you spend making sure that doesn’t happen is often far superior to whatever hypothetical loss you might experience. If I had any advice to give you, it would be that: that score you’ve been building together with your son seems like a very sweet and happy project; I sincerely hope it’s going to be performed as pleasantly as you can wish for, and that people will be happy and moved when they hear it. Now, the copyright industry’s propaganda would have you believe that _none_ of that can or should happen without them getting a piece of the cake; that’s not true. They would want you to live in fear that thousands of greedy musicians around the world are waiting in the shadows, and will make lots and lots of money off of your work unless they’re here to “defend” your interests; that’s not true either. They would want us to believe that giving anything away for free is a sign of weakness and will only encourage others to act dishonestly; that is the opposite of the truth. I’m not saying the world is a nice place (it isn’t); you should, at the very least, secure *your* copyright by having a solid proof of anteriority, as we discussed. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t overestimate the possible threat to your work if you were to publish it freely, nor the amount and quality of “protection” you’ll get from any RMO out there. Good luck, whatever you choose! Not to put any additional pressure on you, but if your score is engraved with LilyPond and you end up publishing it freely, when that band performs it I’ll ask the -devel team how they’d feel about mentioning it on http://lilypond.org/productions.html :-) Congratulations to your son; here’s hoping someday he’ll be able to write down his music without requiring your help! Cheers, -- V.
