JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum So Where Does Your Song Rank On Ourstage?

Ben,

You seem to understand exactly what I am saying. At some year in the future all the Beatles songs will be public domain. (75 years after Paul dies basically.. though I am sure like Disney, his estate will find some way to change the system just like Disney did to protect Mickey Mouse). But there are songs that are copyright protected going into public domain every single day. When the day comes, the only thing that changes is that you can do anything you want with them for free versus needing to pay money and/or get permission.

Sure you can copyright an arrangement of a PD song, but techically and artistically speaking, you can do your own "version" of a cover song as well as long as you either have permission or don't go so far away from the original intent of the song to allow the owner to sue you. Take the court system out of the way and doing a cover and a PD song is the exact same thing.

We have people send us all sorts of "cover songs" which bear very little resemblance to originals. In the cases of PD songs, most of them have no recording made at the time it was created due to technology. (I suppose some songs have slipped into the PD since recording started for one reason or another (or by choice through something like a Creative Commons license) but not many. The movie "Night of the living dead" slipped into Public domain so now you can anything you like with it (including packaging it and selling it or showing it for a fee at a theater) for free. That's why you see it used so often.

Back to music, I don't think there's any difference between doing a new bluegrass arrangement of a Beatles song and a new bluegrass arrangment of a 12th century monk chant. Both display the same type of creativity. Only the court standing and where the money has to go (or not go) are different. The creative process of doing both is the same. Hence, I still don't see any difference.

I am find with letting people post that stuff.. but let's make sure that all songs written by someone other than the artist have the same rules. Either you wrote a song or you didn't. In the case of the "Cover" Channel, many of them do an entirely different arrangement or mash-up of those songs as well. (Perhaps in some cases they might be skirting the law a bit.. but creatively it's not relevent). I've heard Beatles songs used in the most extremely diverse ways imaginable. There's tons of creativity just as I am sure there is in your song (I haven't heard that one yet). But it's still different than if you created the song from scratch in my opinion and therefore it's a different competitive advantage to already have the idea to work with rather than coming up with a totally new idea.

Are you still not seeing my point?

Brian