Are you sure?
I'm an IP lawyer, and even i'm not sure of the answer.
1. There is a very weird set of rights around music/sound/synchronization built into copyright law
2. I would never trust random commenters on the internet, even those experience in music, to know the answer.
Why?
Because of how this stuff actually works in practice.
People assume that "Fox surely did this right before they did this", except, you know, they often don't.
When they want to use a track, they just use it, and then throw it on the uncleared list and get around to figuring it out later.
This is because they've made a licensing/etc scheme that is so convoluted, that often nobody knows who to contact to get all the rights necessary (ASCAP/NMPA et al are sometimes helpful, sometimes not)
In some types of cases, there are compulsory licenses, in some, there aren't.
Yeah, obviously I'm not "in the know" regarding what steps Fox might have skipped. I just know that:
a) If a song is published (and BGB was) then anyone has the right to cover it (a compulsory license always exists)
b) If someone covers it, the covering artist gets no copyright of the musical material - all that is retained by the song copyright owner(s). (This makes intuitive sense, as it otherwise would restrict the ability of other artists to create more covers of the song. You'd have to make sure that your arrangement choices didn't conflict with ANY other arrangements out there.)
c) The covering artist does have copyright over the sound recording of the arrangement.
Now, if techie people wanted to get involved in a way they could actually affect things, rather than just theorizing about what someone's actions/motivations might have been, there's opportunity here:
Coulton released a karaoke track of his version of BGB. It's released by-nc-sa. It's considered likely that Fox used this karaoke track as the backing track for their version. If so, they have infringed on all three portions of the license (no attribution, they're selling it, they didn't release it share-alike).
So - I don't know how to do this, but it seems like someone could do a statistical analysis of the karaoke track, and Fox's version, and prove within some statistical likeliness that Fox used the karaoke track and did not simply re-record their own instruments. (Note that it WOULD be legal for Fox to re-record Coulton's arrangement note-for-note since it would no longer be using Coulton's sound recording.)
Comments
Are you sure? I'm an IP lawyer, and even i'm not sure of the answer.
1. There is a very weird set of rights around music/sound/synchronization built into copyright law 2. I would never trust random commenters on the internet, even those experience in music, to know the answer.
Why? Because of how this stuff actually works in practice.
People assume that "Fox surely did this right before they did this", except, you know, they often don't.
When they want to use a track, they just use it, and then throw it on the uncleared list and get around to figuring it out later.
This is because they've made a licensing/etc scheme that is so convoluted, that often nobody knows who to contact to get all the rights necessary (ASCAP/NMPA et al are sometimes helpful, sometimes not)
In some types of cases, there are compulsory licenses, in some, there aren't.
Yeah, obviously I'm not "in the know" regarding what steps Fox might have skipped. I just know that:
a) If a song is published (and BGB was) then anyone has the right to cover it (a compulsory license always exists)
b) If someone covers it, the covering artist gets no copyright of the musical material - all that is retained by the song copyright owner(s). (This makes intuitive sense, as it otherwise would restrict the ability of other artists to create more covers of the song. You'd have to make sure that your arrangement choices didn't conflict with ANY other arrangements out there.)
c) The covering artist does have copyright over the sound recording of the arrangement.
Now, if techie people wanted to get involved in a way they could actually affect things, rather than just theorizing about what someone's actions/motivations might have been, there's opportunity here:
Coulton released a karaoke track of his version of BGB. It's released by-nc-sa. It's considered likely that Fox used this karaoke track as the backing track for their version. If so, they have infringed on all three portions of the license (no attribution, they're selling it, they didn't release it share-alike).
So - I don't know how to do this, but it seems like someone could do a statistical analysis of the karaoke track, and Fox's version, and prove within some statistical likeliness that Fox used the karaoke track and did not simply re-record their own instruments. (Note that it WOULD be legal for Fox to re-record Coulton's arrangement note-for-note since it would no longer be using Coulton's sound recording.)