Welcome. I am Scott Lesowitz. I am a professional attorney and extremely amateur musician. I graduated from Harvard Law School in 2007. On this channel, I upload videos where I discuss issues involving music, Copyright, and super fun awesomeness. I try to provide concise, understandable legal commentary with some laughs mixed in. If you like this channel and are also interested in sports-related videos, check out my first channel: Law & Laughs, @lawlaughs
Thank you Scott for explaining how copywrite laws work. I am a new subscriber to your channel and learned about you from Fil and Rick Beato. Your last few videos prompted me to see if LEN's Steal my sunshine credited Gregg Diamond for Andrea True's More More More. I was pleased to see that they did. I'm not sure if the copied parts were samples or interpolations. I'm still learning. Thank you for your helpful explanations.
I started my channel about 3 months ago and have nearly 600 subscribers and over 100,00 views. Not much compared with 6 millions subscribers of one fraudulent channel that Wings of Pegasus has shown. I am also honest about using some samples and Ai to produce sounds but how these fraudulent sites have gotten away with these deceptive videos on RU-vid for such a long time is mind boggling. Reversing the video so we are informed stops any copyright infringement and there are many videos on RU-vid like this with the text back to front or drivers on the wrong side of the road ie on the right in the UK.
What if the artist is not interested in "making money" and admits within the "description" at You Tube, that they intend to HONOR the Copyrighted artist by their "attempts to rearrange or parody" the original and intends on never profiting monitarily FROM utilizing "it.?" (parts of melodies, i.e., changing lyrics?)
Thanks for simplifying this for a number of us who are busy "making" the music, who need advice; Wow! this can be extremely time-consuming! Glad YOU"RE there to help us figure it all out! LyndaFayeSoriginals
Interesting, thanks for the info. What I'm wondering is if I use AI to help me finish one of my own songs, can they legally use parts of my music to generate AI music for others? And if I used AI to help me write a song and that song ends up making a lot of money, does the AI platform have rights to demand royalties from me?
Very interesting question the status of works that combine human created elements and AI created elements is either unclear or very fact specific. The human created parts should not be an issue. They should be eligible for copyright. The question is whether the AI created parts are part of the copyright or not.
One interesting question that’s beyond my pay grade is whether When I Was Your Man is substantially similar to any songs prior to it, especially the parts that were at issue in Flowers.
The winner would get some costs, but to get attorney’s fees it is not automatic, and essentially the judge would look at things like how bad the lawsuit was and if there is evidence of bad faith.
Thanks for the comment. This case is going to be virtually all about the melody. The harmonies of both songs are quite generic and they are not identical.
Want to laugh? Marvin Gaye stole Got to Give it Up from a 1962 Mongo Santamaría song and it’s an outright steal. You cannot copyright a bass line nor a rhythm, nor chords, nor the same note repeated in a row, even 8x, nor a scale. My mother worked for a music publisher and was in charge of royalties so I got a great education on copyright law in my upbringing.
As a musician (also a bad 'un!) key similarities are the chord progression, obvs, but it's in the same key and the tempo is closely matched. Also, when we talk about the 'colour' or 'mood' of a piece evoked by a given chord sequence, key signature, tempo etc, I have to say there's a very similar melancholy vibe to both pieces. I've disagreed with many of the recent viral controversies, but this is a _heavy_ borrow to my ears - even if Bruno doesn't mind!
Someone is getting greedy. The case needs thrown out and not just with prejudice, but with extreme prejudice. For Tempo Music to win that case would open the door for them to go after every other sing or piece of music, that contains any notational arrangement/scoring for anything to what they've bough ownership of or any part of an ownership in.
Yes, the only real deterrent for meritless copyright lawsuits is if judges start awarding attorney's fees to winning defendants when they have the discretion to do so (they won't in close/good faith cases, but those cases aren't the problem). Like in the Led Zeppelin case there was no award of attorney's fees. I think there should have been.
David, thank you so much for commenting! One interesting angle here that I didn't discuss in the video is whether borderline copyright infringement lawsuits will become more common now that songs commonly have like 30 co-authors and investment companies are buying so many publishing catalogues.
Very good comment. I'm a believer that with genres like pop and rock, there needs to be a lot of caution when asking the question of whether there was copying/substantial similarity.
@@LawLaughsMusic, the same can easily applied with country music. Which both rock and modern pop both draws elements of musical influence from. While rock also draws some elements from jazz, the other big contributor comes from blues. So a lot of caution across the while of music is going to be needed, at least from my perspective. I'm drawing on some of my knowledge of Country music history.
I have a copyright question for my curiosity. This happened to me at least 10 years ago so its just out of curiosity. I was a music director for a church. Most of the music we played was gospel public domain melodies. I didnt like the Church arrangement of the songs which were piano 4 part so I wrote all the arrangements myself. When they sacked me for somebody with a background in theology I told the church that I would sell them all of my arrangements for a cheap price. The pastor told me that because I was an employee of the church the arrangements were theirs for free and I wouldnt begetting anything for them.. They did eventually give me back my arrangements but I thought it was pretty obvious that as a music director I wasnt paid to make arrangements but to direct the band. I did the arrangements on my own time at home. Who was right?
That's a very good question. So under 17 USC 101, "a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment" is a "work made for hire" that would be owned by the employer. (That's not the only possible scenario for a work-for-hire, but the likely one here based off what you are saying.) So, it would be a fact-intensive question of whether you were acting as an employee within the scope of your employment when you created the arrangements. Considering that you were the music director, it seems likely it would be a work-for-hire, but again, it would be fact-intensive. There isn't great guidance in the Copyright Act itself.
Yeah if you look at what happened to George Harrison when he was doing his solo stuff he got sued over one of his songs and he lost because his song was way too similar. However if you look at what happened to Led Zeppelin with Stair Way To Heaven they got sued but the court ruled in favor of Zeppelin because the song was different enough.
Good post. Yes, George Harrison got screwed not because the songs weren't similar enough. They were very similar. He got screwed because he was going to get out of the problem relatively cheaply until his manager basically screwed him over in something you would think would happen in the WWE. As for the Stairway to Heaven case, the right outcome was reached. It wasn't a close call.
So glad this is coming to light. I am 100% behind the original artists being appropriately compensated for their work. That is what allows them to continue to do that work so that we may enjoy it indefinitely. Scammers, on the other hand, are little more than leeches on society in the end. The only thing they give back to society is when they spend their ill-gotten gains and push the economy along in that fashion by being a consumer.
Fil is playing riffs so #RU-vid Algorithm needs to look at fair use! He should take it all the way to RU-vid in court to get yt to Unblock the Video that was blocked!! #wingsofpegasus
Hi Scott - it's nice to see that your videos are getting more views! Well earned for the informed information you're sharing - thanks! There's an interesting case that I wonder if you would comment on... Phil McKnight has a popular youtube channel. He talks about guitars, guitar repair, setup and the guitar industry in general. And he does a liveshow each Friday. In the most recent liveshow for 9/13 starting at 19:38 he talked about the live music at the Video Music Awards and put links to the performances in the description... and got demonetized. He neither played no showed any clips. I'm wondering why it happened... what did he do? What did the algorithm pick up on? It's not a huge deal for him because his liveshows are patreon funded, but still... what gives?? Thanks again for your expertise!
Thank you very much for the support. As for your question, I have been thinking about this for a while, and I don't have a good answer. I am not sure why that would trigger a content ID claim. That's so odd.
If I learn to play an song on an instrument, is that also copying it? Or only if I bring out the same exact song? And use what I learned to play only as knowledge on how to play, and create other songs with the knowledge on how to play some songs
Good post. So learning a song in order to be able to create your own music is obviously fine. The only issue would be if you then create music that is substantially similar to someone else's song. Good point.
What is the difference between a person listening to a song and learning from it, and a computer listening to a song and learning from it? You cant copyright learning from music
Good post. This is a tough area that needs to be dealt with thoughtfully, ideally by Congress if it can function. On the one hand, there's obviously nothing wrong with a person listening to a song to learn how to create their own competing music. But on the other hand, computers digesting songs to learn how to create competing music on a very wide scale seems different. But good point.
I reported ALL of that guy's video's and his wife's as well to you tube (many times) as I saw people BELIEVING that guy was actually singing, I KNOW what Bobby Hatfield sounds like and I knew he was scamming after reading the comments -Sadly Bobby is no longer with us. He was one of the greats and being used. How anyone could think that dude was really singing, is beyond me. The editing is also a dead give away. I thank you for looking into this and you are absolutely right, Fil from Wings of Pegasus is a person who cares. Love his channel and believe he is one of the nicest guys on you tube. Thanks again.
A while back I used a track with permission from the original artist under licence, but the content id system attributed it to a cover version. I tried to get that corrected by contacting RU-vid but it still remained unchanged meaning the cover artist was getting the revenue instead of the original artist. Which I thought was pretty poor. But at the time I thought it was an isolated error by RU-vid but now I realise it's a much bigger problem.
RU-vid is crazy - I used a 1 minute audio backing track for a video lecture I did for my university students during the pandemic when all our classes went online. The video was marked "private" and I shared the link only to my class, on our university's secure Zoom connection. The video was blocked by RU-vid due to copyright infringement and my students told me they couldn't view it. I had to start over, removing the audio. Meanwhile, these scammers are getting away with much, much more - monetized no less. Something is seriously wrong with RU-vid's administration of music copyright and I think this tech giant should be called to account for developing better policy. Letting people rip the entire song and get paid for it!? WTH RU-vid?? Maybe someone should also point out to RU-vid that it might save them money in the long run - they won't be paying the scam creators easy money for their views/likes/subscribes, either.
I don't think the Physical/Prisoner thing is a slam dunk, either, though it definitely jumps out at you, especially when played back to back. I'm not sure anybody could do anything about it without a greater degree of similarity. But there's no doubt in my mind, whatsoever, that the people in the studio, recording Prisoner, had some conversation where they admitted to the similarity, but pressed on nonetheless.
Back in the day, when there was SOME sense of artistic integrity in the music industry and society in general, "Interpolation" used to be called Plagiarism, and was legally punished.
Thanks for posting. All pop music is derivative to a degree, and there’s only so many harmonic possibilities, only seven notes in a scale, etc. It can be a fine line when it gets into plagiarism and even infringement.
Prisoner is a great track, no one cares about legal bs when jamming along. Good job Miley, Dua, and team. Sorry that some people think they own a six note sequence, smh
This `interpolation' topic has spawned a lot of content, but I think a big part of this comes down to a poorly written Wikipedia article. Currently, the Wikipedia entry includes the line: "Interpolation is often cited as a legal defence to mask unlicenced sampling when the artist or label who owns the recording of the music declines to license the sample, or if licensing the piece of music is considered too costly." That's all it says about the legal aspect, and makes it sound like a claim of interpolation is a "get out of jail free" card. Interpolation and quotation have been aspects of musical creation for centuries. As such, the word is a descriptor of a process, like "sampling" is a descriptor. The questions revolve around its' usage, ethics, and proper accreditation/compensation. If the Wikipedia article had included a section and discussion on "Legal considerations of interpolation", with examples like Harrison's My Sweet Lord that you cite, then this wouldn't seem like it's some sort of little-known magic loophole. It would be more the ongoing process and debate around claiming rights. And that's all tangled up in the monetary value of what's at stake and who has the motivation and legal budget to pursue it.
@@thdrawsI'm pretty sure the word Interpolation is not in the George Harrison My Sweet Lord lawsuit - it was copyright infringement / plagiarism. The question Rick Beato is asking is - why do we have this new word now? Is it different than copyright infringement?
So, just because it SEEMS obvious to everyone, doesn't make it something that will stand up in court, especially when you're talking about half a dozen notes. Taking Miley Cyrus to court over a few notes would be suicide for most musicians/ writers. Of course, if I interpolated one of HER melodies, I'd be lucky to get away with the shirt on my back!
I edited it out because it came off rambling, but I imagine that songwriters and publishing companies don’t want to risk pissing off a couple of superstars over a borderline lawsuit.
It's a small snatch of melody in a different context. There are only twelve notes in music. Sometimes it's just not worth making a fuss over. I don't see any infringement here.
I can see that opinion. I am not saying necessarily it should be infringement. As I make clear with my characterization of the Blurred Lines case, copyright infringing lawsuits with popular music are often nit picky and can unnecessarily stifle creativity. Pop music is by nature so derivative.
Thanks. On one of my recent videos I didn’t realize that the mic was set too loud and that I was clipping periodically until after I shot the whole thing. That’s probably what you are referring to. I thought about re-shooting it but it wasn’t practical.
Thank you for your work on this. I believe it is exactly the same as saying, I didn't steal your money, I just transferred it from your wallet to mine. Its not theft to transfer something to another place." Total BS! It's stealing!
Yes, but there are grey lines when it comes to pop music which by its nature is fairly derivative, and there are only so many song structures and likely harmonies and, as always with Western music, only 12 notes. Stealing is bad. But constantly worrying that you might be sued unexpectedly is bad too.
My understanding is that you do not need permission to cover a song however you need to attribute the songwriter and pay the mechanical license fee to Harry Fox Agency
Very good point you bring up that’s fairly weird. You are correct about covering a song. Covers are an outlier in copyright law where you can force someone to license their work to you for a set price. However, that’s only for covering the song, which requires that the cover version not change the basic melody or fundamental character of the song. So if you make a new song that only incorporates parts of the original, the compulsory license is unavailable. I know that seems weird because when using less of the original you are not allowed to use the compulsory license. See 17 USC 115.
Well done following up on this and getting in touch with Steve Kipner. His response makes me wonder if we will see more people doing this and getting away with it, with so many artists selling their catalogs. Less motivation to protect their work. I think both you and Fil are officially off of Dua Lipa's Christmas card list now. 😁
Thank you. I think it depends who buys the catalogues. In the case of Steve Kipner, he sold to Primary Wave which also offers publisher and management services to musicians. So they have an incentive not to sue two superstar singers and a well known producer. But other investors might have nothing to lose.
This is great stuff. I would love to hear from a You Tube representative on their response to this. Maybe do a zoom forum. There has to be a lot of stakeholders on the issue of copyright theft.
