Copyright claim of fictional bands?

MrHat · Post by **MrHat** » Mon Oct 18, 2010 3:54 pm

Hello forum,
I understand that if you create your own radio station for example, you have to pay taxes to a artist association and they distribute it further? Is this correct?
But what about if the radio station only broadcasts songs made by bands that are not real? Such as Infant Sorrow.

Thanks, = )

AndyJ · Post by **AndyJ** » Mon Oct 18, 2010 5:17 pm

Bands that arem't real? That's a new one on me!
You raise an interesting point. Licence collecting societies exist and are authorised under Sections 116 to 123 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988), to gather royalties on behalf of their members. But not all artists are members, although of course the collecting societies don't always make this clear. A recent test case before the Copyright Tribunal revealed that radio and TV stations which broadcast mainly music have to pay a licence fee ranging from 8% to 25% of their annual revenue. Unfortunately I can't provide a link to the relevant judgement* because the ipo.co.uk site is down at present having suffered a DDoS attack earlier today.
Anyway, returning to your question, if you are only broadcasting music from bands which haven't authorised the collecting societies to collect royalties on their behalf, then you do not need a licence. The main licensing society for recorded music and music videos is Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL) http://www.ppluk.com/.
However bear in mind that someone will own the copyright in this music, even it is entirely generated by a computer, since there will be a human 'directing mind' which wrote the software. Therefore you need their permission to broadcast their music, unless it has been released under a Creative Commons licence.

*Update. The Copyright Tribunal site is now working again. The judgement I mentioned can be found in .pdf form at http://www.ipo.gov.uk/csc-decision.pdf

AndyJ · Post by **AndyJ** » Mon Oct 18, 2010 8:29 pm

As I said in the introduction to my previous posting, I was not familiar with bands that don't exist. What I didn't realise was that Infant Sorrow was the fictional band featured in the movie Get him to the Greek. (I don't get out much)
So the final part of my previous posting actually becomes the most important part, especially as I found this notice on the iTunes site for the soundtrack album:
"℗ 2010 Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios LLLP under exclusive licence to Mercury Records Limited"
The ℗ symbol stands for Sound Recording Copyright (details here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_reco ... ght_symbol), so in other words the tracks on the Get him to the Greek album are most definitely copyright and I would imagine that since the album has been released by a mainstream record company (Mercury) it will be included in the current licensing schemes around the world. Therefore any radio station which wishes to broadcast Infant Sorrow tracks will need to obtain a valid licence.