Re: [Harp-L] Liscening

[Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Licensing songs is all handled through the Harry Fox Agency AFAIK.

Different license.  The Harry Fox office is a clearinghouse for mechanical 
licenses, the one you need to get to publish recordings of copyrighted 
songs.  (I.e., you can record any song you damn please, but you can't 
publish that recording without a license from the copyright owner, normally 
the song publisher.)

Specifically, a song's copyright holder has the right to grant first 
recording rights on a song.  After it has been recorded once the copyright 
holder, usually a publisher, must by law grant a license to record a song 
and publish that recording to anyone who requests one.  That's the 
so-called 'compulsory license.'

First, you can't record a song on which someone else holds the copyright 
and which has come under the compulsory license umbrella unless you request 
it in writing, and then you must pay a fee specified by congress on each 
recording sold.

Because mechanical licenses would be a horrific pain in the butt to deal 
with without a central clearing house, you file your request with the Fox 
office.  It used to be free, but now you have to pay a damned filing fee of 
$20 for each license.

The licensing I was referring to in my post, with imperfect precision, was 
a kind that is usually called a 'synching' license, where you want to take 
a copyrighted recording and/or song and 'synch' it into a TV Show, 
commercial, movie or any other place where a producer might want to use 
it.  This business is commonly called "music clearance".

If a producer wishes to put a copyrighted song in his movie, he locates the 
owner of the copyright, contacts the owner, and either negotiates a fee 
with the owner directly or is directed to the clearance house the copyright 
holder works with.  If the recording that is going to be used already 
exists, you'd have to make a deal with the the owner of the recording 
copyright, too.  (The reason you hear so many soundalike recordings of 
well-known songs on commercials and in some movies and TV shows is that it 
can be cheaper to produce a new recording of a song with a bunch of studio 
cats and singers than to buy a license for an existing recording of that 
song, and often the audience won't really care.  But they still had to buy 
a license on the song itself, and that's a synch license, not a mechanical 
license.)

In the eighties Chuck Berry's music was used incessantly in movies.  I 
heard that you dealt directly with his office, and his minimum fee was 
$250K for a synch license, and this was considered awesome.  Big hits go 
for more now.

I heard that before the movie ET was released they did a tremendous amount 
of licensing, for songs and various products that appeared in the 
movie.  It was supposedly the most licenses ever acquired for a single 
movie up to that time.  After it was released it was discovered that one of 
the recordings with the highest profiles had not been licensed, and it was 
clear that ET was going to be the most successful movie ever up to that 
point.

Universal had to pay significantly more than the normal licensing fees on 
that one.