Music / Copyright

Obviously, I make films, and 99-100% of the time, I need audio.

For future films I want to try and get musicians / music production people on the team so I can have unique audio made to fit with what I’m doing, but, I need a back up plan in case I have any problems with this at any stage in the production, and I need audio for the films I’m making RIGHT NOW.
So, today I set about researching –

1) Copyright rules
2) Where to find royalty free music
3) What are creative commons? And what does it mean for copyright?

I found out a few things which I didn’t realise, the most problematic being that actually, cover versions of songs do fall under copyright, even if you alter them, and in fact these alterations can be seen potentially as ‘detrimental’ to the reputation of the original.

The next discovery was that if you use a piece from creative commons, any subsequent work you produce using it has to be under creative commons copyright too. This is the system used by online collaborative production company HitRECord. (I did always wonder how it worked!)

I then found numerous online sites where you can find either songs that are so old their copyright has expired, or simply royalty free compositions.

There were quite a few famous classical pieces I had always assumed to be copyrighted and/or expensive to get permission for which turned out to be royalty free. For my COP project this is not particularly of use, but it will definitely be perfect for my ballet based short I’m working on at the moment! yay!