Help with Music Licensing
By Mark Fontana
I have a question for MMD readers with experience in music licensing. (This is a little off the topic of mechanical music, but it is kind of peripherally related, as you'll see below.)
As a graduate student at Ohio State, I have been working with some friends on a short film in which a computer-animated upright piano plays the musical selection "Butterflies In The Rain" by Sherman Myers (music) and Erell Reaves (lyrics). We are using an arrangement played by Frank Milne and originally released as an Ampico roll. We are driving the piano animation using a MIDI file derived from the Pianocorder encoding of the original music roll. The result is that the piano animation is precisely synchronized with the musical soundtrack.
Using a slightly edited version of the music, the film is about 2 minutes long and contains some 3400 frames of animation. We are planning to use the song title "Butterflies In The Rain" for the title of the film, since the "story" incorporates rain and butterflies as well (I can go into more detail at a later date). We are not using the lyrics at all.
The film is nearing completion, and I would like to submit it for public screenings at one or more academic conferences, including ACM SIGGRAPH (a huge annual computer graphics conference, with over 20,000 people attending). However, I have been running into some snags in obtaining the synchronization license needed to exhibit the film.
So far, we have contacted only the Harry Fox Agency, since HFA seems to be the only organization that can issue a synchronization license (the specific type of license required in the case in which copywritten music accompanies video or film imagery). They have quoted me approximately $500 for a license to show my two-minute film at SIGGRAPH. I made it very clear that I am a graduate student producing the film for education- al purposes only, that my budget is about $100, and that no copies of the film would be sold commercially; it would only be exhibited at academic conferences. HFA has not been willing to negotiate with the publishers in reducing the rate to a level I can afford.
"BITR" is owned by *two* publishers, complicating the issue quite a bit. (The two publishers are EMI/Feist and Campbell-Connelly Inc.) I have not contacted the publishers directly yet. My understanding is that I am not supposed to do this, since the publishers pay HFA to handle licensing issues on their behalf.
In talking with HFA, I did not mention MIDI or the fact that the music was derived from a piano roll, as these points would probably only confuse the situation even more (HFA is only concerned with usage of a particular song, not a specific arrangement).
The bottom line is that $500 is far more than I expected to pay, and I simply can't afford it. I naively thought that a license to use an obscure song from 1932 for academic purposes would be inexpensive.
Using a completely different piece for the film would be rather difficult at this stage, but I would not be opposed to scrapping the title BITR and modifying the music to _sound somewhat similar_ if this would eliminate the need for licensing. (I realize this is a very fuzzy issue; from a legal standpoint, how different must it be from the original?)
Is there an alternate source for synchronization licenses, or anything that I can do to obtain a lower rate?
I would appreciate any advice on these issues.
Best regards,
Mark Fontana
[ Be sure to also check the MMD ftp archives. Beginning about 961120
[ was the long thread concerning Licensing and Copyright. -- Robbie |
(Message sent Tue 1 Apr 1997, 22:20:27 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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