So if what I gather is correct, you support the fact that the Record label acts as an agent for a "live gig" which I am assuming is the artist, band, etc. The users then upload the mp3 song (owned by the label). But are you implying that the user is entitled to promotional costs for uploading the song?

Legally speaking, the property rights pertaining to music and intellectual property centers around copyrights. In a copyright, the right of the writer (i.e. artist, originator) has automatic and exclusive rights to their work for a given amount of time. The copyright extends for 70 years after the originator dies, 95 years for the publisher from publication, or 120 years after creation of the original work. During that time, the originator (i.e. the artist, publisher) can file for actual damages plus profits received from the infringing party or statutory damages under the Copyright Act of 1976 plus costs.

So, legally speaking, if somebody did upload a song, edit it, and then sell the song privately, they are violating copyright laws. They are taking a registered concept of somebody else and changing it to suit the and profit by it. Of course, the burden is on the producer to show how it is directly related to the song made by the person who may have copied it. But this is why we have royalties. Royalties allow the copying person to pay for the right to change the song made by the original producer and still satisfy both parties.

However, and legally speaking, there is always a loop hole to everything. In certain respects, a person could reproduce the song and not pay royalties. There is a "fair use" exception law embedded in the Copyright Act of 1976?namely section 107. This section states that a work can be reproduced for criticism, comment, news, reporting, scholarship, research. The reproduced work must be above all non-profit. So in answer to your second question, no, a person could not sell a song which was altered and resold because of the fact that it was altered without royalty and sold for profit.

Philosophically, songs much like art are in my opinion subjective rather than objective. It requires the opinion of others to be considered in any respect. Conversely, a song requires origination and credit as much as it needs the aesthetic qualities that make it what it is? art (or a song). Also, if you were a millionaire and bought a Botticelli? and then found out it was not the real thing? would you not be immensely pissed? This is actually a big problem in the art world, where some painters actually reclaim old canvases and use old paint pigments to reproduce a painting and sell as an original.

all this legal mumbo jumbo is waaay beyond me...

if you ask me... a musician who performs music is entitled to payment... if you wrote an awesome thought provoking song, and i performed it and received money for a good performance... i dont believe you deserve any money... of course before i play it i should legally have to give you credit for writing it, but not money for writing it....

all this mp3 business and money for each download is like getting money for each time its played on the radio... its pure greed and outrageous

a musician should be able to make a comfortable living off of performances alone... and even merchandise sales...

you cant disguise greed as fairness...

But doesn't that seem unfair to the music writer who may for all intensive purposes rely on those payments for his/her song to make even more thought provoking songs. Music artists need to eat and pay their bills too... although, I do in many respects think that music artists get paid a little too much for what they do. But that's relative to the market they are in. If a music artist should have credit, they should also have the opportunity to profit from what is credited. Otherwise, there is more hubris and ego than greed.

I wouldn't say that most of the profits from a given song are pure greed though. They fuel a market that is then able to push many more bands which would otherwise not be funded in the first place by record labels. Think of all the smaller bands that would have had the opportunity to be signed by the profits of other bands under the same label. The music industry is very symbiotic in many respects.

well i was imagining the musician as the writer... thats right... i forget that poets call themselves song writers now and sell the material to ppl who can perform...

when i used that example i was imagining instances of cover bands getting sued

like how i can quote anyone in a book so long as i say they said it right... i theorized it was the same with the song... the song writer/poet should be able to sell the material... but they then dont get paid for each time its sung y'know...

truthfully this position is used to defend the ability to download songs...

it is more complicated than i initially gave thought to who deserves what payment for what degree of effort they put in.... *sigh*

like i dont even know how a band distributes its money... does the bassist who is often said of having the easiest instrument get less than the drummer? it really involves alot of forever arguable opinions...

the whole labels and industry and that type of stuff really gets to me... i could discuss a number of related things...

I am also thinking about the musician as the writer as well. Even if they were separate people though, they still have to support themselves and to an extent the industry which they work for.

The instance of the coverband's being sued and quoting from a book or poem is interesting though. Technically speaking, if the cover band did it in a way where it criticized the song they were copying, it would fall under the exception of copyright. Look a Weird al Yankovic. Stupid as though he may seem, he knows the loophole well enough to gauge separability from the original song and keep within the margins of article 107 of the copyright act of 1976. But I thought an artist does get paid every time the song is sung though? Radio for example. Just as long as the song is not played for profit. People pay a onetime fee for that when they buy the media.

On the issue of payment per band member? I would suppose everyone gets a fair share unless the band has a specific member that is the cornerstone of the band. Otherwise, they would have some real big trouble keeping minor contributors to the band.

But I totally understand where your thoughts lie with labels and industry. Suffice to say that if there is an industry, there are more than certainly people ready to corrupt it. They can sign a band and have them work for pennies on the dollar of what they are really worth. But I suppose they were desperate or didn't have good enough lawyers to negotiate their contract.

On a side note,one could download the heck out of every new movie or CD they would want and technically not get in trouble for it because it is not technically illegal. I don't know if anyone remembers, but in the very beginning of the music download craze, there was Napster. They are irrelevant now, but why have they received the full brunt of the intellectual copyright assault? The reasons have less to do with the actual songs or the copyright laws themselves more than it has to do with the medium in which they are spread. Napster used a centralized network that specifically contributed to copyright infringement. Kazaa and Morpheus that followed went around that issue be decentralizing the exchange of songs and movies. MuTorrent completely removed centralization all together. Dilute a pool long enough and all you have left to prosecute is dirty water, with millions and millions of people becoming the point of origins for a single file. It's a legal improbability that (for now at least) is unsolvable.

I think that the biggest potential (not yet a problem) problem of copyright is the decision of whenever someone copied something from someone else or not. I mean if I and some other guy wrote the same story out of an incredible coincidence, could any of us have the exclusive rights to that story just because we had the idea before the other? What could be claimed to give who the reason?

This reminds me of something utterly hilarious I had seen on Vh1 a long time ago. Vanilla Ice was talking about how his song "Ice Ice baby" was so incredibly different from "under pressure" by Queen and David Bowie in that he changed an entire beat line by one small little alteration and in doing so did not owe any royalties.

If I remember the interview correctly where a reported asked Vanilla to explain the differences, it went something like this?

Vanilla: No, our songs are completely different.
Reporter: How so?
Vanilla: See, my song goes "Ding ding ding ding ding ding DUM 'ting" but the song under pressure's beat goes like "Ding ding ding ding ding ding DUM" See? Totally different!

But you make a good point about how one could claim something as their own even if it was based off of the same experience. I think this actually applies to a technicality in the copy right act of 1976. There is a provision, section 102, which prohibits the claim of copyright for any "?idea, procedure, process, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied." This specifically states that it is not (abstractly speaking) possible to copyright an idea. The only way a copyright can be successfully applied is if the particular way an idea is expressed. But really, is it that impossible to copyright an idea?

So in the example of the two men experiencing the same event, which one is entitled to write about it? The simple answer is that, the right belongs to whoever copyrights it first. Sucks, but that seems to be the gist of it.

Yeah, sucks

But that legislation seens strange, because it seens to be it leaves nothing to copyright at all. A recipe to a medicine can, for example, be considered a discovery.

(btw?)
Intellectual property rights should be protected in a market economy but only in a totalitarian state could integrity invasion in doing so be accepted.
It is really up to the industry to protect their product.
Privacy is of a higher priority than their profits.

My opinion on Copyrights is that the Berne Convention of the length of copyright being life of the author + 50 years is reasonable and fair. A certain amount of time must pass before profits can be made on the author's work, 50 is a reasonable length of time because its long enough for the author's heirs to continue to protect the work, but short enough so that others can share in the work. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in the United States is one of the most selfish acts ever passed, forcing works into 95 year ranges.