Archived - Roberts, Matt

I am a musician and a composer. Independent artists often use websites like Facebook, YouTube, and CdBaby to promote themselves. This can be a crucial part of the overall strategy. Recently, overzealous copyright laws have become a barrier to self-promotion on sites like these. For example, CdBaby used to carry 2-minute-long clips of each song they were selling (as long as the artist agreed to it) but they reduced this to 30 seconds because new regulations meant they would have to pay royalties. I think if the clips have less than 50 percent of the entire song, then you shouldn't have to pay royalties. On YouTube and Facebook, independent artists are finding that when they put up videos with their own songs as the background music, the video gets blocked. Artists should be able to opt-out of the automatic copyright protection software these sites employ.

While I very much appreciate how copyright protects my work, ensuring that I am paid for what I create and encouraging me to create more, I also think that copyright laws should be careful not to get in the way of creating new works from old. For example, by combining audio clips, or re-writing a story, etc. If someone combines elements from copyrighted material such that something new is created, this should be legal and they shouldn't be charged royalties. Perhaps they could voluntarily pro-rate their royalties based on what degree they feel they had created a new work. So for example one might pay 25 percent royalties if they felt that to a limited degree the success of their work depended on another work it was based on. If the owner of the copyright for the earlier work objected, then a panel of experts would decide on the matter.

Those are my ideas, thanks!

Matt Roberts