Fair Use


What if you take a recorder to a concert and capture the performance for inclusion in your podcast? You'd own the rights to that, wouldn't you? The answer is "probably not," unless you are also the songwriter and performer for the performance in question. Copyright law recognizes the rights of the author and of the performer, and both must be secured before a performance is recorded and distributed. These dual rights are why, for example, school musical performances so often carry an order against recording from the audiencethe school has been granted a license by the author (or the publisher, acting for the author) to publicly perform the piece, but not to record it. You should know that you have the permission of everyone who holds copyright to the music being performed before you set up to record and podcast a performance.

tip

Satire and Parodyis there a difference? There sure is. Parody is a work that imitates an artist's style in a humorous way. Satire is a work that holds some of society's failings or foibles up to the light. Parodies must be based, to some extent, on existing works, while satires are often completely original. Parody is explicitly protected under copyright law.


So what is this "fair use" that people like to talk about? In most cases, it's the sort of thing we discussed in the first part of this chapter; there are three broad circumstances when you can use part of someone's work within your own. First, if your podcast is a review or critique of a recording, you can use short excerpts to illustrate your point. For example, if you loved the guitar solo on a particular song, you could play a few seconds of the solo to let your audience share in your excitement. Next, if you're teaching some point about the music, you can use a short excerpt to illustrate a teaching point. If, to continue the example, the guitar solo was performed in Mixolydian mode, you might play a few seconds of the solo during a lecture on "The Use of Mixolydian Mode in Popular Music."

The third major category for "fair use" comes into play when you want to make a parody based on an existing piece. If you want to make a podcast that uses song parodies to comment on the state of music, politics, or the silliness of the world at large, copyright law allows you to do so. The key here is to make sure that it's obvious you're creating a parody; merely adding your own words to a famous melody doesn't pass the test. Note that this is the only category of fair use that allows you access to the entire length of a piece, though most parodies use only the melody or, less commonly, only the lyrics, with the parody coming through pairing the well-known component with devastatingly witty new ingredients.



Absolute Beginner's Guide to Podcasting
Absolute Beginners Guide to Podcasting.
ISBN: B001U8C03Q
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 167

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