What Is a Music Copyright? Part Two.

 In this posting, I’ll cover the rights you have in your songs and sound recordings. For a review of how a song differs from a sound recording, see Part One of this blog posting.

Exclusive Rights in a Song

For the copyright owner of a song, the most important exclusive rights are the rights to make copies or records of the song, the right to distribute copies and records of the song, and the right to perform the song publicly. With respect to the right to perform the song publicly - also called the public performance right - it doesn't matter whether a live band is performing the song or whether a club d.j. is playing a recording of the song. Either can qualify as a public performance.

As the copyright owner, you also have the exclusive right to prepare a derivative work based on the song. A derivative work is a new work based on or derived from one or more pre-existing works. For example, if you write new lyrics for one of your existing songs, the resulting song is a derivative work.

The final exclusive right in your song is the right to display the song in public. As you might imagine, the right to display a work in public has much more importance for visual creative works such as paintings and sculptures than it does for a song. However, the display right might apply to a song if, for example, you wanted to post the sheet music to your song on an online website.

Exclusive Rights in a Sound Recording

The exclusive rights for a copyright owner of a sound recording include the rights to reproduce and distribute records containing the sound recording. These are the rights that record companies are exercising when they manufacture and sell CDs of an artist's recorded performances. As the copyright owner of a sound recording, you also have the right to prepare derivative works from your recording. As explained above, a derivative work is a new work derived from one or more pre-existing works. Making a derivative work of a sound recording entails placing a portion of an existing recording into a new recording.

The most significant distinction between the exclusive rights to a song and to a sound recording is the public performance right. Before 1995, the exclusive right to perform a work publicly applied exclusively to songs and not to sound recordings. This means that when a recording of a song is performed publicly on the radio, on television, or in a nightclub, the owner of the musical composition - the songwriter, or her assignee - receives royalty income for that performance. The owner of the sound recording, which is usually the record label, and the artist performing the song on the sound recording do not.

In 1995, Congress passed the Digital Performance Right and Sound Recordings Act. This law gave sound recordings a very limited public performance right. The right applies only to public performances that take place by digital audio transmission. A digital transmission conveys information in a format that a computer understands using a stream of 0s and 1s. So this performance right applies primarily to performances of sound recordings on the Internet and not to performances of sound recordings that are on television, on radio, or just played through an electronic stereo system.