Recording Artists Say Music Stations Would be Silenced Without Copyright Protection
Monday March 6, 1:56 pm ET

WASHINGTON, March 6 /PRNewswire/ — Music stations would be silenced if copyright protection didn’t exist, say Grammy Award winner John Legend and other top recording artists.

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According to the above (totally distorted) news story, public domain music does not exist.

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com

http://www.pdmdb.org – The Public Domain Movie Database
http://www.pdmedia.org – Public Domain Media

Surely there is a need for music users (radio/home/record companies/theaters…..) TO KNOW what music can be used freely and which music can be used only with authorization from the copyright owner.

By “TO KNOW” I mean in an easy manner. If to copy a song at home to a CD to give to a friend or to allow the singing of a song in a restaurant when requested by a patron (at midnight), there is a need to have a law degree or access to a difficult to use, interpret or improperly maintained or an incomplete database, then the “TO KNOW” will not work.

Surely some cleanup of copyright claims must first be made. The American National anthem is registerd in ASCAP by over 200 different individuals and music publishers, even though the song is in the public domain. Almost all the Latin American national anthems are registered with BMI. These are copyright claims that are made because it is very easy to claim the ownership of public domain works. All you need to do is take an old work, make a cosmetic change and claim the ownership of the new cosmetic version of the work. If you then hide the original, then the only access to the work is to the new cosmetic version of the work. This is why almost avery new edition of works by Shakespeare, Chopin, Beethoven are copyright claimed. A kind of legal theft.

As anyone who looks into the use of public domain music on the radio should know, radio stations are licensed to use the catalog of the so called collective societies (ASCAP/BMI/…) but this is a sham. A secret of the radio industry. The collective’s catalogs are not published and are basically useless to the radio stations. A question is will a public domain catalog suffer a better fate or will it be as useless as are the catalogs of the collectives?

If licensed radio stations and restaurants and other venues do not use at all the catalog they are licensed to use, why expect them to use a catalog of public domain works?

Will a public domain database be used by anyone?

Again, I applaud the gesture, but please do all the necessary homework to understand the problem with using public domain works.

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com