Buying Copyrights
 

Hey guys, I've got a client that has specifically asked for a few hit songs to be in their wedding video. Do I literally have to track down the artist's manager email and ask for how much it will cost, and pay them with a legal agreement, or is there a intermediate site which does all the "dirty work". I'm still a little unsure about sites like amazon and whether or not their licensees are limited for personal usage.

I've heard it's also got to do with the redistribution and amount of people viewing the final piece. I would appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction and explain the legal implications I have to deal with.

Thanks a million

I see you're lucky enough to be in Australia. There's a blanket license scheme in effect there where you can obtain a license to use music for limited distribution productions such as weddings for a very reasonable annual fee. Hopefully someone from Oz will see this and chime in with the details of who to contact but if they don't, try posting in the wedding forum here or I suppose a Google search would turn up more details. Those of us here in North America have to contact both the music publisher and the record label for each song and often a license is either prohibitively expensive or simply unavailable at any price.

Amazon, iTunes, etc licenses do NOT allow for reproduction or syncing to video and film to the best of my knowledge. If they refer to copying they mean copying from your computer to an mp3 player, etc, or burning a CD to play on your own stereo, ie, copying for personal use only.

Copyright Music FOR Video
 

Aaron,

whilst it does not help much with your current dilema (i.e. the customers request for specific hit songs), this thread is a useful resource to legally obtaining music for videos that are to be sold.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...ighlight=music

Hi Aaron,
You might want to give Amcos a call.
Looks like they are based out of NSW.

http://www.amcos.com.au/general/about_us-copyright.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_copyright_law

Hey thanks a lot guys ... your info has been really invaluable and I really appreciate it :).