They'll sue me, and if I had a distribution deal, they'd want permission or another song. Besides, it's a short film and it will be self-distributed.

Though this isn't the same as what was asked earlier, those of you indie filmmakers like me 6 years ago should note this...Do NOT have any songs that aren't original in mind for your film. Unless you have a big budget, you won't get them. And it'll break your heart. Trust me! I couldn't get some songs, and it stunk.

Also, don't edit with any copyrighted music, even if only temporarly--you'll be disappointed.

heath

Walter Murch would disagree, but then again, he is using it only until the composer writes the real thing or the music director chooses the final songs. He is not replacing commercial music with homemade or production music.

Trust me on this one, and I include myself in this, but most of my students and friends and others (and, again, me) use, say, something by Weezer or someone for a long time while cutting. And we fall in love with it, and begin pursuing the rights. I'm talking about the lower-budgeted filmmakers. It happens a lot more than you realize.

I'm trying to save filmmakers a lot of grief, because the disappointment is huge. "It makes the film, I have to get it." "What's your budget?" "Umm..." "Sorry, we can't do it." (cue sobbing)

heath

In our case we had already accepted the fact that we'd have to use original music for the "score", but what snook up on us was the non-original music that was in the archive footage.

At first glance I didn't even think about it because it was a band playing a cover of a published song on a VHS tape from like 10 years ago, but I thought I'd post a question here just to gather some opinions. After reading the various suggested articles, it seemed like a no-brainer that we would be violating someone's rights by using the material as-is. The story about the rocky-theme-song-cellphone-ring really put the fear of God (or would that be Elecktra records?) into me.

We then went through the "but it makes the film", sobbing, etc. stage with the added difficulty that it was literally impossible to re-shoot the footage without these copyrighted songs intertwined, so they had to be cut.

But like I said before the result was a net gain, so evil as they may seem, maybe the restrictions placed on us by copyright law forces us to become better artists...

I mean, isn't it about time we all learned to write music and play a few instruments...?

That's why there's Soundtrack, Garageband, and the PC flavors.

heath

Indie films warrant indie music IMO. Unless you DO have and WANT to utilize your budget for published music, it's the only way to go. I go to a website called collectiveunderground.com. It is a local band site for Arizona. Once in a while I'll make a post directing bands to my website and to a few forms for them to request an agreement. So far I have contracts for 8 unsigned bands, each contract includes 3 songs for unlimited use in my productions. The contract includes a clause where if I do end up making profits, the band can negotiate royalties. Otherwise the music is mine to use -indefinitely, free. So I have 24 songs currently in my pool of "worry-free" songs. Many are just as good as multi-million dollar bands.

my $.02

You might find the following document of interest:

http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/...tpractices.pdf

It's on best practices for fair use in documentary film making was produced with the advise of an impressive bunch of lawyers. It makes the argument that incidental reproduction of music in certian circumstances (but not all) falls under fair use.

peter interesting read