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Do I have the lead sheet for Let's Fall In Love? Yes, I do. That's how I was able to produce the chord progression MIDI file and printable score. Can I actually post the lead sheet? I really can't legally without getting a license from the owner of the copyright. To obtain any such license, I would have to agree to pay a sizeable royalty for each copy dispensed. I'm guessing the royalty cost would run from $.25 to several dollars. Dispensing such expensive objects for free from my site and paying the fee would rapidly exhaust my resources, and cause me to shutter the site. How about posting illegally? I believe that I would receive cease and desist letters from the copyright holders attorneys, and discover that I have incurred massive legal liability. The stautory (automatic) penalty specified in the copyright laws is $150,000 per work offered in violation. Ouch! I'm not going to risk that. Could I post a MIDI sequence that is a full arrangement of the tune including the melody? I am permitted to do that, if I pay mechanical royalties to the copyright holder's licensing agencies. In this case, I would have to make payments of 7.55 cents US per copy to the Harry Fox Agency. They would consider any instance of transmission to any SongTrellis user to be a payable copy. I also might have to pay several cents more per copy for the same transmission to ASCAP and BMI ,the copyright holder's performing rights agencies, since under current legal theory that would also be a performance of the work. If I had the SongTrellis server play the melodies automatically when a tune's page is accessed, like I do for tunes listed in The Changes, I would owe somewhere between $.10 to $.15 per page hit. As a free site, I can't afford that either since at current rates my yearly royalty payments would be above $100,000 per year. I could start selling sheet music or complete MIDI sequences from SongTrellis. Is there any interest in this? When I begin vending copies of the SongTrellis Editor from the site, I will have acquired e-commerce capabilities for the site so that I can make that sale. It wouldn't be much work to extend that to allow sale of MIDI sequences or sheet music. I actually have a preference to sell MIDI sequences rather than printable scores. My editor has the capability to read MIDI sequences and transform that into a printable score that can be animated in synchrony with the playback. Once it's in the editor, it's trivial to alter tempo, prepare a transposed score for a different instrument, reorchestrate the sequence, change key, practice with it, and copy excerpts into the user's own work. Offering prepared MIDI sequences for sale would be a nice way to support users of the editor in their musical endeavors. There's also an adminstrative and legal reason to prefer vending MIDI files to vending sheet music. No negotiation is necessary with copyright holders if you wish to commercially offer the MIDI sequence. Simply paying the mechanical royalty fee to the Harry Fox Agency satisfies the claims of the copyright holder. To offer a single work as sheet music requires separate negotiation for each work with each copyright holder. This would require a staff to negotiate the necessary agreements and would greatly increase the sheet music price. So, SongTrellis users, I need your advice. I regularly receive requests to present the complete melody for tunes. How do you think I should go about doing this? There are responses to this message:
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Last update: Wednesday, December 11, 2002 at 9:48 AM. |
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