Found the perfect song for your movie?

Copyright law is such that you’ve got to license music before you use it in, basically, ANYthing, even if it’s nonprofit, for a great cause, etc., etc. But that licensing process isn’t in its nature prohibitive. It’s just a matter of getting permission.

If you’ve got talented singers/songwriters among your friends, the whole thing can be very simple. (And, by all means, support them!) Other artists are a bit more complicated, so here are the key things to know going in:

(1) Most important: there are two separate permissions you have to acquire, two “sides”:

• one from the song publisher, for the composition;
• the other from the record label, for the recorded performance.

Usually you have to negotiate the two separately and pay a separate fee to each.

(2) Pricing for both sets of rights is completely up for grabs. (So negotiate hard on what a good cause you represent / how artistically amazing your project is / what a good person you are.)

(3) Each side is likely to ask for “most favored nation” status, which is just an over-dramatic way of saying that you’ll pay, for example, the label no less than you pay the publisher, or vice versa.

(4) Everybody will want to know where and how you’ll display the finished film, including numbers of viewers or copies distributed, whether global or local, whether you’re charging admission, etc. (You need permission regardless, but it’s a negotiation point in your favor if you’re not making wads of money from the film…)

(5) The record label calls the permissions they give you a “master use license.” The publisher calls their permissions a “synchronization license.” There’s no magic to those terms — they’re almost arbitrary — but I guess “sync license” is a little shorter than saying “all the customary permissions I need from the publisher.”

Good luck! While some of the major labels are notoriously hard to reach, small or midsize labels can be surprisingly helpful.

I believe that, as a lawyer, I should end with a few disclaimers:

Get everything in writing. Think through the details — or hire an experienced attorney in the field to think them through. Licensing agreements can get pretty fine-grained, and you don’t want to get into trouble down the road because you inadvertently limited the film to VHS distribution in North Dakota. Make sure your agreement will survive transfer to new copyright owners, like when your songwriter friend sells out to the big record label.

And, of course, you should not treat this post as legal advice. That would take a detailed, confidential review of your specific facts and circumstances. (Sorry, though; I know you already knew that.)

There’s lots of interesting fodder for conversation around copyright law, its use, and its potential reform.  Before weighing in properly, I’d like to simply collect links for some of the best discussions I’ve read.

Most interesting to me is the way writers and artists are weighing in.  It’ll be interesting to see how their comments filter, via a tangled web of lobbyists, through to Congress.

But on to the links:

Jason Robert Brown, the Broadway composer, posts a fascinating exchange with a teenage sheet music sharer, under the title “Fighting With Teenagers: A Copyright Story.”  I like the post — and the comments, of course — because Mr. Brown ends up focusing more on ethics, less on economics or existing law.  (Which is a good way to start any conversation on what the law ought to be.)

David Pogue, for the NY Times, responds to Mr. Brown in “No Easy Answers in the Copyright Debate,” legitimizing this as a debate with two sides.  In some cases, Pogue argues, copyright law raises barriers to just the kinds of artistic endeavor that it’s supposed to encourage.

And Tony Woodlief weighs in with essentially the same point in today’s WSJ, under the title “Curse of the Greedy Copyright Holders.”  I like Woodlief’s article for the way he writes, the way he’s chewing on the issues, and the perspective.  He writes more as a writer and less as a commentator, if that distinction makes sense.

More to come.  Meantime, I’m thinking about the way this conversation separates into ethics, law, and economics.  Although, eventually, they do need to weave together in some sensible way.