Rusty Close and Austin Padgett discuss what happens when one band wants to record another band's song and the special rules of copyright that go along with it.
In this episode, Rusty Close and Austin Padgett discuss what happens when one band wants to record another band's song and the special rules of copyright that go along with it. They explore the copyright owner's control over who can copy, distribute, and perform their work, as well as the issue of royalties.
No Infringement Intended, hosted by Rusty Close and Austin Padgett, is your go-to podcast for exploring the fascinating intersection of intellectual property and pop culture.
No Infringement Intended Podcast: Can My Band Cover Another Famous Song?
Hosts: Rusty Close and Austin Padgett
Recorded: October 24, 2024
Aired: January 14, 2025
Austin Padgett:
All right, welcome back. Come one, come all. I welcome you to No Infringement Intended. You're listening to the Intellectual Property Podcast of the law firm Troutman Pepper with your host, Austin Padgett. That's the voice you're hearing now, and Rusty Close.
Some are saying, I've heard rumors that we are probably the best IP podcast, at least this side of the Mississippi. So, we'll see where it goes from there. This is episode three of the podcast. Again, we owe our listeners so much for making us look good with firm management. We've only just learned that our management team are some of the biggest pro wrestling fans out there. Well, the numbers and the feedback from episodes one and two were so great that we got a note from up top telling us that they were sad to learn our ages because they wanted to put us up for 40 under 40 this year. But they're going to try to find some other path for us and we owe it all to you our listeners.
Before we go on, I want to make a quick apology to our Swiss listeners. Boy, we did not hear the end of it when I poked a little fun at our listeners in the last episode about Switzerland being the ironic epicenter of pro wrestling. Really sorry to do that, folks. Didn't mean anything by it. Did not realize the strong history to which someone had with pro wrestling.
But let's keep this going, and we'll see where this gets us.
Austin Padgett:
Rusty, what are we talking about today?
Rusty Close:
We're going to talk about something that I think is near and dear to both of us. I think it's fair to say that music is a big part of both of our lives. You are an accomplished musician, sort of a virtuoso in any instrument that you pick up.
Austin Padgett:
You go too far.
Rusty Close:
I've seen it. I've seen it in action and it is quite impressive. You can play piano and guitar and accordion, and I'm sure the list goes on and on and on. Similarly, I am able to put a record on my record player, drop the needle right on the track that I want to hear. I can dial up songs on my CD player. I can do it in Spotify. So, virtuoso in my own way.
Austin Padgett:
No doubt.
Rusty Close:
I think we both have our own tastes in music. Our Venn diagrams don't perfectly overlap.
Austin Padgett:
Fair.
Rusty Close:
For instance, big Nick Cave fan.
Austin Padgett:
I am. Absolutely. Yes. He's my number one.
Rusty Close:
Guilty is charged.
Austin Padgett:
Yes, for sure.
Rusty Close:
Big Radiohead fan.
Austin Padgett:
Love Radiohead. Yes. Long time.
Rusty Close:
Neither are necessarily in my side of the Venn diagram. Me on the other hand, big Phish fan, big fan of Drive-By Truckers.
Austin Padgett:
Okay. Respect. Not my regular listen, but much respect. Yes, absolutely.
Rusty Close:
Absolutely. Respect on both sides. In the middle, though, where do we overlap? Both Tom Petty fans.
Austin Padgett:
Absolutely. Yes. One of the best.
Rusty Close:
Both fans of Steely Dan, though I've never been in a Steely Dan cover band.
Austin Padgett:
Okay. We can fix that.
Rusty Close:
And I think really where we overlap is in our love for Limp Bizkit. Specifically, their legendary cover of George Michael's Faith.
Austin Padgett:
I knew as soon as you said it where you were going, because that is essentially my extent of Limp Bizkit understanding, except for the ‘99, there was a documentary on –
Rusty Close:
Yes, Woodstock '99.
Austin Padgett:
Yes. Then they played a pivotal role there as the documentary makes clear.
Rusty Close:
I think history would agree with that. Yes. Let's put on our red New York Yankees hats. Let's turn them around backwards and let's talk about how does it work when a band covers a song from another band and records it on their album?
Austin Padgett:
Yes. And it can be just to set the stage here. It can be any group covering any other group. We're not just talking kind of straight cover bands or anything like that. It can be your Limp Bizkit covering George Michael. So, this is a kind of a special rule of copyright that we'll get to and it's kind of worth talking about it in a bigger sense because it gets to the way the copyright acts and copyright law kind of modifies over time and adjusts the circumstances and technology.
So, let me take you to the general rule that we're going to break. But here's the general rule is that if you own a copyright, you get to control who makes copies of the work, who distributes the work, who performs the work. That's what we call your bundle of rights as a copyright owner. You get the right to do certain things with it. There’s of course, some limitations kind of rooted in First Amendment grounds and some other policy limitations. But generally, that's your rule is that you get to decide who gets to use it, what the cost will be, how long they can use all those basic terms of a contract.
So, where you come to cover songs, we're going to start hitting some pretty wild music history. Let me take you, rewind 1999 back to 1909, where 1909 is the big copyright act before our most recent copyright act. Our most recent is the 1978 act, ‘76 to ‘78 is when put into law and then come into effect, but 1909 is your other big act before that time. If you have pre-1978 works, a lot of times you have to go look at 1909 and see what was happening because that might be the applicable law or might give you some context as to what was happening when you go into copyright research.
Rusty, go back to 1909 in your ed. What do you think people were doing for fun and entertainment at that point in time?
Rusty Close:
It's a good question. I don't imagine anyone could have foreseen the genre of music that Limp Bizkit was a part of. I don't think that was on anyone's radar at the time.
Austin Padgett:
Right. Yes. I mean, that type of revolution often comes around unseen, for sure.
Rusty Close:
I'm guessing maybe we're talking live performances. Maybe we're talking – I imagine people are spending a lot of time at churches or small organizations in their communities. I feel like I should know this, but I'm guessing we may not have recorded music at the time.
Austin Padgett:
You're starting to see recorded music come into a thing because in the late 1800s that's when the phonograph was invented. So, it's starting. It's really around 1900 into the 19-teens, that's when the phonograph is coming into kind of – it's what you would think of as kind of be in-house.
Now, before that point, I mean at this point in time, you're really looking as you've mentioned live music. If you're going to see musical entertainment, it's going to be probably live in some respect, and that it's estimated that somewhere between a half to a third of American homes had a piano in them, as opposed to now where I think the number is somewhere between 5% to 10%. So, if you kind of look at the long arc of history, you've seen a decline in piano ownership, but those homes that would have piano in them would almost have to have someone who plays piano in them, so you gather around the piano at night. The town you lived in might have kind of a group marching band or some collection of musicians that get together.
If you live in a big enough city, you might have kind of a professional or semi-professional music performance organization. It could be symphonic music. It could be operas or operettas. Something to that effect. But you're really looking at live music. The player piano was also a thing so that you could – some people would buy the pianos with mechanisms inside them that you would put the player piano roll inside and it would play. You would go buy the roll and you could hear the popular piece of music that was put into the roll to make the piano play.
But around 1900, 2% of homes have phonographs in them, is the estimate. But you get into the 19-teens and that's getting closer to a quarter of homes. So, you're looking more like, it's more like a piano because the phonograph is becoming less expensive to produce. It's becoming mass-produced and people are starting to own. It's sort of like televisions take off. It takes a time to ramp up the technology and you build it in.
You come to 1909 and Congress is contemplating putting together a new Copyright Act to collect all sorts of things that have been happening. But in particular, one item is on the list as well, and that is music. What are we going to do with this so-called mechanical music? That is, we're printing records. We're taking music that somebody wrote, a composer wrote, and we are printing them onto records.
So, the phonograph had started to revolutionize the consumption of music at this time, and Congress is sitting there debating on whether or not to even give a royalty right to composers for the recordings of their music. One thing I'd like to draw out in our discussion today is that you have this new technology that's creating essentially a lobbying effort to Congress in this new copyright act that's going to eventually result in the 1909 act. On one side you have composers and publishing houses that want to control their music and have payment for their works. Remember at this point, they've been previously selling sheet music and so they have a pretty close control of the rights and what's happening.
One of your daughters perhaps, Rusty, learned to play. You can sit down in the salon in your home and have your daughter play the recent sheet music that came out from a composer, maybe, some Irish ballads that have been set by this composer. You have a nice evening of Irish ballads from the piano player on your home.
Rusty Close:
We talked about this in a previous episode, but this bundle of rights that goes along with what a musician does, this sounds to me like the publishing rights, the written, the lyrics, if there are any, and the notes themselves, much easier to grasp in this time because that's literally what people were buying. We weren't to the point of having to deal with that other bucket of rights that the master recordings that we talked about.
Austin Padgett:
That's right. This is when you're starting to get this concept of a separate copyright in the recording. So, we're taking a look at it and we're saying, “Oh man, well, someone owns those underlying rights and then we have this new technology where someone can perform it and mechanically reproduce this recording over and over and over again so that these rights are being exploited in some way and how are we going to deal with that.”
So, you have those who want control of those rights and monetized on one side. On the other side, you have essentially the recording industry, which can now reproduce and distribute musical works. This is exactly the topic if folks want to go and re-listen, because I'm guessing they've already listened to episode one since it was such a banger, but we talked about that distinction between publishing and the rights of the recording as being separate copyrights.
Getting back to the 1909 act and the lobbying effort, the publishers bring out a total ringer. Let me ask you this, Rusty. When I say John Philip Sousa, what's your favorite march?
Rusty Close:
I was just going to hope you were going to ask for a sort of a word association because march would have been the word I used. I do not have a favorite one. I don't know of any.
Austin Padgett:
You've definitely heard them.
Rusty Close:
John Philip Sousa and marches. I think I've heard of a sousaphone.
Austin Padgett:
Correct. That's right. The marching version of the tuba, so to speak.
Rusty Close:
You learn something new every day, as they say.
Austin Padgett:
Right, exactly. So, yes, I mean, this guy was a big deal at the time, and you still hear his marches today. I mean, they're kind of dripping Americana as we view them today. Back in the day, he was known as the March King, a famous composer, also conductor, had his own group that would perform works, and best known for military, patriotic types of marches.
Rusty Close:
Not to interrupt, but I'm guessing with your skills and abilities, had you been alive in this era, you could have been the John Philip Sousa of the time.
Austin Padgett:
I don't like marching. That type of exercise is not something I'm – so, if it was something like couch-sitting king, we could make our own kind of anthems for that.
Rusty Close:
I think you would have adapted to the times though, and just born too late, just born too late.
Austin Padgett:
That's it. Well, so Sousa comes before Congress and he expresses some concerns about the impact of these new technologies, including the phonograph, on the livelihoods of musicians and composers, and he calls it generally the menace of mechanical music.
Rusty Close:
I love that.
Austin Padgett:
Yes. So, he argues for the importance of copyright protection and safeguarding the interest of music creators. At this time, he also has an essay where he warns that the technology like the phonograph and even the player piano were becoming, “A substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul.” Does it sound familiar at all to some of the discussions we're having today?
Rusty Close:
It does. This wonderful technology that's entered our lives of artificial intelligence, right? I think we're all just waiting for the singularity when it takes over everything.
Austin Padgett:
No doubt. No doubt. Maybe that's where our souls are all headed.
Rusty Close:
I think so.
Austin Padgett:
So, we'll see. One quick note here. The copyright office, the US Copyright Office has an educational article that compares Sousa and Taylor Swift from our first episode with regard to technological change and the distribution of music. This point isn't, we're not the ones first drumming this up. It's been made before, but I thought it was an important link because we already our episode where we didn’t necessary plan for the connection to be made first. But the copyright office has a nice little piece about –
Rusty Close:
Great minds, I guess.
Austin Padgett:
Yes. I mean, we're certainly we're the greater, but somebody has to back clean up.
Rusty Close:
Exactly.
Austin Padgett:
Well, on the other side from Sousa, you have a legal representative for the Victor Talking Machine Company, which is one of the leading manufacturers of phonographs at the time. They also made records. So, the phonograph these at that time also made records, which makes sense. This similar technology. He provided testimony on behalf of the recording industry and he discussed the need for having a balanced approach to copyright law that would allow for the continued growth and innovation of the industry while ensuring fair compensation for music creators.
Rusty Close:
Can I just say, not to interrupt that point, but I want to be sure I heard this correctly. A phonograph company. They called a phonograph a Talking Machine?
Austin Padgett:
Right. So, there are a lot of antiquated, what are we going to do with this technology? How do you describe it? Yes. So, that was one of the early gestures made towards the machine was that I would say a talking machine because you could record people talking.
Rusty Close:
Love it. Maybe we should have stuck with it.
Austin Padgett:
I do like it now that I think about it.
Rusty Close:
Yes. Sorry to get you off track there.
Austin Padgett:
Yes. It's kind of like the Walkman, and I never actually listen to it while walking, I don't think, but it's more for like riding the bus.
Rusty Close:
Yes, a little bulky if you're going to be doing some outdoor exercise.
Austin Padgett:
Yes, no doubt. So, this representative comes in and makes his arguments as well on the other side. In a normal situation, you as a copyright owner, let's say, would have the ability to license your music, right? That's the general rule. I own this, I have control of who's going to do anything with it, how much I'm going to charge for it, all that kind of stuff. And that rains true in most musical circumstances. You do something, you're going to be able to go and make money off it. But it's not true for recording because the result is that in the 1909 act, and we'll get to it, it becomes part of the later act as well in the 1970s, is that we're going to come up with this idea of what's called compulsory licensing. It's the compulsory licensing of the mechanical right.
So, if you want to license the song to make a record, the owner cannot stop you if you follow the rule of the statute. How does that hit you, Rusty?
Rusty Close:
So, if I'm George Michael, I can't be certain about this, but let's just assume that he owns the publishing to the song, Faith.
Austin Padgett:
Okay. Yes.
Rusty Close:
Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit want to cover that song. They don't have to come to me, George Michael, and say, “Hey, we'd love to put our own spin on this song.” There is a mechanism in place, certain steps that Limp Bizkit has to follow, and George Michael's completely out of the equation.
Austin Padgett:
Correct. Yes. There are some limitations, and we'll get into those, but there's no stopping you. It is compulsory. You as a copyright owner are mandated. If you write something that is a song, that's a musical work, it becomes subject to this compulsory licensing scheme whereby others can take it, record it, and sell those recordings subject to the rules that are set out in the Copyright Act.
So, let's think through that. In the 1976 act and I think I call it the ‘78 act. Anyway, we'll get to it. But the song must have already been recorded. That's the important limitation that you as the songwriter can keep control of who first records your song. So, you find out somebody wrote a song and somehow you get a copy of the chord chart, the words, maybe the melody and you think you can string it together. You don't get to do that for the first time.
So, as I've already been recorded, you have to serve a notice of intention on the song owner. Then you have to file it in a certain amount of time before you do anything with it and it has to contain all of these particular items that are listed in the statute as to the information that's required. You have to find who owns the song, send them a notice, and make this happen. And lastly, you have to pay the statutory rate and provide periodic accountings of what you've been doing.
Right now, the way it's set up is that there's a group that comes up with the royalty amounts and they meet every so often. I think it's every couple of years and they come up with new rates and they look at what's been happening. They take testimony from industry folks and they come up with what is the rate for this mechanical license. Right now, is 12.4 cents per track distributed or 2.38 cents per minute of playing time, whichever is greater. Also, if you're still doing ringtones, it's 24 cents per ringtone. So, that was a big deal for a while there. That's the statutory rate. That's what you pay when you make a cover song and you record it and you
distribute it.
Rusty Close:
I got some questions.
Austin Padgett:
Yes. Let's go for it.
Rusty Close:
So, there's a notice of intention, right?
Austin Padgett:
Mm-hmm.
Rusty Close:
I'm Limp Bizkit. Hey, George Michael, here's what we're planning to do. We filled out the form. We're giving you notice of our intention to do this. What's sort of the policy behind having that notice? Does he have – does the owner, do they have a right to object? Do they have any right to say, “I'd rather you didn't do this,” or is it just, “Hey, we're putting you on notice that this is happening.”
Austin Padgett:
You're just putting them on notice. It's really for record keeping of who's going to be using the music. You got to give me a fair notice of it so that I can keep track if I need to try to enforce my rights because I don't think you're paying me enough. That's really the policy behind this, building in, notice that everybody knows what's going on here and how much we're getting paid for these certain types of activities.
Rusty Close:
So, does the owner, is there any other organization that gets copy of the notice? I mean, is there sort of some governing body?
Austin Padgett:
It's a good question. I don't know this off the top of my head. I believe you send notice to the copyright owner. There are some instances where if you can't find the owner, you send the notice to the copyright office. I've had to do that a few times along the way, but it's really a pain. And we'll talk about how we can – that's become streamlined in certain ways.
But the main thing is to get the people that are supposed to know the things, knowing the things. Then, if you can't find them, there is a process for that that you tell the copyright office, “Man, I tried really hard. I have no idea who owns the rights to the song, but I'm going to use it. I don't own these rights, somebody does, and I'm going to pay you, the copyright office, into a fund so that if anybody comes knocking and trying to claim these rights, that money is sitting there for them.”
Rusty Close:
I'm the copyright owner, if I'm George Michael, is it up to me to collect the money that I'm due? Is it up to Limp Bizkit to just pay according to the royalty rate and then maybe provide accounting records, and then I can double check it, and if there's a dispute we deal with it?
Austin Padgett:
That's right. It's the latter. The covering party has an obligation to pay because they're the ones who know how much it's going to be distributed and what they're going to do with it. They might just do a limited pressing. For example, Pearl Jam does a cover for a holiday. I think this is a thing, right? Do you remember those? I think Pearl Jam did a cover for their fan club, for the holidays, so it would be a limited pressing. So, you pay for the 12.4 cents or whatever the amount was. It was in the nine cents not too long ago or whatever it was at the time, that's what you pay. Then if there is a new account for what you've done as well. So, these mini copies, this is how I came up with the number that I owe you. If there's a dispute, it's really more of a – that would be on the copyright owner to raise an issue of like, how can it possibly this few I've been tracking, maybe through an industry source or some other method. And I think that it's going to be larger than that. And you owe me more money than that. Then, you could potentially file suit, but at least make a demand to either audit the books or make a demand for what you think you're owed.
Rusty Close:
So, if I'm understanding correctly, there's no distinction between – I mean, Faith was a huge song, but if Limp Bizkit would have selected a deep cut from the same album, there's no distinction. They’d pay the same amount. It doesn't change anything.
Austin Padgett:
Right. Exactly right. That's the weird part about this is that it doesn't fluctuate with the market value of the particular song that, let's say our firm wanted to run a commercial and they wanted the big hit of the summer behind a television commercial for the firm where we're going to promise our clients that they're going to get zealous representation of the law.
On that, there's no compulsory licensing. So, we've got to figure out who owns the rights in that recording. We've got to figure out who owns the rights in the underlying publishing, and we've got to negotiate some amount for it because we're going to buy the biggest, hottest song on the market at that moment, and we're going to get charged accordingly for it. But that is not the case in recorded music where the rate is set for you over time. That's the importance of this Copyright Royalty Board that sits from time to time and figures out how much money are people going to get paid for these sorts of things.
There are songs that I didn't even realize were covers until much later, because I've become so associated with the cover version of the song because I thought maybe what I heard first or maybe what I understood to be the song. Then you understand, “Oh, that was actually a cover.” And they were subject to these types of rules and payments. If you read through some recording agreements with artists, sometimes they'll contemplate this amount that has to be paid as the mechanical royalty. Oftentimes, if you're doing a singer-songwriter deal, the singer-songwriter is going to give essentially themselves and their regular label a discount on the rate. So, maybe it's only going to be 75% of the statutory rate for the compulsory license at that time.
Rusty Close:
I'm sure that you're referring to Blinded by the Light by Manfred Mann actually being a Springsteen song when you say you didn't realize it was a cover.
Austin Padgett:
It is incredible how we sync up in those ways. Yes, absolutely.
Rusty Close:
So, the last question, and I think this is really going to come up in a later episode when I think we're going to talk about cover bands and music that's performed live that is a cover of someone else's, but going back to our Venn diagram, I'm a Phish fan. They have covered on occasion the song Roses Are Free by Ween and that can often be like a 30-minute-long jam that they play out of that song.
They've released recordings of those live shows and I'll notice that there's six, seven, eight minutes of Roses Are Free. Next track is such-and-such jam for the remaining 22 minutes. I assume that gets into this idea of 2.38 cents per minute versus 12.4 cents per song.
Austin Padgett:
That's probably what's going on there is that usually the rate that's contemplating gives you about five minutes of song. But as you know, some songs are much longer than five minutes. I look at my entire Rush catalog and think, “Oh man, what would it cost to do hopefully my crowning glory of doing all the albums over in my style?” But anyway, that's how they're trying to accomplish. Okay, how do we get – there's a song. We're going to basically flat-feed it at five minutes. Then if it goes longer, now you got to start paying this upcharge and that's how we're going to compensate and try to just figure out a relatively easy system for music, which is the decoration of time, how we're going to deal with the duration of these things. So, five minutes seems to be just about right.
Rusty Close:
It reminds me of when I was a little kid and I asked my mom. I asked her a lot of questions. It probably drove her crazy. But I remember asking her one time how long a song was, and I remember her telling me it was three minutes. I think this is my idea.
Austin Padgett:
Oh, the radio answer. Yes.
Rusty Close:
Yes. I think most of the time she was just trying to get me to be quiet. But I think that has stuck with me since I was four or five years old, and I kind of use it as a baseline, so it fits here. How often does this rate get changed? I mean, do you know how long this has been in place?
Austin Padgett:
I think they readjust every couple of years. Sometimes it's a small change or no change and then sometimes it's a larger change depending on the circumstances. I think you look at kind of what the fed looks at. You look at inflation, you look at all sorts of different concepts of what's going on in the industry, and they really do hear from experts and they take testimony and try to understand what's happening here. So, it's an important and interesting job because it's such a strange concept. But it not only sets the rate for that compulsory license alone, but that is what it's based on. Because you couldn't negotiate this license. You can't stop somebody from taking the license, but you couldn't negotiate it to a lower amount or potentially, I don't know why you'd do this, but a higher amount. I'm guessing that has happened over the course.
This is, I guess the last point is that the paperwork that you have to submit and to follow all the rules of the copyright office, it's kind of bureaucracy-type stuff and it's not hard. But it's kind of a pain. So, private business has figured out how to streamline this a bit. There's a group called the Harry Fox Agency named after a guy named Harry Fox who I don't know actually that much about him. I don't know that much is known about him except that he was kind of the guy that understood the business aspects of all these licensing and kind of built businesses and all these concepts up. This agency bears his name and this is an agency that manages these compulsory mechanical rights for a large number of rights owners.
So, they make it relatively easy to come and you set up your account, you look for the song, and so that's an important part of it, is you have to go and find who owns this stuff because that's not always an easy task. Then you have to figure out not only who made it and who owns it, but how am I going to get the payment and all these things to them. So, the Harry Fox Agency is built on the concept of, well, let's just hang out a shingle. We'll provide you the information, the platform, make it all easy for you to come and grab the rights that you need to record albums and get them released. It's an interesting kind of tale of Congress figuring out how to deal with industry and technology and new stuff while maintaining old rights, and then also down the road, private industry figuring out, “Okay, we can take these up and make them more efficient.”
Rusty Close:
Yes. I mean, it seems like everything was geared towards streamlining a process that could just get overwhelming and cumbersome. On the one hand, let's put this mechanism in place, this compulsory license, and then what grows up around that, something like the Harry Fox Agency, which it sounds like to me almost becomes an It says, “Hey, we'll simplify this even further for you, maybe not this example. But you, Limp Bizkit, don't have to go find George Michael. Just come to us. We'll take a piece of those transactions for our trouble and streamline it further.”
Austin Padgett:
Yes. That's a great answer. That is the big wrinkle in recording music and recording covers of someone else's music is that there's a compulsory license aspect that is an interesting lobbied-up answer to what was seen as a burgeoning problem way back coming into the 1900s. So, it's just one of those interesting tales of how this came to be. It's an interesting solution to the problem because it's a compulsory license which says, “Hey, you might own something, but we're going to make you subject to a limitation that gives other people rights to your work.” There are other examples of this. It grows over time when digital music comes into being and streaming becomes another part of this. It's all wrapped up into how are we going to deal with these technologies? I love the idea of let's try to find an efficient way that works for everyone. It seems you don't hear many detractors from the concept of a compulsory license.
Rusty Close:
At the end of the day, this is fairly straightforward and simple. Going back to our main example, Limp Bizkit sends some paperwork to George Michael, says here's what we're planning to do. We're going to cover this song. We're going to put it on our album. We sold X number of copies of this album and we're going to pay you 12.4 four cents for each one we sold. It kind of is pretty straightforward.
Austin Padgett:
Yes. Then we'll talk about it in some other episode, but then you talked about, “Okay, we think it might be a hit, and so we might have to make a video of it. How do we get the rights to do that?” We're going to have to separately negotiate those, and so do we all do it all at once? How do we think about that from a business perspective once we're kind of thinking through what the project is?
Rusty Close:
We got to break up a lot of rights, yes. I imagine going back to your 1909 example, they've had to deal with this over and over. We've got records, we've got A-tracks, we've got cassette tapes, we've got CDs, we've got streaming, and then we've got, like you said, live performances. We've got commercials. We've got just clips on YouTube.
Austin Padgett:
Ringtones?
Rusty Close:
Yes. Ring –
Austin Padgett:
Karaoke?
Rusty Close:
Absolutely. Yes, karaoke. Does it get played in a stadium, over the PA system? I'm sure there's rules for all of those things that will hopefully get into at some point.
Austin Padgett:
Yes, for sure. That's the fun part and the challenging part of music copyright is that it's so cut up into different rights. There are little rules and little things that happen in each of those rights that are different from the others and it's part of the reason they're all separated, but it makes it challenging and interesting in this field. You got anything else, Rusty, about covers?
Rusty Close:
No, I'm just ready to go fire up my copy of Limp Bizkit’s, what is it, Three Dollar Bill, Y'all, and really rock out for a few minutes.
Austin Padgett:
Yes, absolutely. Well, thanks listeners for joining us yet again. Appreciate you and remember to go smash that like and smash that subscribe. This podcast is available on all podcast platforms and we'll see you soon. Thanks.
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