Don't understand copyright?

[Clive]

When you buy a CD, or a song online, you have bought it for your own personal use only. This is explained in the small print on the CD, or the licence that you may have clicked "I agree" to without reading it. Ownership of the song remains with the person(s) who wrote it - you have only bought a licence to use it personally, which means no copying it and no distributing it - such as putting it on Facebook. Computer software is the same - what you actually buy is a licence to use the software, not the right to copy it. So are books, which is why there are rules about how much of a book you can photocopy or quote.

It's OK for friends to listen to it with you, or to play it at a party that people don't have to pay to come to, but do anything else with it and you come up against breaking the licence.

If you give it away free, you are denying the author or composer the opportunity to earn from their work. So why should they bother to continue writing? Radio and TV stations can do it because they have bought a licence from the Performing Rights Society which gives royalties (a payment for using the song) to the author or composer, or have paid them royalties directly. Any DJ has to do the same thing. Noddy Holder does really well out of this - every time "Merry Xmas Everybody" by Slade is on the radio or played by a DJ at Christmas, he gets more royalties. (LOL I'm old enough to remember when it first came out!)

Copyright lasts for 70 years after death, so when our choral society performs a piece of music that was composed by someone still alive or less than 70 years dead, when I was treasurer I had to pay for our right to do it. The National Federation of Music Societies has a scheme to make this easy - all I had to do was write on the annual subscription form what we had performed, how big the audience was, and pay the appropriate fee. (So I'd have to think about that in the budget for the concert. With my eye on the money, I liked old music because we could do that for free!) I was once in a church performance of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" and we had to pay Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group for the privilege. And each buy our own copy of the music - photocopying it would be illegal.

If you wrote a song, you wouldn't want to be able not to make money from it because any old Tom, Dick or Harry can just copy it anywhere, would you? That would be theft. That's why copyright law exists.

So there it is - you have only bought the right to use the song for your personal listening pleasure, not the song itself. If you want to do anything else with it, you have to ask permission from the copyright holder and pay for being allowed to do it.