How can you be sure royalty free music is royalty free?

[Angelshare1]

All these websites that sell images, music, stock footage, ect for a fee but without royalties. How do you know they are legit?

We run a local chain of restaurants and we get our music from Direct TV. We have a guy that calls once in a while demanding royalties for some artist that Direct TV rips off apparently. We usually just give them Direct TV's 800 number.

How do you know that the title on music is good from these random internet sites?

 

[Steve House]

All these websites that sell images, music, stock footage, ect for a fee but without royalties. How do you know they are legit?

We run a local chain of restaurants and we get our music from Direct TV. We have a guy that calls once in a while demanding royalties for some artist that Direct TV rips off apparently. We usually just give them Direct TV's 800 number.

How do you know that the title on music is good from these random internet sites?

I am not a lawyer and you didn't say where you're located - laws differ from country to country so take my answers for what they're worth.

Are you asking regarding playing music in a public venue such as the music you're playing in your restaurants or are you asking regarding using music in the soundtrack of a film or video production? The considerations, licensing, and royalty structures are very, very different for the two uses.

I'm assuming here that you are using the regular Direct TV subscriber music feeds and not some special service they offer specifically to commercial re-users akin to the sort of programming Musak provides. The music you are playing in your restaurants constitutes a public performance of copyrighted material and 99.999% of the time that requires you to license the music and make royalty payments to one of the rights societies such as ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC. The fact that your physical source of the signal is Direct TV and you pay them a subscription to get their signal makes no difference - that only pays for the delivery mechanism. Same rules would apply if you went to the record store and purchased the music on CD. In the US legally your restaurants are required to purchase an annual blanket license from ASCAP and/or BMI covering the amount and type of your usage, just like a radio or TV station does. The rights society then divies up the license fee between their member music publishers and composers and that takes care of your royalty obligations.

If you have purchased media (music, images, etc) from a website, satellite or cable vendor, or any other source for that matter and there's no mention of royalties, that does NOT mean it's royalty free. If you buy a song from iTunes, for example, all you have really purchased is the right to listen to the tune for your personal enjoyment. You DO NOT have the right to put it to any commercial use, redistribute it such as giving a copy to a friend, or play it in a public performance such as in your restaurant. Truly royalty free music will be accompanied by a formal license agreement spelling out exactly what rights you have purchased and what you can and can't do with it. If you are a subscriber to some sort of distribution service Direct TV provides specifically for commercial users of music (and that's what you are doing when you play it for your customer's enjoyment in your restaurants) then you would have written documentation in your contract with them stating either they own the copyright and they're granting you a license for commercial use of the music free of further royalties or detailing exactly what royalty arrangements they have made on your behalf. If you don't have such a contract, you owe the royalties.

HTH

 

[msorrels]

Technically you have no real way of knowing if a piece of royalty free music (or footage or photos or 3d models) is actually clear of copyright issues. If an issue did arise, you could be sued (as well as the company that sold you the license). You would of course be able to sue that company as well, but that wouldn't stop you from being a victim. You might be required to pull all copies of your work as well as pay the real copyright holder. Ideally you should be able to sue the company that sold you the bad license and force them to make it good. But those kind of lawsuits can drag on for years meanwhile your film/production is off the market. Best case you palm the whole thing off and make them sort it out.

This kind of problem comes up a lot in the Poser 3D model world. Mainly because it's too easy for anyone to broker something at the major marketplaces. No insurance is required, just statements that you have all the rights to sell the model. Almost yearly it comes out that some merchant's products consist of stolen textures or polygons. Which creates a great deal of headaches since everyone that bought those models/textures were using them to create renders and animations. Now all those renders and animations are basically infringing. Up to now these events have generally been settled out of court (mainly due to the tiny, tiny size of the market). Usually works aren't required to be pulled, refunds are given, etc. In most cases the merchant that was stolen from is also in the Poser market and is reasonable about the end users who are just victims. Not sure how exactly this would play out with stock music and footage firms. I suspect it would depend on the nature of the problem.

I suspect a very small percentage of all media sold by various stock web sites may have copyright issues. Especially the sites that aggregate content from many different merchants. This is one of the reasons most professional productions require E&O insurance, which would cover just this kind of problem. The insurance company would settle the case and then sue the site that sold the license and recover their costs.

The best you can do is buy from respectable firms. If some site claims to sell you a film/video license to a song from The Rolling Stones for a one time fee, run away. Do your homework and your unlikely to have a problem.