UK COPYRIGHT LAW

[Watchmaker]

Interesting thread.

I keep coming back to the notion of WHEN copyright infringement claims might actually come into play and what that looks like.

For the overwhelming majority of IP holders, there is rarely ever a challenge to copyright and in music, it is extremely difficult to prevail if you are plaintiff. Look at the Led Zeppelin case last year - took thirty years for that to get adjudicated and the only reason it did was because there was serious money at stake.

And the plaintiff lost because even the lower bar of civil evidentiary requirements was not met.

And before it even gets that far, it's actually quite easy to stave off a threatened prosecution because the very first thing one should do is force the plaintiff to "show standing," meaning they have to demonstrate actual harm before they can proceed. Very difficult to do, especially since there is no standing based on lost revenue. If you can't show the court that you were harmed, then that's the end of it.

And good luck finding a lawyer who will work on contingency for an IP claim. Any plaintiff will carry the full cost of the battle on their own dime, something very few can afford, and even fewer will judge to be a good spend.

Much ado about nothing.

I should add I'm in Duh'murca and we ain't all that smart, but US law (besides being capricious and heavily skewed towards "business" interests) is based in UK Common law...

(Aside: There was another thread last week about someone getting a C&D order for their name (Rain versus Rhayne) from a different jurisdiction. I don't know how treaties impact standing specifically but I'd certainly raise a challenge that the C&D is invalid in my jurisdiction and let them proceed to court on that. Then I'd kneecap them on standing.)

[Guest]

I can tell you why the poor man's letter or envelope will not work.
Exhibit A. You go to trial for a case and use the envelope as evidence to prove your case. The judge orders your lawyer to open the sealed containment in order to prove your claim. You prove your claim and win the case, end of story you go home happy and rich.

Then one year later another person infringes your copyright, only now you've already opened the seal that won your case before, uh oh, what now? You will lose the case because you only had one sealed envelope. You need to think of the bigger picture sometimes.

If a person is really that successful that people are taking their work from them and they easily know about it, you need to think of a bigger plan because music is not a one versus one world it's a community of billions of people.

[John Willett]

I can tell you why the poor man's letter or envelope will not work.
Exhibit A. You go to trial for a case and use the envelope as evidence to prove your case. The judge orders your lawyer to open the sealed containment in order to prove your claim. You prove your claim and win the case, end of story you go home happy and rich.

Then one year later another person infringes your copyright, only now you've already opened the seal that won your case before, uh oh, what now? You will lose the case because you only had one sealed envelope. You need to think of the bigger picture sometimes.

If a person is really that successful that people are taking their work from them and they easily know about it, you need to think of a bigger plan because music is not a one versus one world it's a community of billions of people.

Er - but you now have a previous court case that proves your copyright.

So this case can be quoted in any subsequant case.

[Martin Walker]

Er - but you now have a previous court case that proves your copyright.

So this case can be quoted in any subsequant case.

Yep, that thought immediately occurred to me too John.

Martin

[Mike Stranks]

And currently...

Those of us providing web-based services/information for our communities in these troubled times need to be aware of copyright restrictions on the use of pre-recorded music...

Just stumped-up £175 so that I'm legal... Ho hum...

[Sam Spoons]

Who was that to Mike? MCPS?

[Mike Stranks]

Who was that to Mike? MCPS?

PRS...

https://www.prsformusic.com/licences/using-music-online/limited-online-music-licence

I did get a free logo to use on my sites though!

[Sam Spoons]

Thanks, we have a PRS/PPL licence to use recorded music for live classes but online is different. The person we spoke to at PRS/PPL said they couldn't licence music for online classes/lessons

[TJ1]

I guess what a lot f people want is the peace of mind to know that their copyright is protected, before the seek to put their work in the public domain.

I realize it would cost more money than the simple sealed envelope route: but lets say you had a couple of sheets of paper with your music and lyrics on it.

If you got any solicitor/lawyer for lets say £30-50 to date stamp it and confirm they had sight of the document -before sending it to yourself, would that give you additional protection?

I am not really talking about getting the services of a high priced music lawyer, rather any above shop wills/beneficiary solicitor who has experience of attesting to the authenticity of documents.

[MOF]

I then started thinking about the sealed polythene envelopes that you get on parcels that you cannot simply open or steam open.

It doesn’t stop unscrupulous individuals sending those types of envelopes, unsealed, to themselves and later enclosing their ripped off composition materials in the envelope then sealing it properly.
I used to send my compositions on cassette to myself and put stamps across one end of the envelope seal and the Recorded Delivery stamp across the other end. It occurred to me at the time that it wasn’t 100% infallible as proof.

[CS70]

I guess what a lot f people want is the peace of mind to know that their copyright is protected, before the seek to put their work in the public domain.

I realize it would cost more money than the simple sealed envelope route: but lets say you had a couple of sheets of paper with your music and lyrics on it.

If you got any solicitor/lawyer for lets say £30-50 to date stamp it and confirm they had sight of the document -before sending it to yourself, would that give you additional protection?

I am not really talking about getting the services of a high priced music lawyer, rather any above shop wills/beneficiary solicitor who has experience of attesting to the authenticity of documents.

I guess nowadays your best bet is to simply upload to an independent large third party service (which essentially means YT and similar).

In case of litigation (outside the US) it's all about who has more arguments, and an independent timestamp that cannot be easily tampered with by both parties is probably hard to beat - and costs nothing.

The laywer thing, I don't think it would be much better than the envelope. I think few judges think that lawyers are saints and a lawyer word would mean little, because it's far easier to tamper with than a completely independent, neutral upload page. Especially when there's significant money at stake - like there must be for a litigation to make sense.

In certain countries you have notaries whose professional job is exactly to act as good faith witnesses (and they get paid pretty well for that!) and in many others their function is replaced by government officials.. however, they tend to enter the picture for existing, concrete transactions, and for something like a recording the chain of custody would be hard to maintain (unless there's a dedicated government office... cue the US Copyright Office).

Maybe if you deposited in a bank..

So imho a lawyer would be a waste of money.

[TJ1]

I guess nowadays your best bet is to simply upload to an independent large third party service (which essentially means YT and similar).

In case of litigation (outside the US) it's all about who has more arguments, and an independent timestamp that cannot be easily tampered with by both parties is probably hard to beat - and costs nothing.

The laywer thing, I don't think it would be much better than the envelope. I think few judges think that lawyers are saints and a lawyer word would mean little, because it's far easier to tamper with than a completely independent, neutral upload page. Especially when there's significant money at stake - like there must be for a litigation to make sense.

In certain countries you have notaries whose professional job is exactly to act as good faith witnesses (and they get paid pretty well for that!) and in many others their function is replaced by government officials.. however, they tend to enter the picture for existing, concrete transactions, and for something like a recording the chain of custody wo

uld be hard to maintain (unless there's a dedicated government office... cue the US Copyright Office).

Maybe if you deposited in a bank..

So imho a lawyer would be a waste of money.

Thank you that is very helpful, I only raised the lawyer issue because it seems the consensus in this discussion and on other sites is that posting it to yourself does not seem alone to constitute a guaranteed method of establishing copyright in many courts.

[chrisnubile]

I’m interested to know… without stating the bleeding obvious, but in this day and age of all of the relevant data being digital files, surely presentation of the original recordings and demos etc which would have digital time stamps on the files that predate anyone else’s would suffice as evidence?

So if at the point of recording we back up to one or more removable secure media and/or a secure cloud service, surely we have time stamped ‘archives’ we can wheel out of need be?

[Wonks]

Trusted 3rd party storage maybe, but as it’s easy enough to set your own computer clock to any time and date you want it to be, and so create a file stamped with that time, your own digital archives would probably not be considered reliable enough.

Files stored in the cloud should be stamped locally with the time the files were created, so bar some serious hacking skills, that should be considered as evidence of the date they were uploaded. But you’d need to check if any of this has been tested in case law before relying on it 100%.

[Folderol]

At one time the recommendation was to make a physical copy and leave it with a solicitor - but that gets expensive!