How many seconds of a song can you play without copyright?
Or merely a ten-second refrain? Unfortunately, there are no fixed standards as to how much of a song you can use without infringing the song owner's copyright. Of course, the shorter you can make the clip, the stronger your argument for fair use protection.
Some artists have to pay 50% of all the recording royalties just to use a sample which may be a few seconds long. These three amounts all vary widely, though. In order to pay the least possible amount, use as short a sample as you can. Use it as few times as you can.
You may have heard of "fair use," a copyright provision that permits you to use 10, 15 or 30 seconds of music without copyright obligation. That is, you understand that you can use a short section of a song without paying a fee. Yet, you're wondering how exactly this works. The short answer is that it doesn't work.
| Printed Material | |
|---|---|
| For Presentation or Project | Up to 10% or 3 minutes, whichever is shorter |
| Music/Audio | |
| Classroom Listening | Allowed for educational purposes. |
| For Presentation or Project | Up to 10% or 30 seconds, whichever is shorter. |
- Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Singers Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer recorded the original version of Take Me Out to the Ball Game in 1908. ...
- Happy Birthday. ...
- House of the Rising Sun. ...
- Rockin' Robin. ...
- Everybody Loves My Baby. ...
- That's All Right.
- Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a licensing organisation that fosters the fair use of artistic work for other artists to use. ...
- Search The Public Domain. ...
- Flip Your Sample and Make It Unrecognisable. ...
- Use Sample Sites And Royalty-Free Sample Packs. ...
- Clear Your Sample.
The process of obtaining permission from the owners of the sampled music is referred to as "sample clearance." Failure to obtain the proper permission could lead to serious consequences, including lawsuits for money damages or the inability to distribute your music to the public.
The "15 Second" or "8 Bar" Rule
The reality is that there is no legal protection in copyright law for these types of use. If you use a piece of a composition or sound recording that is copyrighted, you will need a license.
Berne specifies that copyright exists a minimum of 50 years after the author's death, while a number of countries, including the European Union and the United States, have extended that to 70 years after the author's death.
For example, in the United States, copyright rights are limited by the doctrine of "fair use," under which certain uses of copyrighted material for, but not limited to, criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research may be considered fair.
What are the 4 fair use exceptions to copyright?
Fair use of copyrighted works, as stated in US copyright law, “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”
Anyone can argue any thing in court. So the question becomes whether or not the law backs them up. In this case, if you use someone else's musical composition or sound recording you need a license. If you haven't obtained a license, even if what you're doing is for free or even a charity, then they can sue you.
Chapter 5 of American copyright law specifies statutory damages, or fees. According to the law, those cannot be lower than $750 or more than $30,000. However, if the court determines that your use of the music is somehow willful, the court could increase the damages to $150,000.
Copyright law is federal law and you can claim monetary damages as compensation. Suing for the use of a copyrighted song without permission entails proving in court ownership, access and substantial similarity of the song.
This is one of the most common misconceptions. Unfortunately, this is not true and there is no bright line rule that says a use is an acceptable use as long as you only use 5, 15, or 30 seconds of a song. Any use of copyrighted material without permission is, according to U.S. copyright law, copyright infringement.
The best way to avoid copyright infringement is to ensure that you don't use anything created by someone else. Simple as that. If you do use someone else's work, make sure you have the necessary permissions – this is usually in the form of a license granted by copyright owner(s), which you may have to pay for.
As a general rule, for works created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years.
- Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) ...
- László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) ...
- Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) ...
- Bob Thompson (1937–1966) ...
- Paul Nash (1889–1946) ...
- Joseph Stella (1877–1946) ...
- Florence Fuller (1867–1946) ...
- Hans Hofmann (1880–1966)
Can you speed up a song to avoid copyright infringement? No. You are confusing copyright infringement and getting automatically identified for copyright infringement (which most people call getting copyrighted today for some reason).
Copyrighted, unlicensed music samples must be short in comparison to the original song. As a rule of thumb, samples should not exceed 30 seconds or 10% of the length of the original song, whichever is shorter.
Do artists have to ask permission to sample a song?
If someone wants to sample a sound recording, he or she must obtain the permission from both the copyright owner of the song (the music publisher(s)) and the copyright owner of the particular recording of that song (the record label) to avoid copyright infringement.
Perhaps the most famous case of music copyright infringement in recent memory, heirs of Marvin Gaye sued Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for plagiarizing Gaye's "Got to Give it Up" in their song, "Blurred Lines." In 2015, Gaye's heirs won the $7.4 million case, though it was lowered to $5.3 million afterwards.
An option to make sampling easier and more affordable is by remaking the part of the song you want to use. This would be called an interpolation and means you don't have to license the original recording. However, you still have to get the rights to the composition.
Most statisticians agree that the minimum sample size to get any kind of meaningful result is 100. If your population is less than 100 then you really need to survey all of them.
A 16-bar cut should be around 30–45 seconds (one minute is maximum) and a 32-bar cut should be around 1:15–1:30 (two minutes is maximum). The most important thing is that the cut feel right and make good musical sense.
A three-minute song would usually be around 80 to 90 bars in total depending on the BPM. Taking into account all types of music, the 'average' song has 108 beats per minute. This then equals around 324 beats for three minutes and 81 beats in a song of this length.
There are free and paid services where the DJs get their music from. Some DJs buy songs from popular sites or get songs sent to them in subscriptions. Some DJs also make their own music on music production software which they perform live. They're also labels that send DJs tracks way before its released.
The "15 Second" or "8 Bar" Rule
The reality is that there is no legal protection in copyright law for these types of use. If you use a piece of a composition or sound recording that is copyrighted, you will need a license.
For example, in the United States, copyright rights are limited by the doctrine of "fair use," under which certain uses of copyrighted material for, but not limited to, criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research may be considered fair.