T’s Legal and Copyright Blog
We identified one major legal issue that may arise with the studio section of our project, this is mainly related to the distribution and ownership to the song.
Most Specifically:
What rights do our session musicians have to the final royalties
And the seperate rights of recording engineers.
For studio production we have a multitude of copyright areas, regarding the overall rights to the royalties from the works created. The project has been relatively free form with Chris taking on the composing and musical responsibilities, as well as assembling the session musicians too add their complementary parts.
From my understanding of the Australian copyright law this would mean that Chris will have the ownership rights to the song as he was the original composer and lyricist for the track. Meaning he has the mechanical, performance, and communication rights to the song, this will effect the distribution and publishing choices. As well as these rights, there is a sound recording copyright that exists on top of the aforementioned composer and lyricist rights. These sound recording rights would belong to either Them Juggling Cats productions (TJC) or SAE Qantm Institute; as the recording rights belong generally to a record label or a similar organisation I believe the recording rights would most likely belong to TJC productions, but I have chosen to list SAE Qantm as a partial right holder due to the legalities relating to our assessments and SAE’s right to use work created for promotional and educational purposes. Although I have also found that this may not apply in this case as no contracts have been signed between Chris and TJC productions leading me to believe that no recording rights are held, SAE institute will still hold promotional and education rights as this was included in our enrolment documents and is stated in the offical SAE Intellectual Property document, though they do not hold any right to the intellectual property overall.
So under my understanding of the Australian copyright law our session musicians do not own any copyrights to the song (Finding Purpose) in question. This being said we may look into drawing up contracts regarding payments, wether they be a share of royalties or a set session payment as would be seen in the professional industry.
Australian Copyright Council. (2014). Assigning licensing rights. Retrieved from https://www.copyright.org.au/ACC_Prod/ACC/Information_Sheets/Assigning___Licensing_rights.aspx?WebsiteKey=8a471e74-3f78-4994-9023-316f0ecef4ef
Australian Copyright Council. (2014). Music & Copyright. Retrieved from https://www.copyright.org.au/ACC_Prod/ACC/Products/Music___Copyright.aspx?WebsiteKey=8a471e74-3f78-4994-9023-316f0ecef4ef
Copyright. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://apraamcos.com.au/music-creators/copyright/
COPYRIGHT FAQS. (2018). Retrieved fromhttp://www.musicrights.com.au/antipiracy/what-is-copyright/
Klich, Z. Sae QANTM. (2011). SO_1_A_POL_IntellectualProperty_171016. Retrieved from https://sae.edu.au/assets/0AT/Policy/SO_1_A_POL_IntellectualProperty_171016.pdf
Legal information for musicians. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.artslaw.com.au/legal/raw-law/legal-information-for-musicians
Music Copyright and Publishing for Bands and Recording Artists. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.artslaw.com.au/info-sheets/info-sheet/music-bands-and-recording-artists/