Timeline for Can humming a bar of music be considered copyright infringement?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
22 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| S Nov 1, 2020 at 15:02 | history | suggested | jwodder | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Proofreading
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| Oct 29, 2020 at 8:49 | comment | added | Graham | @phoog Fair point. | |
| Oct 29, 2020 at 8:46 | comment | added | phoog | @Graham "If you're not making money off it, mostly no-one cares": this is incorrect. If you make copies of a sound recording freely available on the internet and you're not making any money from it, you're still providing a means for listeners to consume the music without generating revenue for the record label. Even though you're not making money, you're cutting into their sales revenue. What they really don't care about is whether you're making money. What they do care about is that they aren't. | |
| Oct 27, 2020 at 23:58 | answer | added | Robbie Goodwin | timeline score: -2 | |
| Oct 27, 2020 at 17:50 | comment | added | bta | Possible duplicate: law.stackexchange.com/questions/27440/… | |
| Oct 27, 2020 at 16:10 | comment | added | Graham | @JimMack True to some extent. But it's also the case that the original author/publisher wouldn't have the clout to do this on their own. Let's not forget that the person who wrote that tune deserves a living too. The point of the DMCA isn't to stop people using copyrighted work outright, it's to stop people using copyrighted work to earn themselves a living without paying a penny to the copyright owners. If you're not making money off it, mostly no-one cares - but if (as the OP says) the video is monetized, and if the song is important to the scene, they should pay their way. | |
| Oct 27, 2020 at 15:54 | comment | added | Jim Mack | @Graham - Understood. But those kinds of suits revolve around published (and cynically, successful) songs that are said to infringe. I cannot imagine a DCMA takedown over someone humming a tune, and it always seems to be labels, not publishers, who issue these. | |
| Oct 27, 2020 at 15:43 | comment | added | Graham | @JimMack Yes, there are two copyrights involved. But you can just as well be sued (or at least ordered to pay the appropriate royalties) for performing those notes without paying the author of the music. And in the case where those notes form part of another work, you can be sued for a fraction of your royalties. Men At Work had this with "Down under", with the flute part quoting a couple of bars of "Kookaburra". | |
| Oct 27, 2020 at 13:16 | comment | added | Jim Mack | Isn't it the case that there are (at least) two copyrights involved? The published arrangement of the notes and a performance of the piece are distinct, and I'm pretty sure most of what gets sued over is reproduction of a performance. Humming couldn't violate that. | |
| Oct 27, 2020 at 12:17 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Nov 1, 2020 at 15:02 | |||||
| Oct 27, 2020 at 9:44 | comment | added | Strawberry | Any particular jurisdiction? | |
| Oct 26, 2020 at 23:11 | comment | added | Acccumulation | @PeterMortensen See reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2mgiez/took_me_a_while | |
| Oct 26, 2020 at 21:57 | comment | added | phoog | @PeterMortensen yes, it's idiomatic. In this case it's sense 25, not 24. For example, the first two bars of Lennon and McCartney's Yesterday correspond to the lyrics "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so...." (However, it is possible to change the length of a bar, usually by a factor of two, without changing the sound of the piece, so for music that is not written down people may reasonably disagree about the length of one bar.) | |
| Oct 26, 2020 at 21:14 | comment | added | phoog | For such a short melodic snippet, it's probably possible to find a work in the public domain with the same melody, and argue that the snippet does not enjoy copyright protection because it was itself copied from the public domain. As far as I could tell, the tweet doesn't link to the actual video, so it's not clear whether the excerpt was in this case "a bar or two" or longer. | |
| Oct 26, 2020 at 19:21 | comment | added | Peter Mortensen | But is its use here idiomatic (not a rhetorical question)? | |
| Oct 26, 2020 at 19:18 | comment | added | Peter Mortensen | Bar of music - "24. (music) A vertical line across a musical staff dividing written music into sections, typically of equal durational value. Synonym: measure". 25. (music) One of those musical sections. | |
| Oct 26, 2020 at 17:24 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Oct 26, 2020 at 15:18 | answer | added | user6726 | timeline score: 5 | |
| Oct 26, 2020 at 11:57 | comment | added | Paul Johnson | A big problem here is that "fair use" is a set of guidelines for a court rather than a solid and dependable set of rules. So unless a court has ruled the answer to the question "is this fair use" is can only be somewhere between "probably" and "probably not". | |
| Oct 26, 2020 at 9:58 | answer | added | Dale M♦ | timeline score: 23 | |
| Oct 26, 2020 at 9:33 | review | First posts | |||
| Nov 3, 2020 at 11:21 | |||||
| Oct 26, 2020 at 9:22 | history | asked | ylem | CC BY-SA 4.0 |