Kohn On Music Licensing

Provides an overview of the music publishing business, including a review of the major sources of music publishing income, and the division of music publishing income among music publishers and songwriters. Includes Al Kohn's valuable incites into good music publishing practices.

Provides one of the most detailed discussions available in print regarding the terms and conditions contained in typical songwriter agreements, including the common variations to those agreements negotiated on behalf of songwriters. Learn the negotiation secrets of experienced music industry attorneys.

Continues the discussion of the previous chapter with an in depth review of arrangements between songwriters and music publishers known as participation deals. Provides an analysis of the two basic forms in which participation deals are made: co-publishing and administration agreements.

How a music publisher located in one country performs his responsibilities on a worldwide basis is through a process called subpublishing. This chapter sketches the business and legal background of international subpublishing, describes certain aspects of music publishing that are unique to international subpublishing, analyzes the considerations used in selecting an international subpublishing strategy, and provides some guidelines for negotiating some of the more common terms and conditions contained in a typical subpublishing agreement.

The transmission of musical works over the Internet raises licensing issues that are different from their delivery on physical media distributed through retail stores or by direct mail, or delivered in a non-interactive (or linear) form of transmission, such as radio or television broadcast. This chapter will explore changes in the copyright law recently proposed by the National Information Infrastructure (NII) Working Group on Intellectual Property and the emerging issues involved in granting and clearing licenses to use music in cyberspace.

Explores the standards used in determining whether a use of a copyrighted song is considered a fair use, a use which does not require permission of the copyright owner. Includes a thorough review of the cases, including the recent Supreme Court decision concerning Two Live Crew's parody of Roy Orbison's Oh, Pretty Woman.

In December, 1994, Congress revised the U.S. Copyright Law by enacting a new right under copyright -- the exclusive right to make -- or, to put it another way, the right to exclude others from making -- an audio or video recording of a live musical performance. This chapter describes this new right and introduces some of the questions raised by its enactment.

This rare source of information about the prices typically charged by music publishers for the use of their music in motion pictures, television programs, commercial advertising, videograms, consumer musical products, and multimedia products, has been updated to reflect the latest music publishing practices. Some say this chapter alone is worth several times the price of the entire book.