J. Anthony Allen teaches musicians how copyright law actually works. The course covers the legal definition of music, work-for-hire agreements, fair use, sampling, and why your band name might be trademarked. It explains Creative Commons, moral rights, and the contracts that protect your work.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Musician's Guide to Copyright. The goal of this class is to get all of your questions answered when it comes to copyright. What you can do, what you can't do when you have one and when you don't. This is stuff that I teach every day at my university job, and I've decided to make all of this content available here online, because I just think that everyone should know this stuff, especially if you're making music. So in this class, we're going to start off talking about how we define music, which might seem like an obvious thing, right? Like music is music. But we have to think about the legal setting here, right? So how does the law define music? Then we're going to move in and talk about the basics of copyright, everything we need to know about the dates and all that good stuff. Then we'll move on to the more complicated issues, which is work for hire, assignments, collaboration, fair use, and we're even going to move into talking about trademarks, because it's related to copyright. So trademarks would be things like your band name, possibly your own name, possibly your image, although that falls under something that we'll also talk about in this class called right of publicity. We'll talk about contractual rights, moral rights, and then we'll also spend a good amount of time talking about Creative Commons and the copy left idea, which generally covers how a lot of people deal with sampling. Not exclusively, but it has a lot to do with sampling. So it's a really big class. There's a lot of material to cover, so let's dive in. Sam. Sa.
