Senate Bill Could Make It Illegal To Upload Lip-Synced Videos

An anonymous reader writes "According to Copyright lawyer Ben Sidbury, Senate bill 978 could make it a criminal act for someone to lip sync to a song and post the said video on Youtube, even if credits are given. 'The way the statute is written... It would now criminalize anybody that performs a copyrighted work, which is essentially nowadays any song under the sun. In theory at least, the record companies or the Department of Justice could go after a 9-year old or a 12 year old or a 30 year old for publicly performing a song.' said Sidbury."

Comments

sigh...

[wired57]

Whatever happened to fair use? I mean really come on now, how does this help protect anything?

Re:sigh...

[blair1q]

Lip-syncing is fair use?

Lip-syncing is using the exact recording someone else made, over a picture of you making no sound and maybe dancing funny with your pets.

Fair use would be excerpting a line or two of the original recording, or singing a verse or two as part of a larger work, or parodying it with different lyrics or music, although there are exceptions to this for things like using sound clips in movies or sampling in records where there's huge money involved, or where it's clear you're leveraging the work for profit without adding much to it yourself.

I don't think that playing most or all of someone else's recording as the primary basis for your work is fair use. You can't change something slightly and call it "derivative," either. You can't even steal the hook accidentally and claim it's not someone else's property. Just ask George Harrison. No, he isn't; Beatles never really die.

Re:sigh...

[camperdave]

Parody is also fair use. However, some mashups, are too too awesome to allow petty bickering about ownership stand in the way of worldwide enjoyment, even if they aren't parodies.

Thank you Senate

[PickyH3D]

For really going after what is a problem in our country.

Not the job market.
Not the national debt.
Not the continued housing crisis.
Not any of the three wars we are actively participating in (Libya, Iraq (yes, still), and Afghanistan).
Not healthcare.
Not the tax system.

Nope, it's little kids or adults showing their support for artists by lip syncing. We really have to protect those artists from such stealing! Those poor, underpaid artists (and their leeches that lobby for them, AKA the RIAA).

pretty much every concert I've ever been to

[Skarecrow77]

No matter how famous and how many hits the band on stage had, they played at least 1 or 2 cover songs.

Shit like that is why you go see bands live in the first place. Is that illegal now too?

Or has it always been illegal and it's just that nobody gave a damn?

Re:pretty much every concert I've ever been to

[Bovius]

Ostensibly, bands that play cover songs are supposed to pre-arrange the rights to record or perform said songs with a performance rights organization, and then pay royalties for the performance or pay for a license to record and distribute the song. The PROs make their money off of this, so they can be pretty aggressive about hunting down people who play or perform the music of the copyright holders they represent. The question of who actually pays the fee can get complicated depending on how the music is performed; in a traditional live performance, the location hosting the performance would likely be paying the performance royalty, not the band.

That being said, I'm betting a lot of local performers and garage bands often don't have enough visibility to show up on the radar.

That's how it works, though; legally, you have to pay a fee to get your guitar out and perform a song so common any random stranger could hum the tune along with you.

Re:pretty much every concert I've ever been to

[QRDeNameland]

I think usually the bands get permission to do cover songs. Or rather, they have their manager do it for them.

In terms of live performance, virtually all venues have blanket licensing that covers songwriting royalties for any song played in the establishment, either by a soundsystem or by a performing band. So a band can pretty much play any song live without needing permission.

The only time a band needs to be concerned about licensing a cover song is if they release a recording of it.

Um, this is already illegal...

[langelgjm]

This is already illegal under copyright law. From what I gather from the article, the "news" is that the bill seeks to criminalize unlicensed public performance of a copyrighted work. The summary is totally misleading. Also, giving "credit" in a YouTube video is irrelevant to whether it's licensed or not. Actually I'm surprised more of these aren't scooped up by YouTube's content filtering system right now.

As for fair use, it'd be a tough case to make, but I guess in theory you could argue that... tough because you typically use the whole song, but that's mitigated by the fact that it's non-commercial use, and hardly a replacement - people don't listen to YouTube lip-syncs instead of the original...

I think criminalization of unauthorized public performance is probably a bad idea in general, even if not applied to lip-syncing kids... but don't let the summary fool you, this isn't suddenly making things that are currently legal illegal.

You think the Senators actually do this?

[istartedi]

You think the senators actually do this? No way. The lobbyists write the bills for them. You can't leave jobs like that up to politicians. It's too important. You draft the bill, you send it to your lackey... errr... senator's office, with a cover letter extolling the virtues of it. Then your l...senator's staff "reviews this recommended legislation" which means they putz around on their FaceBook pages for a while with the PDF open in the background so they can punch it up in case anybody walks by. Then it gets voted on. That's how it works.