Soundtrack and Copyright

Below there is some information about copyright I found to help me understand more about the law and stipulations about this area of media protection and also there is information about the choices we made involving copyrighting and using a soundtrack.

Copyright Information:

© is the standard symbol stating that something is copyrighted and protected from use other than what is permitted.

'Copyright is the exclusive right granted to the author of an original work, including the right to authorise or ban the publication, distribution and adaptation of that work. Copyright only lasts for a certain time period after which the work is said to enter the public domain. Copyright applies to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete and fixed in a medium. Some jurisdictions also recognize "moral rights" of the creator of a work, such as the right to be credited for the work. Copyright is described under the umbrella term intellectual property along with patents and trademarks.' - Wikipedia

'Document granting exclusive right to publish and sell literary or musical or artistic work' - Google Definitions

Obtaining Copyright:

'It is normal to request permission via the publisher of the work. The publisher will often have a permissions department to deal with such requests, or may use the services of a copyright clearance or licensing service. If the publisher cannot give permission directly, they will certainly know who you should contact, (as they will have obtained permission themselves in order to use the work in the first place).

If for example, the copyright owner is personally known to you, it may be possible to obtain permission via a private agreement. In such cases you should ensure you get an agreement in writing to avoid any future disagreements.

For website content, it is normal to contact the webmaster of the site. The webmaster may either give permission directly or refer your request to someone in the company who can deal with your request.

For photographs, (i.e. wedding pictures), it is normally to contact the photographer, (or company), that took the images. As they will normally control the rights to the photos, and will have their own reproduction or duplication charges.' - Copyrightservice


Information about the soundtrack, copyright and the outcome of our decisions:

For our scene we thought we should incorporate a soundtrack, this is because in our questionnaires we received information telling us that we should use a soundtrack, especially mine where 39 people said that they would like to hear some type of sound.

This influenced us and basically made us decide we definitely need a song in our scene as it is obviously what the audience like to have incorporated into there idea of a 'perfect' film beginning.

To do this we thought about the ways we could obtain a sound track; our options were to either create our own or use an existing piece of work. Thinking about time constraints and levels of skill you need to create an original piece that sounds sophisticated and sounds 'the part' we decided it would be best to use an already existing piece.

The major problem with using an existing piece of material is that most will be copyrighted and have protection to use these, this is when a piece of work is protected from use of people that do not have permission and to obtain the right to use this you would need the owner/s to agree to you using the material and they would specify under what conditions you can use this.

We thought about this thoroughly and researched all about copyright which led us to writing a letter to the company we want to use the sound from, as this is for educational use and will not ever be publicly presented or used for any commercial purposes we did not see any reason why we couldn't.

Below is the letter we wrote to Overture Films to obtain copyright use of the soundtrack we decided we wanted to use:

Untitled from Zak Wattiez on Vimeo.