Hi All,

In fear of becoming a slave to the biz, I have took time out in order to undertake a law degree. I am now in my 3rd year however, as this has been the focus having taken my eye off the music industry ball somewhat.

OK to cut a long story short, I am hoping to write my dissertation on aspect of the music biz which having a strong legal aspect to it.

I would be interested in any legal problems within the industry which in your opinion needs to be investigated or may need changing. Any topics will be welcome..... Legal that is!!!

Thanks Guys;)

OK Jay; the main area is copyright in the blossoming world of the Internet.

Next year we will see a huge amount of Radio and TV startups based on the MySpace and YouTube models but run cheaply and, in the majority of cases, as a hobby.

Fine and nobody wants to spend time or money getting 50p out of students. But one or two will take off and there will be large monies due to writers, publishers, artistes and copyright owners.

The current structure simply cannot cope and does not understand.

Over to you.

Open Source - mentioned here before.

Quick version is - popular for software, the source code is available for use and modification. Different types of licence giving various degrees of free use.

For music it could be the tracks of a song made available for reuse, mixing, playing about with.

Types of licence here www.opensource.org/licenses/

That's what the Creative Commons and Copyleft boilerplate licenses do. The snag is you can't revoke a share-alike license... so if you ever want to sell that stuff or earn from it you'll be in competition with everyone who already has a free license. Anyone of them can make it available to share... and you'll be trying to earn from it.

The only way to use "open source" is to accept that your copyleft material is a loss leader... and to earn from alternative material, merch, etc.

In JK's example, the upfront stuff would never be a problem if it was open source because it wouldn't be earning anything.

There are different licences, Creative Commons one's go from absolutely free to anyone, via non-commercial use to rather restricted (Acceptance that people will copy you stuff anyway).

As a loss leader aren't singles more or less that?

I'm not really advocating Open Source here it was more to answer Jay and suggesting a music/legal perpective for his dissertation.

You are absoultly right about this Rob/Bemuso. The idea is good and it works in (open source) software and maybe for books.

But with music there are many different rights (recording/composition) and there are far too many different ways to use music, so its getting very complicated with individual licenses for each song.

A german radio station wanted to introduce a "Creative Commons Charts", but they hadn't noticed, that most of the music wasn't licensed for radio play - and Creative Commons Org in the USA complained about the use of their trademark.

So copyright is really the most important subject in the music industry today and tommorrow.

Jay, as a lawyer you will have great opportunities.