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Music Legal Issuses
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| Please read all of the below information before proceeding on to downloads section. By proceeding to download material, you are saying that you have read through everything below and are agreeing to abide by these terms. |
| As some of you no doubt know, there are some messy legal issues involved in putting music up on the internet. We (the FaB leadership) wish to be honorable in pursuing this; we don't want to break the law or otherwise infringe on someone's rights. Below are excerpts from the research we've done on this topic and then our conclusions drawn from that information as to why we believe we are not breaking the law in making this music available for download by a select group of people to be used for a specific purpose (as described below). Sounds like fun reading, huh? ;-) Well, let's dive right in! |
| All quotes below are taken from Chapter 5 of the Music Business Handbook & Career Guide, 6th Edition, by David Baskerville, Ph. D., published by SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA in 1995. All quotes within quotes (particularly section references) are from the 1976 Copyright Act, unless otherwise noted. |
| "In passing the legislation [(i.e., the 1976 Copyright Act)], Congress attempted to reconcile the rightful interests of the copyright owners with the legitimate, nonprofit interests of individuals, schools, libraries, churches, and noncommercial broadcasters in using copyrighted material. Much of the act, particularly sections 107 through 112, concerns the limitations of these rights. |
| "Since the 19th century, the courts have held that certain kinds of uses of copyrighted material are 'fair,' within reason, and not an infringement or materially damaging to a copyright owner. This tradition was validated and codified, to a large extent, in the 1976 law. This law offers examples of what constitutes fair use (Section 107). |
| "The fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords, or by any other means specified by section 106 of the law, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news, reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, 'is not an infringement of copyright.' In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use, four criteria have been established by prior court actions and are incorporated in the new law: |
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| "The fair use doctrine, a legal defense to a copyright infringement claim, essentially allows minimal takings of copyrighted material for the furtherance of scholarship, research, and the arts." |
| I will seek to address each of the four criteria in turn, beginning with the first. The purpose of putting music on this site is so that current Folk and Ballroom students at JMU and current, active FaB club members may have copies of the music we use in order that they may practice outside of class and FaB meetings. I include current, active FaB club members because these are individuals who, as they grow in their dancing abilities, increasingly take part in demonstrating, performing, and teaching dances at Folk and Ballroom class events as an aid to the teacher and as an encouragement to the students. By this ("encouragement to the students") I mean the following: one of the primary goals of the Folk and Ballroom classes is that students would continue on in dance beyond the semester's end. Active FaB club members are predominately either previous Folk and/or Ballroom students or individuals from the community who enjoy dancing, neither group being professional dancers, generally speaking, and all of whom are involved in FaB voluntarily; because of these facts, it can be an encouragement to current students to see particularly their peers teaching and performing, having come from much the same dance experience, very possibly the very same class from a previous semester. In addition, seeing others from again much the same dance experience teaching and performing more intricate, complicated (and fun!) dances can be an encouragement to press on beyond the repertoire and time constraints of the classes and thus further their dance experience outside of class. |
| The nature of the copyrighted works are thus: to our knowledge most if not all of the posted recordings are copies of tapes that are copies of copies of copies of an original record. In pretty much all cases, we do not know where the originals are, nor do we know anyone who does. Most, if not all, of these recordings are of tunes that we believe to be very old (30 years or more). Many of the folk tunes in particular are probably much older than that, though the recordings we have copies of are of course more recent. The point is this: most, if not all, of this material is difficult to find, and in some cases nearly impossible. |
| Regarding what portion of the original work each posted song comprises, it is our best guess that the total of all of the tunes on this site does not comprise more than 50%, at most, of each of the original works they derive from. It is possible that at most there might be several songs posted here coming from the same album, but very unlikely that a collection of these posted songs would have all been recorded from the same album and at the same time comprise the totality of that same album. |
| It is our hope that the effect of posting this music for download by current students and current, active FaB club members will be positive overall (though the impact will likely be relatively small) for the folk and ballroom music industry and possibly even for the original works from which these recordings were derived. We base this hope on two things. The first is that the quality of these posted recordings is relatively poor. As is stated above, these are almost all, if not all, recordings of copies (and in some cases perhaps even copies of copies of copies, etc.) of original records. Thus if a student or FaB member wishes a CD quality recording, they would have to seek out new copies of the songs to purchase. Secondly, the Folk and Ballroom classes do not cover all of folk or ballroom dancing that exists. Thus, if students pursue dancing beyond the semester, which they are encouraged to do, they will inevitably have to pursue purchasing music of their own of these genres because what is available here is only a tiny smattering of what is out there. |
| By proceeding to the download section you are saying that you have read and concur with all of the above and also that you have read and agree to the following terms: You must be either a current Folk or Ballroom student or a current, active member of the JMU Folk and Ballroom Dance Club to download and use these song files. |
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FaB or classes? Please contact KT.
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