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The Rights that make it possible to create value in musical creations
[/vc_column_text][us_separator][vc_column_text] Intellectual Property today is present in everything and is equally important to protect the ideas of any business, not left behind music and all the authors who create it, protecting their unique rights when creating their works. This includes moral rights that recognize the status of creator of a musical piece and that give them the power to demand respect for the integrity of their creation. On the other hand, there are also patrimonial rights that cover exclusive rights that allow the owner authorization of where they want to display and "exploit" what they created. Here also come their compensatory rights, which can now obtain a monetary gain for their music in exchange for sharing the intellectual property rights with more than one person, such as a record label, for example. After the aforementioned, we will talk a little about contracts in the music industry, focusing on the type of contract that applies to the authors of the work. These are called music publishing contracts, where the person who created the lyrics, music, singer, etc., hands over their rights to a music publisher, who retains the right to exploit the music, such as reproduction, distribution, public communication, and transformation of the created piece, in exchange for financial compensation agreed upon with the authors. Currently, many world-renowned artists have had problems with these types of contracts, opting instead to create their own publishing house to have maximum control over their rights and profits. This limits publishers to an administrative role in order to maximize the use of their talent, such as managing payments to authors, recordings, and publicity for new material. Therefore, it can be said that the music industry is now shifting to a model of greater freedom for musicians, giving them almost complete ownership of all intellectual property rights. With this foundation in mind, let's talk about a fairly famous example: Taylor Swift and her copyright in the music industry. Between 2005 and 2017, Taylor released 17 albums with the record label Big Machine Records, to whom she assigned certain copyrights since her musical career was just beginning. More specifically, she assigned her rights to the recordings and signed a clause that prevented her from re-recording her songs until November 2020. Years later, the record label was acquired by Ithaca Holdings, which negotiated with Shamrock Holdings to form a private investment fund, including the singer's copyright in this fund, leaving her unable to control future business dealings with the material. This topic became very popular in the press, who claimed that Taylor Swift had been stripped of all rights to her songs, when in reality this was not the case, since these rights included only ownership of the recordings and not the live performance of them. We know that the company (Big Machines Records) always had control of the albums because all the material was recorded there and Taylor also received monetary gains from them. The main issue was more about regaining full rights to the masters (original recordings) so that Taylor would have even more control over her music. It wasn't until 2021 that Taylor decided to retain all intellectual property rights and decided to re-record all her old songs on a new album titled "Taylor's Version" and thereby receive all the profits from digital platforms, television programs, radio, etc. This allowed them to use the re-recorded version instead of the previous ones, and it was now completely legal to do so. It's worth noting that Taylor Swift is the first singer to do this, and after her, many more artists will surely decide to do so as well. Another well-known example of intellectual property in music was the recent controversy between urban singer Bad Bunny and Missy Elliot. Since Bad Bunny released his famous song "Safaera," which remained in the top 10 most-streamed songs in Latin America for several weeks, the song was suddenly removed from streaming platforms in May 2020 due to a controversy with singer Missy Elliott, who filed a multi-million dollar copyright lawsuit over the use of an identical guitar riff from her song "Get Your Freak On." Finally, after an agreement, Bad Bunny now receives only 1% of the royalties for his song, with Missy being added to the credits. The song was then put back on recognized streaming platforms. As a lesson from previous cases, it is essential to seek legal advice on intellectual property issues that allow for the best review of contracts, without them being detrimental in the future. For these, like many cases in other industries, it is extremely necessary for companies to review where their copyrights on all their creations originate.[/vc_column_text][us_separator][vc_column_text]Written by: Lexincorp El Salvador [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
