So, Kevin, have you ever gone to a bar? >> Yeah, I think once or twice. >> Was there music playing? >> Of course. >> Well, in that case, you were the recipient of the effect of a performance license. Most bars and restaurants that play music for their patrons have blanket licenses for those public performances of copyrighted music. The licenses come from the major collective societies and collective rights organizations, including ASCAP, BMI, and then even SeSac, which is sound exchange licenses for Internet performances, on behalf of performers. Which, as you'll recall is the only type of performance rights that performers hold in recorded music. So each license does permit public performances of the music that's in that particular agency's catalog. So what that means is different publishers work through different agencies, and it's often necessary to get a license from all three performance rights groups to cover the music that you might have playing in the bar. >> These performance rights agencies also license individual performances of specific pieces of music but their major business is the kind of blanket license that you were talking about that they provide for businesses of all sorts and for our purposes very often. Also for college campuses. Colleges and universities buy these licenses so that their faculty, students, anybody can perform various kinds of music on the campus. Most campus licenses permit a variety of live performances of the music that's in their repertoire or catalogue. That is, the music that publishers have made the specific agency their legal representative for. This allows performances, as I said, by student bands, visiting musicians, faculty groups. These licenses allow for the use of recorded music at public performances such as sporting events, parties, graduations. And they even sometimes cover the music on hold that you will find on your telephone system. >> [LAUGH] >> Performances may also be broadcast under certain circumstances when you hold these licenses, including the over university owned cable TV stations, radio stations, or a university owned internet site. These facilities must, as I just said, be entirely controlled by the institution, at least according to most of the terms of these licenses. For example, the performance license would not allow recording a performance of the school's orchestra, and posting it to YouTube. But it might allow posting it to a university-controlled website, which obviously YouTube is not. And in fact, the issue of recording is not very clear, at least in the licenses that I'm familiar with. Broadcast is allowed in these limited circumstances that I've described, but it's not at all clear if these performances must be live or if they can be recorded on campus and then broadcast later. That's just one thing that the licenses aren't clear about. There's another that they clearly do not cover. And they always say this. And that's performance of music for a dramatic performance. So if you wanna do an opera or a play that includes music, a musical. The performance of these dramatical musical works, which is the language the licenses often use is not included in the typical campus license. These kinds of rights are often called Grand Rights. This is another example of a dividing up of the rights in a way that the law doesn't specify, but the rights holders have made part of the licensing tradition. So grand rights are something entirely different than most of the other performance rights on campus. >> So a good example of what, that you really need to know the breadth of the licenses that you have. >> Absolutely. >> So, if your campus has a blanket license, it's okay. For students, faculty, and visiting musicians to perform a variety of music, everything from symphonies to pop songs, without having to get further permission. But if you want to stage Rent or Rigoletto or offer a production of The Nutcracker over the holidays, then you're going to have to get additional licensing for those particular performances. >> Those grand rights. >> Those grand rights. Thank you for watching.
