I think that I can help clear this up. My son has a band and we have one of the biggest managers and biggest attorneys in the music/entertainment business. There is one word that starts drawing the line, "COMMERCIAL". Our songs are protected by the copyright laws just like art, however, once it's recorded and published it becomes public. Meaning we can't stop anyone from singing it or completely changing it or whatever as long as it is used personally. They can pretty much do what ever they want with it (even record it) as long as they don't use it "COMMERCIALLY" or mis-represent it. Commercial is also a broad term also and doesn't have to imply money.
It can mean advertising, promotion, marketing, etc... If they do, they first have to have permission and in the case of a situation that is non-profit for them, they have to negotiate a fee with us.
I think the confusion we have here and a real tough question to answer is this. Anyone can "Play" our music at a party or something but they can't duplicate it and give it away (although we don't care). Which I think is the issue here. We can actually use any art from anywhere for anything for ourselves but we can't re-distribute it. However, the reason we really don't see any real problems is because even though it's being used it's not being used in a commercial fashion.
It's one of those things that we can put Jafo
in charge of monitoring and trying to keep the obvious ones out and for the others, when someone yells, you simply take action first and study later to determine if their request is justified.
