Goodnight.


I am up to date on copyright and its rules, but I have a question and I would like someone to help me.

Let's imagine that I write an instrumental song and I want to use Steve Jobs's speech at Stanford (very good, by the way) to honor him and share his message. Are these types of records subject to copyright? How can I find out?

I believe that BMW acquired the copyright to Bruce Lee's famous "Be Water my Friend", in this particular case would it break the law if he used his voice in a song?

I ask because they are not artistic works. I suppose that most of the news, speeches and interviews that you see on YouTube are not owned by anyone, but I would like someone to shed some light on this topic.


Thanks a lot

 

will you use just a part of the speech to sample? because i think you can use it, but in pieces of 10 seconds at most if i'm not wrong

 

Sounds like it's for educational use which might fall under "Fair Use".

 

Not the case at all.
The individual recordings are.

 

Take Steve Jobs's speech as an example.

I suppose it was originally recorded by a television network (or several) and later it was broadcast. Do TV networks have rights to everything they record? or do they have to buy beforehand what they broadcast? pay the person who makes the speech?

Now you can see it on YouTube through different channels. What is the deal here?

I believed that only artistic works had copyrights, since it is the author himself who creates those rights for their legitimate use. Who demands copyright of a speech?

I am sorry for my ignorance on this point.

 

Got it! There's free music, free radio, free found sounds, conversations, interviews, speeches, oral histories...

https://citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov/

 

Could you elaborate on this statement a bit more? Under what circumstances is the use of an audio fragment labeled "educational use"?

 

Thanks for the extensive reply. I suppose that each piece of audio should be studied one by one to know what legal situation it is in. Honestly, it seems like a tedious job to me.

So all the content on this website can be used freely within any composition?

 

Right of quotation is one of the copyright exceptions provided by the Berne Convention, article 10: "It shall be permissible to make quotations ... provided that their making is compatible with fair practice, and their extent does not exceed that justified by the purpose". Always give credit to the source of (portions of) text. There are examples where a particular sound has been ruled to warrant protection as a trade mark ("that familiar Rumble", Harley-Davidson) and, to my knowledge in a Dutch court case concerning artistic rights, the timbre in Elvis' voice.

 

Which, unrelated to the recordings of any such public-airing of the speech, would at least imply we can quote the text IN text, but re-record that quote and use it in a recording...? I doubt.
Doesn't meant the quote can be the recorded speech though!

 

Well, wherever you are geographically, YMMV.
Yet considering the YT algo blocked a purely educational uni lecture on the history of Hip Hop just for some James Brown samples...through a crap Tannoy system in a uni lesson with noisey talking students around 10 years ago, I really don't know what to expect now.
I mean, look at what happened to Rick Beato on YT.
The majors and/or the artists didn't care about 'educational use', but YT would have found it for the them first and offered them the option to shut it down.
Really, educational use originally probably meant in a classroom and not with a publically replayable recording of said lecture! lol

 

depending on the country you are in, there is a good chance that such material is copyrighted, too.

however, in practice it is mostly other legal circles which can be affected from things like that.

for example using the voice theoretically requries the approval of the person, or can violate his personality rights, because the original recording already did.

then the person who was holding the microphone or a press agency or newspaper company might have ancillary copyrights (which is, at least here in europe a completely different story from the protection laws)

if the person who speaks did that on behalf of a third party he also migt have ancillary copyrights and wants to get payments per word or per minute in case your reuse includes broadcasting it again.

lasty, of course the text itself could be a copyrighted works.


a closer exam would only be possible for a concrete use case.

finding out about all these things by simply asking at a single point is unfortunately not so easy.

as you know, copyrights´n stuff is not depending on membership in a collecting society, and every second youtube news channel mostly steals material from others.

and it always remains your own responsibility to have everything cleared with the rightholder, anyway.

 

I don't agree 100% with every thing stated thus far related to copyright, however, since the OP already got his answer we leave it at that for another time.
The Steve Job's speech is in the public domain. Both, its text and its recording.
https://archive.org/details/SteveJobsSpeechAtStanfordUniversity
https://tea4avcastro.tea.state.tx.u...s-stanford-university-commencement-speech.pdf

The https://archive.org/ is another source for the type of material the OP seeks.

 

Good. I said I wasn't an expert and there are so many variables of usage case, in different continents, across different reproduction mediums, that I just wanted to illustrate the amount of variables.
I could have chosen other examples obviously.

You've actually helped with the actual question in the op though, re. Jobs, which I didn't feel like addressing!
I chose to do some weeding as well...

 

That is the fallacy of copyright questions that start with the "let us imagine." It is the person's who posits it fault by not being specific enough. Lawyers don't want to hear "let us imagine", they want facts in order to apply the law, and provide you with a sound course of action. With that said, I was not referring to you, specifically, but to the person who mention the 10-seconds-myth. There is not such a thing as a free for all if you use 10 seconds or less of a sound recording. None!

 

@ the thread starter, much as I like to be level with No Avenger in the Best Answers list, @The Pirate should actually get Best Answer as he actually gave you your information that you specifically needed. I just chose to talk about random examples because of some of the things you were thinking.
And if others want to sample SJ and use it in a song and they look for such a thread or happen to see it, his info is of more use than mine.