Copyright

[Matthew Robinson]

Hello.

 

Over the summer, we have a one off show for charity. We want to play music (singing with backing tracks, playing instruments with & without backing tracks, excerpts of prose, etc). What would we need to do about copyright. The plan at the moment is to basically ignore copyright issues, is this the right (well, an OK) way to go about it; or do we need to do something else?

[Caerdydd]

Does the venue you are performing this in have a PRS licence?

[Matthew Robinson]

Someone else has sorted the venue out, so I'm not sure.

[Caerdydd]

Well then, find out and get back to us.

 

Is the venue a well know theatre for example? A village hall? A warehouse?

[Matthew Robinson]

It's Elland Village Hall (near Halifax) if that helps.

[paulears]

It's going to be down to your conscience isn't it? You need to license it to be legal. It's possible the hall have a PRS license, but it may or may not cover what you plan to do. You can get the thing done legally - PRS are actually quite ok to deal with. Or - you just do it. We can't condone that, but plenty of people do it.

 

My own 1200 seat venue haven't done it properly for years - totally innocently as it happens, and PRS are sorting it out from this year. They thought they were licensed, but they weren't.

 

It's actually not even that easy to sort this one out properly anyway. As a group of individuals, it's quite tricky to sort out responsibilities. Somebody would have to do it personally - take the license in their name, but not many people would fancy that. If the hall do weddings and that kind of thing, it may be much simpler - because the paperwork should already be in place.

[Caerdydd]

Speak to the village hall committee asking if they have a PRS licence, if not you need to get one. They don't cost much for a one off event.

 

http://www.prsformusic.com/users/businesse...es/default.aspx

[Matthew Robinson]

Well, we're hoping to get 100 people to buy tickets at £4 a time. It'd probably cost them more than £8 to process our request...

[KevinS]

The PRS website has a search facility for premises they have licensed - though they don't shout about it:

http://www.prsformusic.com/users/businesse...isessearch.aspx

I did a quick check but don't see the hall mentioned but you will know more details of the location to put in the search fields. As advised already - ask the hall management. If they look blank or shifty...assume not.

 

Not sure if your backing tracks are ones you have recorded yourselves of your own musical endeavours or commercially available recordings - like karaoke CDs or similar. If they are not your own creation then you will need a PPL licence as well.

PPL represents the record companies while PRS represents the composer/publisher etc.

The same applies if you are planning to play incidental music from commercial CDs or downloads.

Everyone wants a slice of the cake and the fact that it is an amateur show for charity makes little or no difference I'm afraid.

 

Over the past year or so PRS and PPL have had their heads banged together by the government to try and sort out the complicated mess that is music licensing in the UK. They were supposed to be coming up with a joint licensing scheme from this April that would make this sort of thing much easier but the last time I looked - nothing had changed.

 

We would need more details of the prose reading that you are planning but generally speaking for literary works (plays and books/poetry) if the author died less than 70 years ago then the work will still be in copyright and a fee may be payable to the rights holder - generally the publisher, which is a good place to start. So if you are reciting Shakespeare then that's fine but if you want to quote passages from Thomas the Tank Engine then the Fat Controller is likely to want a fee.

 

The other thing to check is that the hall is licensed for this sort of activity. This has nothing to do with copyright but is part of local authority's responsibilities. Some village halls are and some are not. If not, it's quite easy to make a Temporary Event Notification to the local council and police. The mechanism for doing this is likely to be on the local council's website.

 

It's all a bit daunting if you've not done it before but as Paulears says - it's down to your conscience, though bear in mind that the information you have already posted here is now in the public domain for all to see.

 

Good luck

Kevin

 

A concurrent post has been automatically merged from this point on.

 

Just done a more thorough check on the PRS website. If it's the Wainright Hall in Albert St, Elland it has a license.

 

KS