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Publishing music videos on the Internet

There's a good inch of paperwork on this site about copyright of music and photographs.. but what about when you put the two together? Music videos started with Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, and since then have become the core of music promotion. Many people want to download and keep copies of their favorite videos, either from official websites or saving them direct from TV. Bands would like to make videos and post them online for their fans to watch. Folks with cellphones want to wave them in the air and record concerts. The problem with all of this is of course that copyrights are being fiddled with, and the files themselves can sometimes be owned by a lot of different people. Doing what you want legally can be daunting!

The first thing to say is that having permissions and licenses to use an audio recording of some music on your website does not usually give you permission to use that music within a video or motion picture.

If you want to host commercial music videos on your website

Naturally you'll need permission and to have paid your license fees, but beyond that, there is a question of how you deliver the video. In our server formats section we introduced the different ways to push the files to your visitors, but how does this affect your license fees? Well for a start, if you stream or download then you will be billed for the total number of copies delivered - based on your server logs. For webcasting it's based on the number of 'slots' (people listening) and the duration of the broadcast. It's extremely bad practice to link directly to video content on another server, as they end up paying the network charges but don't get to see the visitor. Only ever give links to the web pages of other sites, not the video files themselves. in certain situations, embedding video from another site into a player on your own could be illegal under the DMCA, as you can be said to be hiding the true owner.

To play a commercial music video on your website you must have:

• A synchronisation license (sync ticket) from the songwriters to permit use of the musical work, usually via Harry Fox
• A master use license (MUL) from the video production company to permit copying of the video
• A public performance license (PPL) from BMI, ASCAP or SESAC to permit you to broadcast the performance

In general, for music videos the record label can provide the best advice on which agency controls licenses for the artist, and give information on who to talk to about master use tickets. There is NO single overall license system for music videos on websites - you need ALL THREE sets.

If you want to make your own video and post it to your website

Assuming you own the copyrights for the music, all your performers agree to it, and you can afford the space on your server, then there's no license needed. If you make a video using a copyrighted song (such as some of the 'Anime music videos' people make, using commercial music) then you have to get the same three licenses as above before you can make your video and publish it. Even if the lyrics or melody aren't yours but your band are singing them , you'll need the sync ticket and PPL. It's all about who WROTE the stuff, not who's singing it!

If the music is entirely yours, then delivering the video is your only problem. Realistically amateur sites won't be able to deliver DRM or streaming content, and you'll have to offer downloadable files. Remember to plan for visitors with different computers - Quicktime for Macs, Real Player and Windows Media for PCs. 'Plain' MPEG or AVI videos are an option for specialist applications, but delivering sensible filesizes is very hard indeed. You should also plan different quality versions for people with dial-up, ISDN or DSL. one music video can end up being 16 copies! Specialist javascript and php scripts are used by people like us to test visitors and deliver only the files they can cope with viewing. An emerging technology is video embedded into Flash movies - the advantage being that users don't need extra video players - but getting sensible filesizes is still hard.