Also, another nod to mzed up there.

How long ago was this? I ask because while I know UCLA restored it and put it on 35mm in 2007, I saw it at UCLA’s Melnitz theater sometime in the early 2000s (double feature with Murnau’s TABU, with Burnett in person) on 16mm and it seemed fine to me. Did UCLA restrict that print’s use, or was it not available or not in good condition or something?

Probably 2004 or 2005. I’m not sure if UCLA had full commercial rights for that 16mm copy they showed in the early 2000s. The only (legitimate) distributor we could find was an educational film company who wanted an ungodly amount of money for either a VHS or 2″ Beta version.

Usually a film costs about $300 to rent for a showing. Because we wanted to show Killer of Sheep in a non-educational context, they wanted a pile of money (well over $1000) for the rental. Add the cost of digital projection equipment for a theatre of that size and we were looking at a film that cost 600%-800& more to screen than thousands of other films.

How long ago was this? I ask because while I know UCLA restored it and put it on 35mm in 2007, I saw it at UCLA’s Melnitz theater sometime in the early 2000s (double feature with Murnau’s TABU, with Burnett in person) on 16mm and it seemed fine to me. Did UCLA restrict that print’s use, or was it not available or not in good condition or something?

I agree with you, once you’ve created it and put it in the public eye people will and should be legally able to build upon it.

I think royalties should be paid where appropriate but I don’t think permission should be an issue.

And use that in the theatre release.

And im not saying rip the song off just get one that is inspired by the one originality used.

Silly to waste 30 odd years when there are alternatives available.

No sympathy for any film maker that does this and gets clobbered: they deserve it.

Also, prices are set by big labels, for big-studio hollywood releases – so the cost of licensing even one song can be more than the entire expected net of the movie. So sometimes the only way to add big-label music to an indie movie is to go ahead in production and then pray somebody’s willing to sell the rights at a sane price when it’s time to distribute.

The answer, of course, is not to use big-label music at all. But that only works if you can use modern bands, post-internet bands; older music is all big-label. Sita Sings the Blues is the obvious case in point.

If the filmmakers cannot play any instruments, they can kick trashcans down the street and use that as the soundtrack.
I’d prefer that to Led Zepplin any day.

If they want to use another artists work, they have to pay for it.

Exactly. Thanks to the magic of the free market, if one service provider becomes too onerous to work with, then another vendor can pop up and offer better service.

Filmmakers could work with unsigned artists as mentioned above. Or they could buy stock music, which is music professional musicians make specifically for commercial use in movies, ads, flash videos, etc. Or they could put out a call for music and offer payment only in “exposure” (which is cheesy, but I know at least one of the recent nerdcore documentaries did this).

imho, Charles Burnett wanted to use Schoolly D’s “Signifying Rapper” for the same reason that Schoolly D wanted to use Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” — because those others’ works were perceived to add artistic value.

Are you suggesting that there should be a compulsory for sampling and use in movies?

Nope.

But since you claim the music is, in these examples, not particularly important to the desire to see the film, it’s odd that you then say “so why not just let them use it?” rather than “so why not just remove it from the film?” …

The latter follows even more logically from the “it’s not important to the film” premise, right? It not only doesn’t really affect people seeing the film, but also respects the music rights-holder’s interest in the music – the former abrogrates them every time someone wants to put incidental music in a film, purely for the filmmaker’s convenience.

And yes, student films, festival/art films and many documentaries are caught in gigantic rights traps when it comes to use of popular music, archival photographs and footage and other copyrighted material. Rights owners (which are usually *not* the creators of said copyrighted material, and which are not interested in rational discussions about the true value of their material when referenced within other works) think they have some sort of gold mine on their hands and ask for wildly disproportionate royalties, effectively killing or shutting away whatever projects are involved.

I worked at a small publisher many years ago where one of the books on our slate was prefaced by a one-line quote from Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’: If you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer. Like responsible people, we inquired about permission to use the quote. The rights holder wanted to charge us $15,000–which broke down to $15 for each book in our 1,000 book print run. (Cover price: $9.95) We said fuck it, and used the quote without permission. (Insert debate about Fair Use here.)

Am I correct to think that Abel Ferrara secured rights to use “Signifying Rapper” before he released the film? (ie, even if the rights later proved invalid, was he told he had them?) — If so, then why isn’t it similarly fair to expect that Schooly D should secure rights from Led Zeppelin?

Again, this seems to come down to whether you are advocating for a compulsory for sampling and/or use in movies.

There’s also the issue of fair use – if you see music as being zeitgeist shaping, shouldn’t its use in the background be fair use?

From the musician’s perspective – does inclusion of a snippet add or detract to the possibility of someone going out and acquiring the full work, becoming an enthusiast, and ultimately spending money with them? I’ve lost count of the number of artists who I’ve gone and bought works by (and note the verb) on the basis of hearing their material in a film, TV show, or ad. The fact that this is a two way, possibly symbiotic, street should be recognised.

This leaves completely aside the whole issue of how creativity works. If this was the 18th century the teenage Mozart would have been prevented from hearing Allegri’s Misere, writing down his take on it, and popularising one of the most beautiful pieces of music imaginable – equally how much of Mozart’s oeuvre could be seen as being derivative and thus subject to the whim of the rights holder (the Vatican)?

Not convinced the music industry is doing itself any favours here.

Man the torrents!

Of course if you’re charging for the use of a work, part of that should be indemnifing the person that you’re charging from action because you yourself never had the rights for what you’ve used. So the rightsholder of Kashmir SHOULD have been sueing Schooly D instead of the maker of “bad Lieutenant,”.

*And whether the rightsholder is the creator, the person the creator SOLD the rights to, or even the person for whom the creator agreed create a “work made for hire,” is irrelevant here. While changing what qualifies as a WMFH after the fact is clearly wrong, deciding that you don’t like the WMFH contract after you’ve signed it is not exactly right either.

But it’s Zepllin’s music, For example, and they can or should be able to charge what they want. Nobody *needs* a Zepplin song, nobody has a right to expect a ceiling on the price they have to pay. It’s not the minimum wage or something.

They didn’t use a Zeppelin song they used a song by Schoolly D which had a sample from a Zeppelin song in it.

The problem was that Schoolly D’s record label had never cleared the sample correctly in the first place, so when Schoolly D got sued, part of the ruling required that all unsold copies of the film had to be destroyed.

Sounds like a lot of bullshit to me, especially given Led Zeppelin were pretty damn famous for using other peoples riffs and songs. (Something I don’t have a problem with, in a band myself and plenty of times I’ve written songs only to realise later that I’ve accidentally chucked a riff I’ve heard somewhere else into it).

Schooly D did NOT sample Zep. The tune is question is actually just using the riff of Kashmir as a bassline (as far as I remember), so there’s even less ‘ripping off’ going on than you may think.

The “sounds like” scheme is VERY common in commercials, where royalties would drive budgets way up. For example, there is a commercial using Simon & Garfunkel sound-alikes (so much so, it’s rather disconcerting.) An alternative is to buy the music, but not the performance (which are two very different things) and hire a band to do the sound-alike.

(An interesting side to this is that we test recorded one such song using our lead actress and I still think it sounds better than the original. We can’t release it, however, since it’s using a backing track for which we don’t have clearance.)

Thus it fails. Copyrights, patents etc encourage dog-in-the-manger behavior. There are multiple solutions to this around, like stronger fair use policies, compulsory licensing, annual licensing for copyrights with a fee based on how much the copyright returned to the rights holder, annual licensing at a fee of $1 with the copyright lapsing if the fee is ever not paid, etc.

None of these have been adopted, because democracy is itself subject to a tragedy of the anticommons.

Some of the rights were hard to track down, some wanted more money, some were refusing.

One of the issues was members of Martin Luther King Jr’s staff singing “Happy Birthday.” Yeah, we almost lost a great civil rights documentary over someone singing “Happy Birthday”, of all things.

Another great documentary was almost priced out of the market, “Tarnation.” In that case things like a Pepsi jingle playing on TV in the background during a climactic moment ran a movie that cost $218 (really) into serious budget trouble when seeking distribution.

We had another project, WINTER SOLDIER, where we wanted to use the song Oh Camill as a bonus feature on the DVD (it was written after seeing the film) and not only did Graham Nash grant us permission, he intervened with the publishing and recording companies to give it to us for free. It’s not all horror stories.

I never understand these arguments. It’s sad and frustrating, I agree. And who cares about Led Zepplin’s pocketbook. And the music companies are probably only hurting themselves.

But it’s Zepllin’s music, For example, and they can or should be able to charge what they want. Nobody *needs* a Zepplin song, nobody has a right to expect a ceiling on the price they have to pay. It’s not the minimum wage or something.

The lesson here shouldn’t be the music companies are mean. This post should be warning film makers to be careful and explaining to them *how* to secure the rights if they can afford what they cost.

Anyway, couldn’t the film have been released without those particular songs? Did he wait thirty years to release it because he was standing on principle, or because they were so important to the film it wasn’t worth releasing it without those exact particular songs which weren’t his in the first place?

If I misunderstood something, and I might have, I hope someone will explain it.