Applying for Music Copyright - Miss Georgiou

When artists copyright there songs it just means that only they have permission to distribute it in whatever way they like. People do not have permission to use any part of the song for any financial purposes or for there own use that causes a wider audience to be enjoying the music else where. Overall the use of copyright gives the owners of that content like songs or video footage etc the right to distribute there own work how they want. This is why technically you need permission to use almost everything that can be associated with the media. This law actually works well in stopping other artists 'copy' similar lyrics as well as the rhythm and notes used in a piece of music. Copyright is a very lengthy and technical law that requires a lot of time, money and evidence to actually prosecutor someone. Although in the music industry people do have this sort of power and are able to send people to court over copyright issues and there are many stories out there of artists and other music producers being sued a lot of money of this sort of law. 

Vanilla Ice released a song in 1991 called 'Ice Ice Baby' it used the main beat of the song 'Under Pressure' by David Bowie/Queen. This caused an up rise as although Vanilla Ice used the exact same piece of music it didn't actually credit the other song at all. Ignoring the fact that they where remotely similar. The copyright law is put in place to stop things like this happening as artists can be sued millions for things like this. This is due to the fact that the original artist gets the justice they deserve by suing anyone that tries to take credit for something that may have taken a lot of time and money to create for themselves. Although at first Vanilla ice denied it being similar or him ripping off there song in any way. He was later sued by David Bowie and Queen. Where he then stated it was meant to be humorous and admitted to using the melody as the main beat for his song. Vanilla Ice ended up paying out money which could have been avoided if he followed the copyright rules successfully and had he to credit the song in there favor.
This goes to show how important it is for us as a group to at least try and contact the record label and provide evidence that we have attempted to get permission for being able to use the song. 

When applying for permission to use Gabrielle Aplin's music soundtrack 'Salvation' we needed to at-least attempt to get some sort of permission to use the song for educational purposes, being our A2 media coursework. To do this we had to research what record label Gabrielle is with and find a contact number for them. This was harder then we expected as we did not know for sue if this would be a legitimate contact number and email address but we still attempted to give it ago as it was crucial that we at least tried to get critical feedback on our copyright issues.This was the closest we could find to being accurate and even though the email had been cut off at the end we where able to get through using the email address below. 

Here is an example of the email we sent as a group to get permission for using the song for our copyright concerns, we have send a number of these emails and still not had a request or reply so we have has to continue with our own project knowing and having evidence that we have at least tried and attempted to contact someone at parlophone records and get a reasonable reply, but unfortunately this has not been the case for us. Although we will still carry on to attempt to use this song for our education.