Miss Georgiou - Applying for music copyright

The copyright law states that intellectual property allows a person to own things they create in the same way as something physical can be owned. It is the right to prevent others copying or reproducing someone's work. It is used in a number of ways within the music industry, mainly to prevent content creators work from being copied by other artists, to which when the creative freedom borders are breached and exceed past what is deemed as original work when taking inspiration from already existing songs. One example of an artist which was hit hard when it came to breaching the copyright law is Pharrell Williams, in which he was sued $7.2 million dollars, as his song "Blurred lines" sounded very similar to that of "got to give it up" by Marvine Gaye. He passed the song of as his own, not giving any acknowledge to Marvine Gaye's 1970's hit, despite both songs having very noticeable similarities. This demonstrates the extremes as to what can happen if copyright for content isn't obtained, emphasising its importance for when it comes to creating and releasing your own content. If the artist marvine Gaye didn't have copyright for his own content, those that took part in the creation of blurred lines would have been able to get away with recreating the content (or at least to an extent), but to profit upon it and pass it off as there own. 

Above is a video discussing the blurred lines lawsuit, including a side by side comparison as to how it breached copyright. There are multiple over examples within the music industry in which the importance of copyright is emphasised through such large and mass scale lawsuits which have been taken on to large artists, receiving full media coverage on such.

For this reason, I had to apply for copyright before going to create my own content alongside my media group, after seeing what actual content creators/ artists have come under when its come to copyright infringements in the past. If I didn't do so, when going to upload our content onto youtube, we could have our work taken down or unable to be viewed due to it receiving a copyright infringement. If it was deemed to be too similar to the original song and the record label was to discover this, a number of actions could be put into place. 

We went around doing this by researching what record label our artist Jake Bugg was under (Mercury Records), to which I then sent the label an email stating the purpose of the music video, asking for permission to base our work upon it, stating how it would only being used for educational purposes. This was done as a precaution in case the record label which owns the rights to Jake Buggs content if they were unhappy and deemed the content to be infringing with the copyright of the song and label. 

We contacted them through the above email, although since sending it we haven't yet received a response from them, although we have provided evidence of attempting to contact the record label for the song which we intend to base our content upon. My group and I will now go on to create our music video, as we are still awaiting a response.