Applying For Copyright - Miss Georgiou

Copyright gives the creators of some types of media rights to control how they're used and distributed. Music, books, video and software can all be covered up by copyright law. There are a few limitations imposed by copyright .  For example when you buy software, copyright law forbids you from: 

• Giving a copy to somebody else
• Making a copy and then selling it
• Using the software on a network (unless the licence allows it)
• Renting the software without permission of the copyright holder

The law that governs copyright in the Untied Kingdom is called the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 

In the music industry for the musician, copyrights can protect both songs (which usually consists of a melody and includes lyrics if the song has words) and recordings (CDs, mp3s, LPs, cassettes, DAT, and any other recording). The “fixed” requirement means that there is no protection for a song that is only in your head. A song may be "fixed" by writing it down, recording it (even on a handheld recorder), or saving it to a hard drive on a computer. Playing a song live does not meet the “fixed” requirement. But, if you record the live performance, you have now "fixed" the song. 

We then realised after finding more information about copyright that in order to create our own reincarnation of the music video, we had to get authorisation from the artists record label otherwise we were going against the law by taking the music video without permission, and this could of led to the record label suing us as we were unauthorised to recreate it Copyright also for us would of let us be confident in not copying the video and recreating it as our own and not that of the artist in the music video. So in the end we as a group had to find out the information and do our own individual research in order to send an email to the record label about asking their permission for 'Burn' by Ellie Goulding. We in the end had to email her main company which was Polydor to request permission to use their song. We accessed the internet, typing in and finding out her main record label. We then searched and accessed their official site to find a general email to the company. This enabled us to ask for permission and wait for a reply.
Unfortunately we are still waiting for a reply, this is probably due to them being extremely busy or this may not be top of their priorities. We have contacted them twice now, and if we do not get a reply soon then we will have t ofind anther suitable email address for Elie Goulding's record label in order to copyright her song.

Dear copyright holder,

We are a group of A Level student’s from West Hatch High School, writing to request your permission for the song 'Burn by Ellie Goulding With your permission, we would create a music video for this song, which would part of our coursework.

The song would only be used in an educational context, viewed only by our media class and OCR examination’s officer. It will not be released to a large audience. The audience and your company would of course, be recognised throughout and a copyright notice may be added to our projects if you wish. In this case, you may send us this information.

We look forward in hearing from you,

Kind regardsHeather Everingham

As of yet we are still waiting for a response from the record label and have tired several times to see if we can get a response. We do understand that record labels are very busy and we may not even get a response but we are still continuing to plan our music video in the sense believing that we are allowed to use the music to create our own music video.

We unfortunately did not receive a message back from the record label but continued on the music video.