Um, No, It Doesn’t
CNN has a story about a lawsuit over the use of The Standells’ song “Dirty Water” in a new set of beer commercials. The following passage caught my eye:
The Standells learned of the Budweiser commercials when their record company received a “substantial” royalty payment for use of the song, their attorney said.
Royalties are one thing, Brown said, but copyright law requires that advertisers receive permission before using a work in a commercial.
If the rightsholders (here, the record company) have been paid a royalty and granted permission for the use, it’s just not true that the artist who recorded the song must also give permission, is it? That sounds very much like the kind of “moral rights” argument that might work in Europe, but which just doesn’t exist in U.S. law (for musical works, at least; I doubt VARA applies here). Or am I missing something obvious?
I agree that it’s at best a fuzzy statement of the law — unfortunately, not uncommon in reporting on copyright. And the AP story that CNN ran and that you linked to is everywhere.
The Lowell Sun ran its own story on the same issue. This is what the Sun said:
So it looks like it’s contract, not copyright, that allegedly prevents the use.
Thanks, Bill; that certainly sounds more plausible. I wish it was only news reporting on copyright-related stories that often gets the basics of the law wrong, but of course we’ve both read any number of fuzzy-headed news reports in other areas that don’t jibe with what we know to be the case. (Makes me wonder how much erroneous information I’m absorbing in areas about which I don’t know enough to read with a truly critical eye…).