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There can be up to 4 – that’s right – 4 licenses required in Canada for radio stations.
SOCAN is the most commonly known, and represents the rights of songwriters, composers and publishers. Re:Sound represents the rights of the performers and record companies.
The other two are far less known, yet just as important. Connect (formerly the AVLA) represents those who own the master recordings of songs that will be copied for any purpose. If you use mp3’s on a hard disk and play those over the air, then you need a Connect license to do the copying.
Here is a paper that describes the agencies involved in this licensing, their similarities and differences.
The 4th licensing agency is the CMRRA, and as far as I can tell, gets involved when you are making and distributing CD’s and other non-electronic copies of songs. However, I’m still unclear as to the precise differences between Connect & the CMRRA.
It’s been announced that Live365 now is affiliated with SOCAN & Re:Sound and is available in Canada. But as you can see, that’s not the entire story here, and if you are not operating totally live and feeding the stream directly, you could still be in copyright violation.
As a followup to my previous post, and for what it’s worth:
It appears that the CMRRA (through CSI) is concerned with reproduction songwriter/composer rights. If you are doing any sort of musical work streaming or download distribution, you need to contact them as well.
Now that I’ve started down this path, I might as well finish.
If you intend to use Live365 as a Canadian streamer, I would investigate exactly what licensing fees that organization is paying.
This is precisely the reason that I use Canadian-verified public domain music when I broadcast or stream to anyone other than myself.
Canada did modify its copyright rules in 2015 for sound recordings (performances) but anything that had fallen into the public domain prior to that year still remained in the public domain. The rules had stated that sound recordings retained copyright for 50 years after the end of the calendar year in which the recording was released. So any record released prior to and including 1964 is in the public domain. The new rules extend recording copyright periods to 70 up to 100 years.
I had heard rumblings that the copyright rules for the music composition itself were to be changed, but haven’t been able to verify that. The potentially current rules (as found on the Canadian music composers website) state that copyright in a musical composition lasts for 50 years (at the end of the calendar year) past the death of all stakeholders (composer, lyricist, etc.). I use 1964 as the cut off date for that as well, i.e., all stakeholders must have died prior to or during that year.
The copyright status of a musical composition, by far the most complicated aspect of determining public domain status, can be checked by going to the SOCAN website and checking their public database. I’ve found that their database is fairly accurate – it does include some songs that I feel shouldn’t be there (as all stakeholders died well before 1964) but I err on the side of caution and don’t use the songs anyway.
I’ve also found that the SOCAN database is missing some songs for which one of the stakeholders died well after 1964, i.e., they should be copyrighted. In that event, I drop the song as well.
The copyright status of a sound performance is pretty straight forward – just take the year the record was released. That’s erring well on the side of caution, as the previous law states that copyright is automatically granted on the date that the performance was *recorded*, not released.
Canada has a distinct advantage regarding public domain material over the U.S. In the U.S., NO sound performance is currently in the public domain and won’t be (until around 2035, I believe). While radio is currently exempt from paying performance license fees (and they’re attempting to change that), if you want to stream, you have to pay.
Here in Canada there are thousands of popular songs released in 1964 & prior that can be streamed license-free. Not to mention most classical music recorded in 1964 & prior (excluding modern classical composers, of course).
As far as a BETS-1 over the air station goes Resound and Socan don’t care and don’t require fees
and I still have the email printed(somewhere) that I received from them.
But this “Connect” I never heard of till now. I will give them a call or send them an email inquiring about a BETS-1 station and I hope I don’t have to try to explain BETS-1 to them!
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