Copyright Law for Fan Arrangements of Popular Songs

So we all see fan arrangements of popular songs. How does this work? How are people able to take a popular song (i.e. hallelujah by leonard cohen, just for example) and change it (a little or alot) and have it be "legal"?

What are the details of, limitations of, and protections in place both for and against "fan arrangements"? Could i just play a fan arrangement of a song on youtube for example (No monetization) and would i be infringing on leonard cohen AND/OR the fan that arranged that particular fan arrangement? Just one or the other? Perhaps neither?

Any and all details of copyright law as it pertains to fan arrangements is appreciated and thank you for your time.

There is no amount of modification that you can do to a copyrighted work that will suddenly make it legal. There's no provision in the copyright rules for "fans."

The question is what exactly are you doing with this arrangement. If you are doing so only for your own purposes and not publicly performing it, nobody is really going to care. Public performance is generally covered (at least for the major artists) by the performance rights organization. Most of Leonard Cohen's appears to be ASCAP. You can find info on public performance royalties by examining ASCAP.com.

If you're going to make "phonorecords" (to include MP3 downloads), you need mechanical rights. These are handled (in the US, note that Cohen is Canadian, and while their laws are somewhat similar, it's outside of the topic of our board) by compulsory (also called statutory) royalties. You pay the legal amount (per copy) to the artist or their agent. For most of the industry, the agent is the Harry Fox Agency (again more details at harryfox.com along with their "songfile" which will help in finding who to remit the royalties to).

If you want to do just about anything else you need explicit permission of the copyright holder (which often isn't the composer but his "music publisher" which often is the record company).

Quote:

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Quoting flyingron

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There is no amount of modification that you can do to a copyrighted work that will suddenly make it legal. There's no provision in the copyright rules for "fans."

The question is what exactly are you doing with this arrangement. If you are doing so only for your own purposes and not publicly performing it, nobody is really going to care. Public performance is generally covered (at least for the major artists) by the performance rights organization. Most of Leonard Cohen's appears to be ASCAP. You can find info on public performance royalties by examining ASCAP.com.

If you're going to make "phonorecords" (to include MP3 downloads), you need mechanical rights. These are handled (in the US, note that Cohen is Canadian, and while their laws are somewhat similar, it's outside of the topic of our board) by compulsory (also called statutory) royalties. You pay the legal amount (per copy) to the artist or their agent. For most of the industry, the agent is the Harry Fox Agency (again more details at harryfox.com along with their "songfile" which will help in finding who to remit the royalties to).

If you want to do just about anything else you need explicit permission of the copyright holder (which often isn't the composer but his "music publisher" which often is the record company).

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Yes hello! If i were to go onto a site such as musescore, you see fan arrangement's everywhere and as an average person who isn't very familiar with copyright law it can be very confusing at first to go on a site like musescore and see "all rights reserved" under a fan arrangement of a popular song. This led me to a false assumption that if you changed all the notes then it isn't really the "same" song is it? But i now after having learned more, of course see that is wrong.

So if i have this right, i could play any fan arrangement of a popular song, no matter how much that fan arrangement differs from the original, on a site like youtube where they have deals in place with the appropriate content creators / rights holders to let you do so as long as you don't monetize the videos. (provided that they don't have any sort of official licenses or permissions to do so/or create that derivative work)

And if this is the case would i still need to provide an attribution to the fan?


(I am not saying i intend to do any of this, just examples and hypotheticals so that i can try and understand it a bit better)

No it means the opposite, the rights holder can sue the person who infringed the original work.

If you want to use the infringing derivative work you need a license from BOTH as either could sue you for using it.