It's Only Rock 'n' Roll But I Download It

Any attorney practicing Internet law probably has plenty of clients that offer music to their users, from background music for a site feature or page to television and movie programming, advertising, webcasting, play-on-demand music and music videos. Those clients may think that all they need to play music on their service is a license from the record company that released it. Those clients would be wrong.

As smaller and startup sites — which often are less sophisticated about the labyrinthine legalities of music licensing — start adding music to their services, they and their attorneys run the risk of missing at least one license they need: for the public-performance rights held by composers and publishers. Even more mature Internet companies may be mystified by the options for licensing performance rights online. A recent case in the district court with jurisdiction over half the music performance rights in the United States confirmed the need to obtain broad performance licenses for online music in the course of setting performance license fees for Internet giants AOL LLC, Yahoo! Inc. and RealNetworks Inc. In doing so, the court offered a road map for negotiating online performance rights in the future. See U.S. v. American Soc’y of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) (Applications of America Online Inc., RealNetworks Inc. and Yahoo! Inc.), 562 F. Supp. 2d 413 (S.D.N.Y. 2008).