First of all, apologies in advance for this rambling post...
I posted this question over on KVR and so far I've had only one useful response...I'm hoping for something a little more helpful here. It's very rare I use samples at all, but I thought a couple of spoken samples (specifically, old political speeches) might fit with a track I've been working on lately. So I dug around a bit and found a speech by Edison 'Electricity and Progress' and a more famous speech (actually part of a TV interview) from J.Robert Oppenheimer (the 'I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds' speech). The contrast between the two speeches is quite profound, and it actually makes the track into something far more than an instrumental with some vocal samples tacked on.
I won't mention the site's name, just in case, but at first glance it seemed to take copyright seriously and implied that whatever was on there, was in the public domain. HOWEVER, in my subsequent googling about, I discovered that Martin Luther King's famous 'I have a dream..' speech, which one would have assumed would be in the public domain, is very much copyright-protected, and the holder of that copyright (EMI, subsequently Sony) vigorously defended it. And guess what? You got it, the site where I found my two speeches also had a copy of this MLK speech, freely downloadable in convenient MP3 form.
So my question is, how do I find out who, if anyone, holds the copyright on these speeches? If I can find that out, I can ask permission to use and hope they grant it. If not, I'll have to exclude it from the album and record a new track to replace it :(
I posted this question over on KVR and so far I've had only one useful response...I'm hoping for something a little more helpful here. It's very rare I use samples at all, but I thought a couple of spoken samples (specifically, old political speeches) might fit with a track I've been working on lately. So I dug around a bit and found a speech by Edison 'Electricity and Progress' and a more famous speech (actually part of a TV interview) from J.Robert Oppenheimer (the 'I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds' speech). The contrast between the two speeches is quite profound, and it actually makes the track into something far more than an instrumental with some vocal samples tacked on.
I won't mention the site's name, just in case, but at first glance it seemed to take copyright seriously and implied that whatever was on there, was in the public domain. HOWEVER, in my subsequent googling about, I discovered that Martin Luther King's famous 'I have a dream..' speech, which one would have assumed would be in the public domain, is very much copyright-protected, and the holder of that copyright (EMI, subsequently Sony) vigorously defended it. And guess what? You got it, the site where I found my two speeches also had a copy of this MLK speech, freely downloadable in convenient MP3 form.
So my question is, how do I find out who, if anyone, holds the copyright on these speeches? If I can find that out, I can ask permission to use and hope they grant it. If not, I'll have to exclude it from the album and record a new track to replace it :(
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