CCC on May Day
Copyright Clearance Center, an SIIA member, recently held a one day conference on Copyright. Once there I saw the schedule and got a little worried – they had schedule four ninety minute panel discussions on the topic. I’m thinking that is way too long and people will be nodding off. SIIA runs lots of conferences and we’ve moved to much shorter sessions , never venturing beyond 60 minutes. To my surprise and delight – they were all terrific. CCC matched the right speakers with the right audience. The people in attendance, including Keith Kupferschmid and Ken Wasch from SIIA live and breath the topic and were quite passionate about their opinions. They touched on copyright in print, music and video.

The highlight for me was hearing recording artist Suzanne Vega talk about her experience with the global remixing of “Tom’s Diner”. This tune was remixed by a variety of artists. Once they reached some level of popularity they’d contact her or her legal team for permission. For the first and most popular remix, she wisely paid a flat fee for global rights to the version and she now receives all royalties whenever this version is played. She has pretty much approved every request except when someone wanted to use it in a porn soundtrack – she advised them that there were probably better songs they could choose from.