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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (82307)	9/5/2008 9:05:09 PM
From: Brian Sullivan	Respond to of 542009

The explainer: Answers to your questions about the news. slate.com Whether the campaign needs permission to play "Barracuda." By Chris Wilson Ann and Nancy Wilson, the frontwomen of the rock band Heart, are demanding that the McCain campaign stop using their 1977 song "Barracuda" at political rallies after the song was played in honor of vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin on both Wednesday and Thursday nights. Does the McCain campaign have to honor the Wilsons' wishes? Not if the campaign has the correct license. Like thousands of other songs, "Barracuda" is distributed by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, meaning that any entity that is licensed with ASCAP can play a song without getting the artist's explicit permission. This license can be held by a venue, like a club or a sports arena, and apply to all events that take place there. In this case, the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn., would be the holder, but a representative tells the Explainer that the venue's ASCAP license applies only to sporting events for the Minnesota Wild and the Minnesota Swarm, the professional hockey and lacrosse teams, respectively; otherwise, it's up to the people who use the premises to get their own. A spokesperson for the Republican Convention said the event did have an ASCAP license separate from the one for sports. Assuming the licenses were all in order, the Wilson sisters probably don't have much legal recourse. But it would be a much different story if the campaign had used the song in an ad or a promotional video. While an ASCAP license covers the right to perform a song, you need a separate "synchronization license" from the publisher to put the song in an ad. Some artists ask for stipulations in their contracts with publishers that prevent their songs from being used for political advertisements or any other causes they find objectionable. (Neil Diamond, for example, is known to be very reluctant to license his songs for programming that is even vaguely political.)