Quote:
Originally Posted by Kentaro Sato
To Jazz Paradin:
I reccomend to get a permission directly from the copyright owners or their representatives.
I am a member of PRO, so my works has been "pre-approved" in a sense. I have let things go in the past, and I did make some moves for those commercially-oriented illegal activity.
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Hopefully easysonglicensing has a way to make this viable for mmMike then. Although it does seem pricey, seems it may be the only way to go.
Going directly with the copyright owners does seem like it would likely fail, for a few reasons. For example , a few years ago ,before I became aware of compulsory licensing and how that works, I tried contacting Konami in Japan for licenses, and willing to pay fees. Ultimately, and as you and others described early, the response was very much "we do not grant individuals licenses", presumably because many companies are fearful of treading in those waters when it comes to being aware of all the legalities with music licensing. But also , there was the added complexity of having a big language barrier in our communications...
I do disagree to a certain extent that sales outlets are not responsible--in many cases they have been forced to remove items or materials that are unlawfully sold--if it can be proven that they are knowingly allowing illegal materials to be sold, whether it is music or contraband, they are in trouble...
Again, a big problem is that is is very hard to have bad content removed when A) Only the copyright holder can request the content removed and B) Not everyone has the time or capacity (or even language barriers not knowing that their the songs are being named in English, Japanese, etc) to police the internet for their content.
It is sad to seem situations like the one you describe where in the past you have "just let go" of instances where your content was being abused. But this mirrors a lot of what I hear among a few circles of audio producers I am friends with--as sad as it sounds, they are aware of what is going on, but eventually resign to the conclusion that it can actually do more harm than good in some instances policing everything (alienating fans, and what can in some of their examples be seen as "free" advertising). But I digress.
Like I said, it is horrible seeing the many loopholes I have seen for the VGM industry as a whole. Lately, I have seen quite a few instances where it seems people are getting around the fees by essentially changing the name of the song to something else such that it won't raise any red flags with the publisher, but sure enough when I hear the tune show up on Spotify, it is something from Chrono Trigger, etc, with an entirely different name...
Sad, sad, sad...