I’m so confused. My sister was telling me about how Taylor swift is re recording her old music because scooter Braun owns her old music and she wants to have sole ownership over it.

So how can she release similar or exact copies of songs she doesn’t own but other artist constantly have legal battles for having songs that have some similarities to it? Like Ice Ice Baby for example. Is she not violating copy right laws by doing this?

Edit: good news. I get it now!

  • CaptainHowdy@vlemmy.net
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    1 year ago

    In not a lawyer, but I think the recordings are what is owned by the label. As long as she wrote the song, she can re-record and release the new recordings.

    • moon_crush@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Best TL;DR yet!

      A finer detail is that Swift was contractually prohibited from new recordings for two years after original contract ended — that time has now passed.

    • Slartibartfast@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I’ve done a bit of this for TV/film stuff, and yeah there’s basically two copyrights on a piece of music - there’s the rights to the song in general, and the performance rights. That’s why you’ve got to be careful with public domain recordings and check the date of the performance - if you use a song that’s old enough to be public domain but a more recent recording of it that isn’t, you can be in trouble.

      I’m pretty sure that’s also why so many trailers have weird covers of famous songs on them (usually a woman doing a slow acoustic version of a rock song for some reason) - that way they can pay for the song rights, and get some aspiring singer to record it for next to nothing so they don’t have to also pay the performance rights for it.