Music Protected By Drm

[Zulema Estabrooks]

Iam trying to use a song purchased from iTunes in iMovie. My understanding from other threads is that music purchased after 2009 should be available, but a song I recently purchased is not showing up in my iTunes library accessed through iMovie. There is however a note saying "1 files are protected and unavailable." It is not clear to me whether that refers to one of the songs listed, or if the protected/unavailable title is not shown at all. If the latter, could that be my missing song? Are some titles purchased through iTunes after 2009 not available to iMovie, or have things changed? I am not talking about a song downloaded from Apple music, this is a song purchased for $1.29 from iTunes.

Not necessarily all songs purchased from iTunes after 2009 are DRM free. Also, songs that involve Apple Music somewhere in the chain of acquisition and/or download to iTunes would be DRM protected. All Apple Music songs are DRM protected and that protection remains even if subsequently downloaded to iTunes.

To check on whether your particular song is DRM protected open your iTunes library and control-click on the song and from the drop down menu click on Song Info/File. Look under the heading "Kind" at the top of the Song Info/File display box. If it is protected it will say so. If unprotected there will be no mention.

When you record a song, you may be creating two works that are protected by copyright: a musical work and a sound recording. A sound recording and the music, lyrics, words, or other content included in the recording are separate copyright-protected works. These works are subject to different rules and are commonly owned and licensed separately.

Although your work is protected by copyright from the moment it is fixed, you can register your work with the U.S. Copyright Office for additional benefits, including for U.S. works, access to federal courts in the case of infringement. Registering your work also makes a public record of your ownership. Applying for registration with the U.S. Copyright Office requires an application, a filing fee, and a copy of the work. Depending on the type of work, there are several different online application options, including the following:

In addition to registering your sound recordings and musical works with the Copyright Office, you may want to consider submitting a trademark application for your band name with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Generally, copyright lawsuits are decided in federal court. You may also choose the Copyright Claims Board (CCB), a voluntary forum within the Copyright Office to resolve copyright disputes involving damages totaling less than $30,000. It is intended to be a cost-effective and streamlined alternative to federal court. To use the CCB, you also must have filed an application to register your copyright. You can read more about the CCB here.

For the last couple of update iterations, I have had every single song that I sync onto my iPad from my iCloud Music Library is flagged as DRM-protected when I try to load it onto my decks. Is anybody else experiencing this?

My iPad is from 2021, max spec, OS on the latest version. I have an Apple Music subscription, so I purchased songs via iTunes on the Mac. These are tracks published in the last two years. They play on Traktor 3 on the Mac and they play on the DJay app on the iPhone.

For this reason, the next step to troubleshoot this would be to try syncing the music from your Mac to your iPad using a cabled connection to do so. This should hopefully allow the iPad to see the tracks as Purchased, as they currently are seen on your Mac.

For more information about how mix-ups like these can happen when using Apple Music (streaming service) and the iCloud Music Library, here are some outside resources that also offer additional troubleshooting steps which you may find helpful:

Technically speaking, I am not syncing the music though, since I use iCloud for music syncing. I do not have a local separate library, just for my purchased tracks. iTunes has to distinguish tracks from Apple Music and the purchased ones, and this seems to work on the iPhone and elsewhere.

I, unfortunately gave up, after having spent hours with the Apple helpline. Back to Traktor. Would have loved to switch. The latest iPad is quite powerful and would be an excellent display and player.

I have written an original composition, and I publish it and sell its sheet music in the retail marketplace. I recently found out that there is an album whose title is the same as mine. That album does not contain any songs with the same titles as mine, nor does it contain music related to mine. Is there any possible copyright conflict?

Thank you for your question. This topic comes up quite often, and it helps to show the boundaries of copyright protection. Generally, copyright law protection does not extend to song titles because they usually are short and lack sufficient originality. Therefore, you can (and often do) have multiple songs with the same name, and the first to name their song, for example "Crazy," does not have the right to stop other people from releasing their own songs named "Crazy." An exception to this is that some long titles may be found to have sufficient originality to be afforded copyright protection. I suspect that my friend's song entitled "The Concept of the Quantum-Mechanical Bodymind Has Sparked a Great Idea" is one of them.

The story doesn't end here. If the song was a hit song, the song title could be protected from unfair competition as a trademark under trademark law. A trademark is a word, phrase or symbol that is used to identify and distinguish the source of a product or service. You might think of it like a brand. Accordingly, trademark law's primary goal is to protect consumers from confusion as to the source of a good or service and to prevent later users from trading on the popularity of an earlier use of a name, phrase or symbol. Importantly, trademark law not only protects against later use of the same mark but also of "confusingly similar" marks.

For example, music publisher EMI successfully argued in court that the song title "Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)" constituted a protectable trademark and a golf company could not use "Swing, Swing, Swing" in their advertising without EMI's permission. Keep in mind, however, that "Sing, Sing, Sing" was a wildly successful song that was included by NPR in the list of the 100 most important musical works of the 20th century. The overwhelming majority of song titles are simply unprotectable.

AskaMusicLawyer.com is maintained by experienced Austin music lawyer Amy E. Mitchell. Please feel free to ask any music law related questions. You will be notified by email when your question has been selected for response, and the response will be posted on this site.

Please note that no responses are guaranteed, and responses provided on this site do not constitute legal advice and may be edited or removed at any time. The purpose of AskaMusicLawyer.com is solely to educate and inform musicians and music professionals about legal issues in the music industry. Accordingly, any posted responses are merely intended to give you general legal insight in order to point you in the right direction.

When a track by artist "Ghostwriter" was uploaded and then promptly removed from streaming services in April, it was the latest example of one of 2023's most astonishing trends. The track 'heart on my sleeve' sounded like it was sung by two of the world's biggest stars, Drake and The Weeknd. In fact, it was actually someone who had used an AI tool to make his voice sound like theirs.

AI has become a hot topic in the music industry in recent months, with new examples each week of astonishing AI-generated music, and concerns voiced about the "widespread and lasting harm" of such tools to music creators and rightsholders.

In the UK, the proliferation of such tools comes at a time of increased scrutiny of the role of copyright and the remuneration of music creators and rightsholders, following the DCMS's inquiry into the economics of music streaming.

For sound recordings, these are protected regardless of whether they are created/generated by AI or a human author because there is no requirement of "originality". However, for a song or lyrics to be protected, they must be "original".

The "author's own intellectual creation" is generally regarded as requiring a higher standard of originality than the English case law standard. Many commentators consider that AI-created works that do not have a human author cannot meet this higher standard. However, there is uncertainty over how broadly the EU test applies in the UK, or whether it will continue to apply in the UK post-Brexit, and whether it contradicts the CDPA, which seems to provide protection for non-human authored works.

On 15 March 2023, an entirely separate report of Sir Patrick Vallance on the Pro-innovation Regulation of Technologies Review proposed that the UK should "utilise existing protections of copyright and IP law on the output of AI". However, the Government's response did not explicitly mention providing copyright protection to AI-generated works but, instead, focused on infringement issues (see below).

This is not a uniquely UK or European problem. Unlike most of the rest of the world, copyright can be registered in the US, meaning that the US Copyright Office has had to deal with this question directly. The USCO has consistently refused to register copyright works without a human author, and has now issued guidance on works containing material generated by AI.

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