Case+08+-+Mr.+Campbell+and+Commercially+Recorded+Music

Mr. Campbell and the educational use of commercially recorded music:

Mr. Campbell teaches digital audio production courses at Touro College in Manhattan. Each semester, he shows a documentary to his class on the making of Dark Side of the Moon by the band Pink Floyd from a DVD from his personal collection. The film illustrates the creative and groundbreaking production techniques used in the writing, performance, engineering and mixing of the record.

In particular there is a segment that describes in depth, the use of reverb, an audio effect, on the song Money. The majority of the song is laden with reverb, but during mixing and editing of the track an unconventional technique was utilized. For a small portion of the song, the reverb is removed from every instrument completely. This nicely illustrates the concept of reverb’s effect on recorded music.

Mr. Campbell designed several exercises using the section of the song lacking reverb. In these exercises, students experiment by replacing the reverb effect on the clip using digital signal processing or DSP software. In order to do this, Mr. Campbell burned 20 CD copies of that segment of the song. The clip is 30 seconds in length. On completion of the exercise, the CDs are returned to him.

Commentary:

Due to the educational nature of this scenario and the length of the media used, this falls under Fair Use guidelines. According to the U.S. Copyright office and further clarified by the Music Publisher’s Association of America, it is acceptable to make multiple copies of portions of recorded works. This is provided that the excerpts constitute a maximum of 10% of the entire work and only one copy per student is made. The song used for Mr. Campbell’s lesson is 30 seconds in length, which is slightly less than 10% of the duration of the entire work. He made 20 CD copies, one for each of the 20 students in his class. This also falls under fair use since Mr. Campbell is collecting the CD copies and not using them for resale.

Additional Comment:

I believe Mr. Campbell has a great deal of work, just to find the “perfect” activity or sample of music for his class. I do not believe that recording thirty seconds from an original DVD would compromise the Copyrights of the author. In addition, when collecting these CD’s, he is making sure that no one is using them for other than the intended educational purpose. If he had the time, it would be helpful if he could explain to his students the importance of not to copying the entire song, and why he is allowed to copy a portion for his class. (By Carolina Guerrero)

Ah, what a great song from a great album (3rd in all-time sales; longest time on Billboard's charts of any album). I concur with the previous comment and would add that adding or subtracting reverb would not appear to "change the basic melody or the fundamental character of the work" as stated in section 4.2.3 of the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia. I'd also like to point out that sections 6.2 and 6.3 of the same document reminds educators and students to credit sources and display the copyright notice, so Mr. Campbell could augment his case by doing this, as well as to caution students against posting the modified work on the Internet without permission from Pink Floyd (section 6.4). ~GregM