Much has been written concerning the recent lawsuits that are being filed concerning trademark and copyright infringement in the karaoke industry. As with any intellectual property these days (that’s what you call the right one has when they create music, art, a written work, etc.) there is not a discernible line to determine whether a particular act is within the law or is a violation. To make things even harder to understand, there has not been a lot of case law that is specific to the karaoke industry.
Karaoke not only deals with the actual creation and the performance of the musical piece. It deals with the display of the lyrics on a monitor or television screen. This expands the issues to include cinematography and synchronization rights. Add to that the rights of the karaoke manufacturer who pays (supposed to anyway) a huge upfront fee for the right to record the song, pays the musicians to play the music as close to the originals as possible, presses the discs, and then markets and sells the product to the general public. With all this, it is easy to see two things:
1) Karaoke is big business – upwards of $10 billion dollars annually. That’s bigger than baseball.
2) There is a cost to produce each and every karaoke song.
So why have karaoke manufacturers (one in particular) decided to go around the country filing lawsuits against karaoke shows (we’ll call them KJ’s) and the venues that hire them? Let’s examine the business as it has transpired since it was introduced to America back in the late 1980’s.
The Beginnings of Karaoke in America
When it first started, karaoke was the music tracks on cassette tape. The lyrics were printed on paper for the singer to use to perform the song. Backtracking is nothing new – really! Tracks have been produced for years in America for people to sing to their favorite songs. Churches have used back tracks for many years for their services. And musicians have used books of lyrics as “cheat sheets” during their live performances. When I was in a band in 1990, the lead singer always had the lyrics handy. In 1969, I wish the lead singer of my band had a cheat sheet for the lyrics to Inna-godda-davida. He couldn’t remember the second verse (it’s the same as the first). Anyway, as the music industry and technology advanced (very quickly), karaoke music producers like Pioneer created Laser Disc Players and music that had the lyrics on a TV screen superimposed on a moving video background. These discs were about the size of the old 33 rpm LP’s. (For the young at heart, LP’s are the medium we dinosaurs have in our music collections.)
The music industry didn’t like this too much and lawsuits were filed. Because of the synchronization aspects of putting the lyrics on screen with video, it was determined illegal. So disc manufacturers started putting just the lyrics on the screen. An occasional clipart picture in between the lyric’s verses was ok. And then they found a way to use a compact disc (CD) that supplied the music and the lyrics. More songs on a smaller format were just what the industry needed. Manufacturers started cropping up all over the place making karaoke a very popular pastime. But guess what? No one was paying the songwriters for the music rights. On top of that, the bars were hiring bands, playing jukeboxes, and adding more and more televisions as a way to attract customers. The music industry went on a campaign to get their just rewards and began charging the venues a fee to help reimburse the songwriters and musicians for their creative work. Now, the right to perform karaoke at your local bar is deemed to be covered by the fee that the bar pays to BMI on your behalf. (That’s assuming they have paid the fee). But there are still a few differences between you (the KJ) and the local band coming in and playing at that same bar. (We will assume here that the bar has paid its fees.)
The local band performs the music live. You are playing a sound track that has been created by someone else. The performance rights for both would be covered by the performance fee paid by the bar. For a regular DJ, the band on the disc gets paid through this fee and the original sale of the disc to the DJ. For karaoke, the band is paid by the manufacturer, but no rights are attached to pay the musicians after that. Consider it like a work for hire (a piece of software created by an employee of Microsoft probably doesn’t own the copyright to his creation since he was a paid employee).
There is also a question of the synchronization of the lyrics on the screen with the music. This is a legal issue that has a long way to go since the advent of technology created the problem. Sure, it’s easier to sing when the screen is there changing the color of the lyrics in synch with the music (easier than lyrics sheets or memorizing the song). While it is hard to understand the difference, let’s just say for now that it’s an issue to be dealt with. Technology has created a bigger problem that is the crux of the karaoke lawsuits.
Karaoke and the Computer Revolution
Computer technology has advanced so much that the local KJ now has much more capability to make it easier (and more entertaining) to run a karaoke show, find songs, create song lists, remember singers and what they’ve sung before, and even keep their history from one venue to another. KJ’s have the ability to transfer their large inventories of CDG’s to the computer so they don’t have to haul them to their show, make room for them, search through them to find every song requested, and then haul them back to the car. The KJ with 20 years in the business has accumulated several thousand discs making this an increasing larger task. So the advent of computer karaoke has made their lives easier and their shows better. So why would the karaoke manufacturers condemn the thought of using a computer in a karaoke show? The answer is simple – PIRACY!
Why All The Hooplah?
Since the advent of the digitization of information and the internet, downloading music has become a phenomenon. People have found it very convenient to look on a search engine, find a site (like Napster of the past) and download all the music they can muster. Think of it like this on a smaller scale. You buy a CD at the local music store. By purchasing that disc, the songwriter, the producer, the artists playing the music all get paid from your $10 investment. Now you take it home and rip it to your computer to save the disc and make it more convenient to get onto your IPOD. Your friend comes over and likes the music and wants a copy. You don’t think about it and hook your friend’s IPOD up to your computer and now your friend can enjoy the music too. Guess what? The songwriter, the producer, and the artists on the CD did not get paid for the copy your friend now has. And you are guilty of copy write infringement.
Let’s take it one more step. Your friend (we’ll call him Malcom) goes home and uploads the MP3 version from the IPOD to the computer. He knows five friends who would also like the new music. So Malcom emails an attachment to all his friends with the new CD in MP3 format. That’s five more people who have the CD and have not paid the copyrights and performance rights on the CD. Now those five email 5 others, etc. Get the picture?
If you haven’t figured it out yet, pretend you are the person who wrote the song. How do you feel? The point is that, regardless of where the music comes from, it’s illegal when it’s free. There are very few places you can actually download music legally. And just because they say it’s legal, it may not be.
Karaoke is not much different. Because of Piracy in the karaoke industry, there are fewer legal manufacturers left. Sound Choice is one of the better known producers as you will see a large number of songs with their logo being sung at karaoke shows all over the world. And thus brings to issue the other side of the conversation – Trademark Infringement.
Where's The Beef?
Each song that Sound Choice produces has their logo attached to the lyrics screen. When that song is played, the logo shows up and is a pretty good indicator that the music was created by Sound Choice. If the KJ is doing his (or her) show all from discs, it’s pretty easy to determine whether the disc is an original or a copy. With a computer, you cannot tell whether the song was ripped from a disc that was purchased from the manufacturer, copied from someone else’s disc, or downloaded from the internet.
Enter the Internet entrepreneur. Malcom likes karaoke too. He goes to shows and figures out that he can use a computer to run his own karaoke show. He already knows where to get his music on the internet and it doesn’t cost him much. Besides, he found a shareware sight that told him it was totally legal to download all the music he wants after paying the $67 membership fee.
So Malcom spends time at home (he doesn’t have a real job) and downloads 20-30,000 songs. He knows everyone likes Sound Choice songs so he makes sure he has them all. He hasn’t paid for his music, so he has some money that he can use to buy a decent sound system to hook his computer to for his karaoke show. He goes to as internet site that will print your first 250 business cards for free and he’s ready to market his show.
Malcom doesn’t have the investment that the local KJ has in music, so he can go to the bar owner and tell him he can do the show cheaper. The bar owner doesn’t know the difference and money is tight, so he switches and hires Malcom. The legal KJ must now find another venue and cut his fee because he knows that Malcom is ready to set up a friend with a computer loaded with songs to expand his little operation.
How Does This Affect The Karaoke Industry?
So now every KJ in the area is forced to work for less and expand their libraries to compete. Even though the legal KJ has the investment and the experience, the dollars are the determining factor. But let’s take it another step to get the real picture of the situation that the karaoke manufacturer has been faced with.
Malcom is pretty internet savvy. He has found a great place to get music and now has 100,000 songs. He decides that internet auctions and classified ads are great places earn an extra income. So he starts advertising his music already on a hard drive for a great price. Because others throughout the country are thinking about getting into the karaoke business, they buy from Malcom and the piracy expands exponentially.
So manufacturers have made a large investment to create the music that we all love to sing. But if they create 10,000 discs and 100,000 end up in circulation that have not been paid for, they cannot continue to operate. They cannot afford to make contracts on new songs; they cannot afford to hire musicians. In short, they follow so many of the other manufacturers before them – they go out of business. But one has chosen not to go down without a fight.
Slep-Tone Entertainment Systems aka Sound Choice is scouring the country, going to shows and seeing who is running shows from computers. They know that there are a lot of legal KJ’s using computers, but they can’t tell the difference up front. So, they file a claim and name the venues and the KJ’s they have questions about in the lawsuit. It’s now up to those KJ’s to prove they have purchased and maintain the legally purchased copies of the music on their hard drives and up to the venue owners to prove they didn’t know the KJ was using illegal music. And to make it really interesting, copyright law (since the early days of computer software) requires that you purchase one copy for every show that you run. There are so many Malcoms that run 5 shows and still have not bought one copy of the songs on their computer that countless legal karaoke shows are being forced to hire lawyers to defend themselves just to prove their innocence.
Sound Choice has paid their dues. They have been on the defending end of copyright law before. So they know what it’s all about and what it costs, both as the manufacturer and as the defense in a lawsuit. But they are more interested in cleaning up the industry. So they have offered to drop suits against KJ’s who are willing to purchase the entire legal Sound Choice library of songs. Those that refuse are then prosecuted and face the court’s interpretation of the law as it relates to the karaoke industry.
The sad truth here is that the vast majority of people that go to karaoke shows don’t care whether the music is legal or not. Because of the availability of music downloads on the internet, most people think it's OK and perfectly legal to download music. The venue owners often don’t even know there is an issue. For the KJ, it doesn’t always matter that you run a great show. If you don’t have 100,000 songs, you lose. So legal KJ’s start looking at playing Russian Roulette. But there are a lot of us that are doing what we can to help clean up the industry. That will take a while. Until then, we are constantly faced with the dilemma of how to earn an honest living in spite of the Karaoke Pirates.
If you would like more information on how Sound Choice is working to combat Karaoke Piracy and how you can get involved, stay legal, and help save the karaoke industry check out http://scsafeharbor.com/programdetails.php.
