Hi,

i want to shoot a short film and use bach's works in my film.
i want to use the audio files on this website, but i dont know is there any restrictions to use them ?

can you help me ?

how can i use these music ?

thanks

Interesting question. I don't see what the problem is as long as proper credit is given to the performer and source whose work you use.

It's not quite THAT simple, Eddy.
Yes these are requirements, but the main thing is that the artist in question has to be asked, and give his consent. We give out the contact information
for the artists, insofar as we have it.

Good to know.

I get such questions 1-2 times per month, sometimes more often.

The thing is that the copyright of a recording published at the site is not transferred to Piano Society. It still belongs to the pianist.

I usually (as it is me getting these questions) reply with a call to compile a list with the music that should be used in the project (movie, school work, radio show, web site) and then I return the email address to the pianists making the listed recordings. Then the pianist and the person making the request have to agree.

Isn't it a bit more complicated than that? Copyright in the recording is only half the problem. There is also the performing right to think about, which usually belongs to the publisher of whatever sheet music the pianist plays it from (or has memorised it from).

Not usually a problem with long-dead composers such as Bach, but one needs to be careful in the case of more recent works.

There may well be an informal understanding that when a public performance is given where no admission fee is charged, then no publisher is going to worry about it. Presumably if a film is made, the situation is similar, that is to say if the film is given away free of charge, that's fine. But if copies are to be sold, or fees charged to view it, then the producer of the film needs to obtain not only the performer's permission, but the publisher's as well.

There seem to be quite a number of sites which offer PS recordings for free download. I don't imagine they asked permission first.

Some sites have asked for our permission, but the majority have not. I've given up trying to keep track of them....

Even worse than that. They link it from our site which means that we have to pay for the bandwidth when someone is downloading it.

It took some time but I found a way to prevent linking direct to *.mp3 extensions unless the domain is *pianosociety.com. Now all these site with links have dead links

That is good ! Though I wonder if it works, or maybe (more likely) I don't understand how it works.
Experiment: I click right mouse on New Recordings and do Save As. So now I own a local copy of new.html on my disk. I clear the browser cache, then
open that local file in my browser. All the direct links still work ! What am I missing ?

I wonder what happens if you run it from you local browser with the html file saved on your local disk. What does it look like? Something like file://c:/somwhere/nowhere/pianosociety.com/new.html ? That would still be ok as the domain is *pianosociety.com which we allow (as in the code below (from /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf):


(cloud4security.com is my test domain for things like hotlink protection, I have allowed imslp.org too)

I think you need to own a different domain and make a link to a recording on pianosociety to test it properly

Is what I did ! The url is file:///C:/Users/chris/Downloads/new.html. But I'll test it properly via my local webserver (not now, had too much wine for that )
That line is A True Work of Art

Wine is da shit!

I removed cloud4security.com from the list of allowed domains. Then created a link to a recording on the main page. Go to http://cloud4security.com, press the link.


...took me quite some time to figure this code out my friend. Happy to a long unix backgroup as these regexp:s are close to what I used to do.