More Copyright Laws

Here are more Copyright laws governing what we put in our blogs. Rates stated are said to be "competitive".

But seriously, paying $1000 a year (the amount you have to pay to put 10 songs or less) to put background music on your blog is ridiculous especially when majority of the bloggers who would actually put music on their blogs would be students. And they are expecting students to pay for it too.

Ok, you can say $1000 a year, which translates to about $84 a month is reasonable, but most casual student bloggers would not be able to find the money to pay for it. I think the easier way out for students would be to get it off their blogs.

Ultimately, the decision lies with the bloggers themselves.

Below is the a Channel News Asia Article taken from their website
(for bloggers take note of those in bold)

The Composers and Authors Society of Singapore (COMPASS) has set up a one-stop centre to license music works for digital distribution.

COMPASS helps to protect and promote the copyright interests of composers, lyricists and publishers of musical works.

The move is seen as yet another move to reduce the spread of illegal music downloads.

To provide songs for downloads, a company like SoundBuzz needs to first clear the copyrights for them.

Previously, it had to obtain separate licences from nine different music publishers.

The new one-stop centre, up since beginning of the year, allows the company to just apply for a single licence.

But bloggers need to take note.


Dr Edmund Lam, CEO and Director of Composers and Authors Society of Singapore, said: "Currently, the trend is that we see an increasing number of bloggers that copy music into their web pages without obtaining the legitimate corporate licenses.


"We would encourage such bloggers to come to the one-stop centre to apply for the necessary licence. We are charging a rate of $1,000 for bloggers that does not exceed the usage of 10 songs."


(p.s. The following values are quoted from the January 12, 2006 The Straits Times, Home Section, page H7:
$5000 for 11 to 49 songs. $10000 for over 50 songs.

COMPASS plans to introduce two new technologies to identify illegal music websites in about six months.

One technology is called the webcrawler where it will go through the net and search for sites that have exploited musical works.

The other technology is called fingerprinting. What it does is it identifies the type of music that has been downloaded, and checks if the musical works have the appropriate copyright licences. - CNA/de