In saying this, I am not in anyway implying that infringement is the right way to go because I also believe that free download/ file sharing sites are contributing to the fact that the music industry has come so far downhill in recent years. If you spend £6,000 writing, recording, publishing and touring an album, unless you have a lot of money to spare and are not trying to make a living from music, Ideally you would hope to make at least some or all of that money back through sales. I think that in the days before free file sharing sites, when the only way to get your hands on a decent reproduction of the album was to buy a hard copy, it could have been a lot more possible to make a decent amount back from your sales of records/ merch/ tickets. Obviously there were still things like cassette mixtape recordings and such from radio play but I don't think that would stunt your sales anywhere near the way free download sites do these days.
That said, when I was creating my site I had to be aware of copyright for different media aspects, including music recordings, photos, trademarked names (magazines/Newspapers/ brand logos), newspaper/magazine articles and videos.
Through a previous college course studying photography, I have a basic understanding of what photo copyright entails. It is similar to music copyright (in its simplest form) in that as long as you have the genuine permission of the copyright owner to use their photo, then it is usually ok to do so. I usually make sure that they are credited wherever possible for the photography and I provide a link to their site if possible.
There have been a couple of instances where the publishing of newspaper articles that I was involved in haven't been possible due to copyright. The Birthday Suit were featured in The Sun Newspaper and I was recently involved in a Press Release for the Scotsman and Evening News. Naturally, I wanted to show these articles on my website, the best way to do this would have been to scan the hard copy of the article and put this on my site, although after contacting the copyright department of The Sun they had said that this may not be a great idea "just incase" of any issues. Another slight problem was that I have the OK from the Evening News' Photographer that it is ok to use the photo from the press release on my site, along with a mention and link to say that the copyright is owned by the Scotsman however I am not able to use those photos for any other means. I asked about using them for another press release and was told, understandably, that this was not possible.
I don't actually have any music physically posted on my site other than links to youtube videos, however I do have links provided on my site to sites which feature music by my different bands. I have the permission to use these links and have them on my site by the people who built those sites (excluding the link to my personal facebook).
Another way in which I had to be careful with copyright was using my endorsement companies logos on my site, Although part of the endorsement agreement was that I promote each brand as much as I can so really it wasn't a problem after the agreement had been made.
I believe that I am complying with legal copyright requirements because I am not exploiting the media in any way, I am not making any money directly from it being on my site either. I simply am showing what I have been involved in so far in my career and all I really feel I am doing is advertising these papers, photographers and sites in a very positive way. Of course if a problem was to come up, I would like to get it sorted in the best way possible.
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