With Your Permission...

 

Hello Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

I spent this past week trying to figure out how to secure all the necessary permissions to eventually use a song in my blog, and let me tell you, it was a dizzying mass of confusion.  And for the life of me, I don’t even know why I’m bothering to try to do this legally.  As an aspiring young attorney once told me, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission, and I have to say that I’m beginning to believe that he was right.

Actually, several of my friends have asked me why I’m so intent on using the song legally, and while I gave them all a good, righteous answer about the need to respect the rights of others and to recognize that music represents the labor of someone else who deserves to be paid for it, the truth is just that I don’t want to run afoul of the law.  I’ve seen too much Law and Order to knowingly give some hell-bent-for-justice D.A. with a moral superiority complex a reason to chase me down.  I mean, if this was Law and Order, I’d use the song illegally, someone would hear it, that person would get murdered, and I’d somehow be dragged in and charged as a co-conspirator.  And at that point, the best I could hope for would be first-degree manslaughter with a sentencing recommendation, only if, of course, I was willing to roll on my accomplices, which I couldn’t do because I wouldn’t even know who they were because all I would’ve done was use a song on a blog without getting all the necessary permissions.  So, I’d pretty much be screwed.

And I’m not the kind of person who would do well in prison.  Can you imagine me and my fellow inmates sitting around in the Big House talking tough?  They’d all be exchanging charges—armed robbery, felony assault, possession with intent—and then they’d get to me:  “What are you in for?”  Then I’d have to put on my scariest face and say in my most menacing voice, “Copyright violation.”  And of course, it wouldn’t work.  I mean, seriously, you could say “copyright violation” in a tone so belligerent that it would peel paint off a car, and it still wouldn’t keep you from getting a beat down on a daily basis if you were in prison.  

I’d try to fight back and stand up for myself, of course, but I can just hear the taunting now as some hardened convict steals my last pair of socks—“Yeah, so what are you gonna do about it?  Reprint something I wrote without my permission?”  What a nightmare!  Martha Stewart could pull off prison, but let’s face it, I’m no Martha Stewart.  Heck, I’m not even Jimmy Stewart…and he played a guy with a six-foot tall invisible rabbit friend in Harvey.  

I think the hardest part of it all for me, though, isn’t really figuring out who to ask for permission or even trying to determine how things have to be licensed.  It’s the whole idea of having to ask an actual live human being for permission to do something.  And sometimes I really wonder if that doesn’t have something to do with my childhood.

Of course, in my family, you never started with my father unless you really wanted to be shot out of the sky right off the bat and pretty much for good.  “Dad, can I hold my breath for ten seconds?”  “No, you’ll get brain damage.”  “But I hold my breath when I’m swimming all time.”  “And see what it’s done for you?  If you hadn’t wanted to swim, you’d be at Harvard right now.”  “But Dad, I’m only eight years old.”  “I don’t care. I better never catch you holding your breath again.  Ever.”  “But I have to hold my breath if I’m underwater.”  “Then you’re never allowed to be underwater.” “But what if I’m in a flood?”  “I absolutely forbid you to ever be in a flood.” “Well, what if it’s only raining?”  “I will not have my children out in the rain.”  “OK, then, what if it’s just sort of cloudy?”  “That’s the most dangerous time!”  “What if it’s completely sunny?” “No daughter of mine is ever going to leave this house on a sunny day.  And that’s final!”

And on and on it went until all you were allowed to do was sit motionless in your room.  For the rest of your life.

So, we always just started with my mother because at least she was slightly more rational and less likely to make sweeping proclamations that permanently barred us from ordinary, everyday activities like leaving the house.  The trick, though, was learning to translate what my mom said into what she really meant.  I finally, though, managed to work out a rudimentary chart of my mother’s typical responses to the question “Mom, can I…?

My Mom’s Response	What It Really Meant
No.	What the hell is wrong with you?
We’ll see.	No, and stop talking to me right now.
Go ask your father.	No, and stop talking to me right now.
You don’t need to [name of activity]	No, and stop talking to me right now.
Maybe another day.	No, and stop talking to me right now.
I guess if you really feel you must.	God, there really is something wrong with you, isn’t there.
Yes.	Whatever, just stop talking to me right now.
That would be great.	Am I going to have to give you money to get you to stop talking to me?
You should definitely do that.	How much money am I going to have to give you to get you to stop talking to me?

Of course, the upside to being able to translate my mom’s answers was that if you could get her to some form of a “yes” answer, you could ask a couple of follow-up questions and get a little more out of her.  My sisters were both much better at that than I ever was, though.  I rarely made it through more than two answers before I got shunted over to my dad.  “Mom, can I go to the movies with my friends?” “Oh yes, you should definitely do that.”  “Cool.  In that case, can I have $10?” “Go ask your father.” Oh no, shunted!  “Dad, can I have $10 for the movies?” “No, you’ll sit too close to the screen and go blind.”  “What if I sit in the back row?”  “Then you’ll be too close to the speakers and go deaf.”  “How about if I just stand out in the parking lot?”  “Go ask your mother.”  Oh no, reverse shunted!  “Mom, can I go stand out in the parking lot while my friends go to the movies?”  Long pause, quizzical look. “No.”

And as I’m walking off to go sit in my room for a while, I hear her mumble to herself, “What the hell is wrong with that kid?”

Of course, getting the various permissions to use a song on a blog can be kind of intimidating, but it doesn’t involve nearly the level of human interaction that dealing with my parents does, and I actually find that kind of comforting.  I mean, I think about something like Capitol Records, and I can’t even conceive of that existing as a human organization.  To me, it’s just a big, round, skyscraper in L.A. that I’ve seen on TV a bunch of times.  It looks like a dead Transformer.  It’s just a building.  And I have no fear whatsoever of writing to a building to ask for copyright permission, and even  if it says “no,” I don’t get that upset.  I just can’t take anything a building does to me that personally. 

The music publishers like ASCAP and BMI seem even less intimidating than the big record companies.  I mean, they’re just collections of letters, and how threatening is a collection of letters?  Oh sure, things like “IRS” and “FBI” are just collections of letters, and they can certainly throw some fear into you.  But it’s not the organizations themselves that are so scary.  It’s their agents. And we’ve seen those people.  They’re all over TV.  But when was the last time you saw a TV show about the high drama and intrigue of working for the American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers?  Seriously, that’s just a ratings disaster waiting to happen.  So, having to deal with ASCAP or BMI or SESAC doesn’t faze me at all.  It’s a form and a credit card payment.  To me, they’re just kinder, gentler incarnations of Skynet that haven’t quite become fully self-aware yet.

And even though the main agency that grants mechanical licenses for interactive streaming, (which you have to have but no one really knows why because no one really knows what interactive streaming even is) has a human name attached to it, it’s still just basically a form and a fee.  You can actually e-mail them and ask questions about what kind of license you need, though, and they will answer you very quickly.  But the reply you get won’t be from an actual, specific person.  It’s just a reply from a department.  So, I just envision them as a large cubicle farm, and there isn’t anything that particularly scares me about acres of cubicles.

(It is worth mentioning, though, that I initially e-mailed the agency to ask if I needed a license, and I got back a response telling me that I did and directing me to a part of their website where I could obtain it.  The thing is that upon further checking, I discovered that they don’t seem to represent the owners of the song I want to use. So, I wanted to write to the agency and ask, “Why do I need to buy a mechanical license from you if you don’t represent the owners of the song?” but I could already imagine the reply:  “Because if you don’t pay us, we’ll send you to prison.”)

Anyway, the only really scary part of all this has been contacting the copyright owners because they aren’t a big record company.  They’re a very small record company, and to me, that means only one thing—actual real live people.  Shunting, reverse shunting, double-shunting, the big shunt fake-out.  God, the possibilities are endless.  But I knew that if I didn’t contact them and ask for permission, I’d be halfway to lockdown before I even knew what hit me.

The thing about writing to a small company is that all I have to go on is their name, and that’s hard.  I need a company to be called Happy Shiny People Music or We Already Like You Records to really be comfortable dealing with live humans.  This company is named Wild Mess Records, which just seems kind of neutral to me.  So when I sat down to write an inquiry e-mail a couple of days ago, my first thought was “I got nothin’here.”

But I wrote the e-mail anyway.  And then I decided that they probably wouldn’t be interested in my life story or creative vision, so I started editing it.  And then I just kept editing it until I finally read it and thought to myself, “Great, now you sound like the shadowy figure on the grassy knoll.”  But then I got this image in my head of how I’d look in handcuffs if I used the song illegally.  And then I started to panic.  And then I just hit “Send.”

And I think of that e-mail now, printed out by mistake, and subsequently tossed in the dumpster, where a homeless man picks it up and reads it through.  He imagines me living in a seedy motel room somewhere on Sunset Boulevard, furnished with upturned wooden boxes and wobbly chairs while a lone table with only three legs sits in the corner, incoherent graffiti covers the walls, and a sandwich lies rotting on the counter of a makeshift kitchenette.  He takes a moment to thank his lucky stars that he’s not living my life and then lets the page drift slowly off on the breeze out into the street, where a smart woman in a business suit picks it up, reads it through, and as she crumples it into a ball and tosses it into a nearby trashcan, thinks to herself, “Jesus, what the hell is wrong with that kid?”

But despite the obstacles, real or imagined, I have two things going for me:  time and an insanely dogged sense of persistence.  Well, that and a really deep-seated fear of incarceration.  For what it’s worth, though, I actually do respect both copyright law and performance rights because I know their histories, and I understand why they exist.  And I’m really not up for a daily prison-yard beat down, either.

(By the way, the song I’m chasing hither and yon is Jennifer Batten’s “He’s Calling.”  It’s a great song, and Batten is an extraordinary musician.  I mean, there are days when I put that song on and then immediately have to leave the area because I know I’m not cool enough to be in the same room with it.  So, crank up your mojo, and go check it out for yourself).  

Anyway, in the end, I suppose that my young lawyer friend is correct.  It is easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.  But asking for permission forces you to go beyond what you’re comfortable doing.  It gets you to take chances and to deal with risk.  And it requires you to learn and to understand exactly what you’re asking permission to do.  But maybe above all else, it just obligates you to keep asking the one question that really is the glue on which a civil society is built:  “Do I look good in an orange jumpsuit?”  Well, do ya, punk?

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.