[HANASHIR:4105] Re: Universal Jewish Music License

[MahTovu <MahTovu...>]

A great suggestion, Jeff, et al. Setting up the mechanics of permissions, 
royalties, etc. will be the relatively easy part. The hard part will be the 
process of educating our community and creating a new culture around the 
proper uses of copyrighted material (as someone else said, getting them to do 
the right thing because it's the right thing - that's what Jews do). And not 
be the doomsayer, but that will be an uphill battle. As you can tell from the 
previous (lengthy) discussion on this list, many people either don't know the 
legalities, or just don't care. 

In addition to being a composer, am the business manager for A.R.E. 
Publishing, one of the major publishers of Jewish educational materials (and 
a distributor of Jewish music, both recorded and printed) and, while I can't 
prove it beyond doubt, I am certain that a number of our customers purchase 
single copies of certain materials and photocopy them in large numbers for 
their students. Their "rationalization" would be that the budget is tight, 
the books are expensive, more students registered for school than we 
expected, it's only a few pages, etc. I would bet that some of the customers 
don't even see anything wrong with doing it - and certainly don't understand 
that they are breaking the law. So we will have our work cut out for us... 
we'll be asking institutions to start paying for something that they've never 
had to pay for before, and G-d knows what kind of response we'll get to that.

Having said all that count me in! And definitely get Judy C-G and JERD on 
board. She made some contacts with BMI recently that could be helpful.

Nice to start beating on a fresh young horse, huh?

Steve Brodsky
Founding member of Mah Tovu (contemporary, original Jewish music)
Cantorial Soloist
Music Educator
Guitarist/Singer/Songwriter
Denver, Colorado

------------------------ hanashir (at) shamash(dot)org -----------------------+
Hosted by Shamash: The Jewish Internet Consortium  http://shamash.org
------------------------ hanashir (at) shamash(dot)org -----------------------=