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June 29, 2005

Mad Hot music rights: in the clearance

A case study of how doc makers have to struggle to get music cleared, even in the smallest measures: There's a scene where a woman's cell phone rings and she has the "Rocky" theme ringtone. I noticed that you even cleared that! I would have thought that could be an example of fair use. "I thought so too. It's only 6 seconds! But our lawyer said we needed to clear it. So I called Sprint, which owns the ringtone master rights, and they gave it to me for free because they saw it as product placement. But then I called EMI, which owns the publishing rights and they asked for $10,000. I said no way—even the classics weren't getting that much. Luckily, we were able to get it for less." [See the writer's follow-up post, too.]

Posted by at June 29, 2005 03:57 PM

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