I asked this in a famous music production forum.
Sorry for just screenshot it, but I guess it will makes sense from this point of view.
I recommend consulting with an IP lawyer on this matter. Asking game developers for legal advice on a more complicated issue such as this will usually only result in opinion posts, the accuracy of which should not be relied upon.
I am not a lawyer.
In principle your mechanical license would allow you to use a game as a distribution method. I suspect the mechanical license you have been issued would describe in more detail what you can, and cannot do with your cover.
Mechanical license usually only serve to license the recording materials.
by thenoodle from GearSlutz.
As a lawyer for myself (not for others) and from having been involved with all the publishers and companies for many many years… my advice is (like the other guy) don’t follow my advice… go talk to a lawyer.
But if this is just small talk between nobodies at Starbucks… I’ll tell you all day…you virtually own nothing on this cover song.
If you have filed an SR with DC for the recording itself, you do have a $50 registration preventing someone from simply copying the recording verbatim and using it… but that’s not r-e-a-l-l-y of much benefit to you if you decide to plop down $350 filing fees to file an action someday. You’d be stopped in the first week of action because the court would find out you didn’t actually WRITE the song or own the underlying PUBLISHING or anything… The court would throw it out and probably not even give your filing fee back.
You don’t own the underlying composition… the writer/pub owns that. So… you can’t give an okay to anybody for anything for any reason regarding that composition (which is already protected by the PA and a bazillion other publishing agreements in force no doubt).
If you WERE to give an okay to the game company (or whatever it is), the game company would have to FIRST go out into hoopland to deal with a sync license from the writers/publishers that do own the song…
… and maybe… just maybe… THEY’D get a deal to do that…
and…
then the game company might come back to you to talk again about using your particular fascinating recording of the song. Which would be hammered out in some sort of agreement based on the game company already having the sync license but choosing to use an alternate master… bypassing whoever owns the SR (probably Warner or whatever label).
There are some interesting ways of getting into mainstream biz… and hey… you may just be able to do it this way.
But as your lawyer will tell you, the game company has a bunch of initial work to do by contacting the writers/pubs of the composition before anything goes forward.
Now, what I would do is take the cell phone off the hook and hurry up to write an ORIGINAL song in the next hour and record that too… and give that to the game company too… if they like THAT one, you now have two options in to possible mainstream… and you also own the PA and SR on the second one (don’t forget to file those before you hand your own composition to the 3rd party guys).
I won’t take this as legal advice myself, but I guess we have some idea what to do when this things happen.
