Legal Question in Intellectual Property in North Carolina
Fair use of short music clips on a website?
I am considering putting together a website about music, but I wanted to double check on the legality of it before putting forth the effort.
What I'd like to do would be similar to what imdb.com is to movies, only on a much smaller scale. Most of the information I would put on the website would be factual information (like composer, artist, year of publication, etc), and I wasn't sure if that fell under the fair use act for ''commentary''.
I would really like to be able to put song clips on the website because some of the information I provide would necessitate actually hearing the song to understand what I mean. Since the songs would be from many different labels I was hoping that I could avoid getting explicit permission from each one through the fair use provision.
I would also try to stay in line with the ''not affecting the sale of...'' clause of the fair use provision. I would have links to amazon.com or some other site where people could buy the CDs. I would also make sure the clips were only a minute long or so and perhaps even make sure they are less-than-CD-quality (actually is the quality of the sample even an issue in this situation?).
Does this sound like something I might get sued for?
1 Answer from Attorneys
Re: Fair use of short music clips on a website?
It sounds like something you shouldn't get sued for. That, of course, doesn't mean you wont get sued. On the other hand, it seems like you would only be encouraging purchases and the recording industry likes that very much.
Go ahead!
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