Big Your Piano, Be a Real Man!

(Okay, the title of this post is from a recurring spam and I just had to try and use it. Let`s see if the kid can make it somehow fit the topic?)

Those of you that have been following my blog from before the move know that I have been working my way through my cartoon collection and logging everything into a data-base.

I have a lot of one-of-a-kind animations from my students in my collection. I don`t put everything my students do automatically into my stacks. No, they have to earn it by making a great animation. And a number of them do. Today I came upon a sad case of a great animation that can`t be shown.

Unexpected by Jesus Montero is a great animation, I wrote about it here and you can see a clip here .

(Here is the part of the post where he tries real hard to make the title fit the subject. Which him carefully. It is all done with mirrors.)

As great a piece of animation at this is, and it is killer, it is flawed. You could watch it 20 times and never see the flaw because the flaw is not in the animation itself. Jesus didn`t get rights to the music.

I am known around the schools I teach as the copyright guy. The person that you go to if you have any question on copyright or trademark. And it is not just the students that ask, the teachers and administers ask. But the students are the ones that often ask too late.

Jesus ask too late. He came to me after he had finished his animation, timing everything to an upbeat remix of Alexander Nevsky Battle on the Ice. It`s in public you know free to use, right? Because it is so old?

You have no idea how many times I have had this discussion with my students. The core copyright on classical music, or any other music for that mater, will be in public domain if it was created before 1923 but the performance of the music is protected under copyright law. Sorry!

(Here we go, can he pull the title out of the fire?)

I`m sorry you can not show your animation, that you work 6 months on, in film festivals until you secure rights to the music. (Big your Piano, Be a Real Man) Get rights to the music before you animate.