You and Your PC can make Beautiful Music Together

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Have any plans to enter your newest video masterpiece in a film or video contest? Want to post your latest and greatest on the Web for the world to see, or on your local cable channel for the community to see? Any chance you'll show your tape to a crowd at your church or club? Thinking about creating an instructional video to train new employees at the office or shooting wedding and event videos for money? Whether you produce commercials or christenings, baseball games or bar mitzvahs, any video that you will sell, broadcast or show publicly must adhere to copyright laws. That means you'll need to be careful not to use copyrighted music in your productions without permission.

There are several ways to avoid a potential copyright predicament. If you have some time and money to spend, you could request (and await) permission from the record company or the artist. This can be a time-consuming, paperwork-heavy task and can be an expensive endeavor. It is probably cheaper than a lawsuit for copyright infringement however.

You who are professional musicians and songwriters have it easy. You could simply create and arrange your own original compositions for each production. Of course, just because you can, doesn't mean it would be worth the time an…