what UK COPYRIGHT LAW protects
UK copyright law (primarily, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988) provides protection for recorded music and music videos (along with other types of creative works) by giving the copyright owner certain exclusive rights of use. Anyone who uses recorded music or music videos for those protected uses will be infringing copyright unless they are licensed (i.e. authorised) to do so by the copyright owner.
For recorded music (referred to under copyright law as “sound recordings”), the original copyright owner is the person who undertakes the arrangements necessary for the recording to be made – usually this is the record company responsible for organising and paying for the recording. Music videos are protected by UK copyright law as “films” and the same “necessary arrangements” rule applies to determine the original copyright owner.
The copyright owner’s exclusive rights to use recorded music and music videos in the UK include, amongst others:
- the right to play them in public;
- the right to communicate them to the public (including broadcasting them);
- the right to copy them.
Please note that you may still require a licence even if you do not think you are using recorded music or music videos in any of these ways, as the legal scope of these exclusive rights can be broader than you might think - see the panels on the right of the screen for some examples of this.
how ppl is able to grant your licence
There is no section of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 that creates PPL or gives it the power to grant licences. Instead, PPL was set up by the UK's copyright owners themselves and it is through them that PPL acquires the legal entitlement to grant your licence. On joining, recorded music and music video copyright owners legally transfer the relevant rights to us, or appoint us as their agent to exercise them.
The result is that PPL effectively becomes the copyright owner, and is therefore able to grant collective licences authorising you to play in public, or broadcast, all of its members' recorded music or music videos in the UK. Those collective licences can also cover the copying of recorded music and music videos for certain purposes (e.g. where businesses provide jukeboxes, hard disk systems and other music/video services to other businesses) but for other acts of copying you may require the direct permission of the relevant record company.
This means that you can legitimately use a vast range of recorded music or music videos without needing separate licences from each record company, etc; instead, you simply need the appropriate PPL licence. You can access further details of the various licences that PPL issues via the menu on the left hand side of the screen.
Please note that PPL is not the same as the Performing Right Society (PRS), the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) or the MCPS-PRS Alliance.
Whenever a sound recording or music video is played in public or broadcast in the UK, a PRS licence is likely to be required in addition to a licence from PPL. Similarly, you are likely to need a PPL licence as well as an MCPS licence to copy a sound recording or music video in the UK.
This is because the law protects separately the underlying musical and lyrical compositions (e.g. the “song”) embodied in sound recordings and music videos. The rights in those musical and lyrical works are owned separately (by composers/publishers) and licensed collectively on behalf of those separate copyright owners by PRS and MCPS (who operate together as the MCPS-PRS Alliance).
what happens if you do not obtain the appropriate licence
Hundreds of thousands of businesses and broadcasters are licensed by PPL and are therefore able to make lawful use of recorded music and music videos. However, please be aware that failure or refusal to obtain the appropriate PPL licence can have serious consequences, and may ultimately result in a court order to stop you playing sound recordings or music videos altogether until all outstanding fees are paid in full – as well as making you pay interest and costs.