Music club similar to cakewalk

slartabartfast

kakku
OK. Thanks. How about rights? do they claim they own the song that are displayed on their siten? Homerecording talked something about how they, IIRC, own the song IF it is displayed over their bbs.

Is this is the "something about how they own the song" to which you are referring?:
"Homerecording.com claims no ownership over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through the BBS. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, copyright, and trademark rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the BBS and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the BBS, you hereby grant to Homerecording.com, its successors, licensees, affiliates and assignees a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license (with the right to sub-license through unlimited levels of sub-licensees) to use, copy, reproduce, publish, display, store, transmit, sublicense, adapt, transmit, publicly perform, or display any such Content and to irrevocably waive in favor of Homerecording.com and its successors, licensees, affiliates and assignees, all moral rights in respect of any such Content on and through the BBS."
 
The first sentence seems to mean that they in fact do not own your work even though it is posted on their site. That means that you are clearly not transferring or assigning your copyright to them. On the other hand, even to make a copy of something you post there available to others (which is the point of posting after all) they require that you license them to do so. Without your license, they can not retain or distribute copies of your work to users of the bulletin board. They are requesting that you give them a "nonexclusive" license, which means that you can license the same work to anyone else. You could sell your work (composition or recording rights or both) to someone else and they could not interfere. The problem is that it is common for a publisher who buys your work to demand an exclusive license (assignment or transfer of copyright), so that no one else can sell (or give away) copies of it and he can make all the profits after paying your share. But if you have granted a nonexclusive license to someone else already, you can not sell an exclusive license until the other license is extinguished.
 
And the license they are requesting goes far far beyond what is necessary to do what they claim to do. A perpetual license means that you can never withdraw your permission for its continued use. So if you no longer want them to host your work, they can still do it. Further, although simply making your work available to other users of the bulletin board constitutes publication, the meaning of the word is broad enough so that it might include them issuing a CD, or music notation transcription with your work on it.
 
And since they can sublicense your work to anyone else for the purposes listed (which pretty much includes every use of a copyright except possibly synchronization with film) they could sell your nonexclusive license to an unlimited number of other publishers without paying you a dime, so long as those other publishers did not require an exclusive license. And each one of the sublicensees would have the right to sublicense to someone else who could then sublicense to someone else for unlimited levels. Even if you trust the good people at Homerecording.com will never screw you by plastering the universe with licenses that will never pay you a cent, their affiliates, who you do not know now or in the future will have the same license, and their assignees who can include anyone who buys, inherits, or wins Homerecording.com in a lawsuit, forfeiture, bankruptcy, or poker game will have the license as well. The endlessly replicating license also includes the right to make adaptations of your work, so they could use your music with someone else's lyrics without asking your permission, or they could use the chorus with someone else's verse. The moral rights issue which you give up any claim to is not a big deal in the US, but in much of the rest of the world is an inalienable  right of the author, and pertains to the use of your work in ways that you would not permit, say as a fundraising release as the national anthem for the Islamic State.
 
So you would still own the copyright to your work, but any number of other people and organizations could acquire a license to use and exploit it for profit without paying you a dime, and you could not stop them if the license they are demanding is valid. And if they did not think it is valid, then why in god's name would they demand it? You would still probably be able to claim the per copy statutory licensing fee (an author's right) for mechanical licenses for recordings, but if someone got a better deal from one of the licensees arising from your posting they could buy a recording license from them instead. The same avenue is open to performance rights, although you would probably find the Performance Rights Organization (PRO's) who collect these would favor you as the author. Further, challenging the use of one of these licenses could be reframed from one of copyright infringement, where if timely registered you are possibly entitled to legal fees and statutory damages if you win, to a question of a contractual disagreement instead.
 
Your only real protection in this situation is that your work in its entirety is so atrocious that no one would ever want to make a copy or adaptation of it anyway.