It gets worse. A lot of the music we play has rights held by someone's estate - 'cause they're fuckin' dead. There may then be hundreds, literally, of people who have a vested interest in the rights. For starters, copyright should expire when the artist is dead - or a 10 year period, which ever is longer. That way, if a great artist comes along and releases two albums before putting a bullet in their skull, the heirs can collect on it for a little while. Copyright should only have one original rights owner. They should be able to release rights for performance, recording, commercial, etc... Fair use should be expanded - or at least actually enforced. You can't play a song for educational purposes, legally. Now, they're not suing all the people on YouTube, but they certainly do go after people. DMCA should be abolished, written again by people who aren't in it for the money, and only apply for those ten years or lifetime duration. I'd go so far as to say that copyright, if you choose to use it, should have a 'must-transfer' rule - meaning you have a right to pay to use it. We should probably establish a maximum rights value, just to ensure they don't say it's $10,000,000,000 to play a 30 second clip, thereby locking things away from the public. The whole system is fucked. I usually signed away my rights, in favor of a single payment immediately instead of royalties, but I'm actually entitled to some royalties. It'd be a giant pain in the ass to collect them, so I don't bother. I doubt they'd be all that much.