Library Tracks Used Without Permission.

[tim gueguen]

I was listening to a Geoff Bastow track, "Beautiful People," on YouTube.  The upload includes a shot of the label from the LP, which was released on the JW Music Library label.  It includes the notice "Not To Be Publicly Performed Or Re-Recorded Without License."  And this made me wonder how often library tracks have in fact been used without permission.  At the very least I would assume there were cases where a track was used by a media producer after an agreement they had with a library label lapsed. Or when such an agreement was rendered void by an ownership change at a radio station, commercial production studio etc.

[Retronic]

It likely happened it and I'm sure cue sheets were inaccurate at times.  I'm sure I've seen examples where the sheet shows they used a particular track but the sides were mixed up, so they used Tk 3 from the A-side but quote Tk 3 from  the B-Side, which if a different composer meant the original composer didn't get his money (the label would though).  These things must've been coming in from all over and hard to track or check. 
No one knew how technology would allow us now to go over details with a fine tooth comb.

[Lord Thames]

There's a story in Oliver Lomax's The Mood Modern book about KPM's Robin Philips and Aaron Harry going to an industrial films award show undercover with a tape recorder, and finding a whole swathe of unlicenced KPM tracks being used - they had words, and the paperwork they received afterwards trebled in size!

[tim gueguen]

The hands on approach often works best.

They could have used someone to do that in Hong Kong and Taiwan.  If the foreign releases of movies are anything to go on film makers in those markets lifted a lot of commercial music and music from foreign films without permission in the '70s and '80s.  For example I've heard Riz Ortolani's theme to the film Day of Anger used as the theme to several '70s martial arts films, while the 1976 film Master of the Flying Guillotine used music from Tangerine Dream, Neu!, and Kraftwerk.  So I'd be entirely unsurprised if library music was used without permission as well.  Having said that Shaw Brothers, once the dominant movie studio in Hong Kong, seems to have had an agreement with De Wolfe Music in the '70s, and their tracks turned up in Shaw films. 

(Shaw is an Anglicisation of Shao, the family name of the brothers who started the studio.)