I’m in your classrooms, stealing your musics.

Last week I recorded everyone in my composition class playing melodies they composed. I can now rock the music world with the mostly amateur sounds I have officially stolen.

Of course, whatever I produce from my recordings is going to be freely available so I’m pretty sure it will fall under fair use terms but there’s reason to believe that this classification isn’t always obvious–some awesome person tagged Jay Maisel’s building over this by the way. Luckily, it’s pretty unlikely that any college students are going to recognize a heavily modified version of an exercise they did years prior and then feel the need to sue me over it.

This does seem to fall into an odd category. I know I’m allowed to record what happens in a classroom as private conversation, legally, does not occur there, but how does this work when we’re talking about performances in a classroom? Hell, what about performances in general? I admit, I haven’t looked into this, but maybe I should.

In fact, if I were doing this right, I would have consulted a lawyer right from the beginning. It seems ridiculous to do so, though, so I didn’t. Eat that penal system! I suppose I’ll just have to wait until someone goes all Sita Sings the Blues on me.