"I Can See Clearly Now" Guitar solo fingerstyle arrangement
Under Fair Use of the copyright law one may use another copyrighted work if
It is used for comment, criticism, parody or educative/demonstration purposes. Since I am a Guitar Music teacher I simply demonstrate to others and educate students how arrangements of tunes can be performed once you have achieved a higher level of playing. In guitar lessons I try to help students to reach higher levels of musicianship so they too can make their own finger picking arrangements as demonstrated in my videos. Certain techniques and skills are obtained through a great many sources, and mainly for my style of arrangements it has been the Chet Atkins, Merle Travis and Leo Kottke styles of playing along with many others. So I urge students to study works and arrangements by those players to achieve the level of playing as seen in their videos or mine here. You will not find these types of finger picking arrangements I do available by the original songwriter because they never created these guitar solo-style arrangements and in most all cases cannot because they lack the guitar skills to create in this manner. They are solely the author of their own rendition which bares no resemblance or very little in my guitar-solo, finger style arrangement. The music for my arrangements are not available for sale in sound nor sheet music. I also am not recording these videos in front of a live-paying audience at a gig etc. But rather I film myself at my home, in my cluttered, non-stage room. These videos are non-commercial and my arrangements are considered "transformative" (fair-use terminology) because they alter the original work greatly and add new meaning to them.
Once again, no commercial gain (fair-use requirement) and no harm to the exact original copyrighted work is being done by my solo guitar arrangements. It does not compete with the original work or serve as a substitute for it, and causes no harm to the market of the original work. (fair-use stipulations) If anything it is a positive reflection and just might help.
Also and more importantly, is the fact that my arrangements are fully original in finger picking style and I have only used a very small portion of a pre-existing melody in the arrangements which is allowable under fair use copyright laws. The melody pieces are also performed on a different instrument other than the vocal voice as mostly heard in the original derivative works. Also, the melody often is not falling on the same beats as the original in many cases. Nor does any other of the instrumentation contained in the original song appear in my arrangements such as drums, keyboards, voices, horns etc. It is vastly and completely different!
So if anybody has an issue with the name of their song (names cannot be copyrighted) and melody bits being used in a guitar-solo style arrangement then they should simply notify me and let me know how I have taken away from them in any way.
After much thought and seeking legal advice I have come to find that my arrangements are covered under fair use because they are in fact different, educative, demonstrative, non commercial, and transformative. Therefore I will post my videos so people can see how guitar arrangements are done. (educative)
All one has to do is listen and see my videos to know they fall under fair use. One problem with Youtube authorities is they are not watching the videos to see the actual content but often delete videos only because a name/title is similar. Watch it youtube before you make erroneous judgments.
P.S. If anyone is interested in using my original songs for back ground music for videos or even if you play some of my own original arrangements feel free to do so. I am a musician and I write to share my music with the world! Just give credit to where credit is due and thanks for promoting my music!
Musically Yours, Ray Tutaj Jr.