THE CENTER FOR
POPULAR MUSIC, MIDDLE TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY,
MURFREESBORO, TN
AMERICAN SOCIETY OF
COMPOSERS, AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS (ASCAP) PAPERS
Creator:
American
Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers
Type of Material:
Corporate
Papers, Business Records
Physical Description:
2 items of textual materials
Dates:
1941
March 4, 1945 May 3
Abstract (Descriptive Summary):
This
collection consists of two documents, one a Consent Decree issued by the
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers in 1941 and the other an
opinion by the New York Supreme Court between ASCAP and Broadcast Music, Inc.
(BMI), dated 1945 regarding rights and legal relationships.
Access/Restrictions:
The
collection is open for research use.
Provenance and Acquisition
Information:
The two
documents were purchased from Bookworm & Silverfish of
Subject/Index Terms:
American
Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers
Broadcast
Music, inc.
Music
trade
Agency History/Biographical
Sketch:
The
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers is
a performing rights society, headquartered in New York, New York, that licenses
and collects fees for the use of music written or published by its members.
ASCAP membership is made up of composers, songwriters, lyricists, and music
publishers of every kind of music. ASCAP protects the rights of its members by
licensing and distributing royalties for the non-dramatic public performances
of their copyrighted works. ASCAP's licensees encompass all who want to perform
copyrighted music publicly.
Scope and Content:
This
collection consists of two documents, one a Consent Decree issued by the
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers in 1941 and the other an
opinion by the New York Supreme Court between ASCAP and Broadcast Music, Inc.
(BMI), dated 1945.
The
original Consent Decree of the American Society of Composers, Authors,and Publishers was entered
into the district court of the United States for the southern district of New
York as Civil Decree and Judgment, Civil Action No. 13-95, on March 4, 1941.
The decree resolved an earlier antitrust case brought by the Department of
Justice’s Antitrust Division charging that ASCAP and certain members of the
organization agreed to restrict competition in the licensing of performance
rights and discriminated against certain members in managing those rights.
ASCAP voluntarily issued the resulting Consent Decree, which imposes a variety
of restrictions and obligations on ASCAP related to the collective licensing of
its members' works, as well as its relationship with its members.
The
opinion document declares a judgment between Broadcast Music, Inc. and Deems
Taylor, President of ASCAP, filed in the New York Supreme Court on May 3, 1945.
The judgment pertains to rights and legal relationships between the above two
parties regarding the public performance rights to three songs. A reference copy is available due to the
fragile nature of the original. Also included is a printed final judgment from
the United States District Court Southern District of New York, dated September
5, 2000, involving subsequent modifications of the 1941 Consent Decree.
Arrangement:
Arrangement
:
chronological.
Location:
The collection
is filed by accession number with other manuscript materials in the special
collection storage area of the archives.
Related Materials:
The
Center holds an ASCAP/BMI scrapbook entitled “The
Battle of Music, ASCAP vs. BMI,”
compiled by Charles McMillan in 1941. It can be found in the manuscript section
by accession number 89-029.
Notes:
Parts
of the “Agency History/Biographical Sketch” taken from the ASCAP website,
www.ascap.com.
Processed
by Lucinda P. Cockrell, March 2008
Revised
by Rachel K. Morris, June 2011