Mechanical license

In copyright law, a mechanical license is a license that grants certain limited permissions to work with, study, improve upon, reinterpret, re-record (etc.) something that is neither a free/open source item nor in the public domain.

With regards to copyrights of musical recordings, there are at least two distinct copyrights. There is (1) the copyright of the composition, embodied in the sheet music (the “musical work”), which may include separate copyrights for lyrics or composition; and (2) the copyright in the sound recording, embodied as a “phonorecord” (Please note that the law considers ANY tangible medium capable of storing a recording to be a phonorecord. This includes MP3 players, CDs, 8-tracks, vinyl records, cassette tapes, or any future technology.) It is not unusual for one party to own the copyright in the underlying musical work while another, independent, party owns the copyright to the phonorecord.

A mechanical license (or simply, “mechanical”) is a license the holder of the underlying musical work grants to another party to cover, reproduce, or sample specific parts of the original composition. A mechanical license does NOT give a third party the rights to sample from any phonorecord of the original recording.

For example: Puff-Daddy wants to sample the opening riff from “Every Breath You Take” by The Police. He contacts the copyright holder of the underlying musical work and gets a mechanical license to use all or part of The Police’s song in his composition. He now has the right to reproduce all or part of “Every Breath You Take” in his new song. He cannot, however, purchase The Police’s Greatest Hits, take the CD (or MP3 from iTunes) into the studio, pull the track off of the phonorecord, and sample the riff into his new song. For Puff Daddy to sample from the phonorecord of The Police’s music, he must get both a mechanical license from the copyright holder of the underlying musical work, and a license from the copyright holder of the phonorecord from which he copies the sample. He is free to hire musicians to reproduce the Police's sound, but he cannot copy from any phonorecord with only a mechanical license.

Copyright law also allows for a "compulsory mechanical license". Under the law, anybody can obtain compulsory mechanical license without express permission from the copyright holder.

In the United States of America, most mechanical licenses are obtained through the Harry Fox Agency. Other commercial agencies such as EasySongLicensing.com, Loudr, and formerly RightsFlow (via the Limelight online mechanical license form utility), also issue compulsory mechanical licenses. On January 9, 2015 RightsFlow announced it would be closing its Limelight service. Harry Fox Agency and the other commercial agencies collect and distribute the royalties, plus they collect a per-song service fee of roughly $16.

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Wikipedia