Music for our film

Finding music for “The Lover Who Lied” was a tricky affair as there were many criteria we had to fulfil. Firstly we knew that we wanted the classic, older sound of a genuine vintage recording some 70 years old to soundtrack the restaurant scenes, and an archetypal noir movie score for the introductory and concluding sequences. We did consider the idea of recording our own music through friends or creating our own on Garageband, but were not convinced we would achieve the authenticity required to set the mood and tone for our film. But to use old recordings we had to research thoroughly what we could and could not utilise in terms of copyright law and public domain material.

The website http://www.pdinfo.com/copyrt.php was very informative regarding US copyright law, and to paraphrase the main clauses I discovered:

• Works published in the United States with a copyright date of 1922 or earlier are in the public domain in the United States.

Copyright protection outside the USA is determined by the laws of the country where you wish to use a work.  Copyright protection may be 95 years from publication date, 50 to 70 years after the death of the last surviving author, or other criteria depending on where the work was first published and how the work is to be used.