Here’s a fun news bite for today.  CNET reports that English rock band Def Leppard couldn’t come to terms with Universal Music on how much revenue the band can get from digital downloads of its songs, so it’s recording identical “covers” of its songs.  Def Leppard would own the masters of the “covers” and therefore control the financial terms of its distribution, including through digital downloads.  Clever, no?

Under U.S. copyright law, a musician may cover a song and distribute the recording so long as he gets a license (called a mechanical license) and pays a standard royalty fee to the song’s publisher.  The mechanical license can’t be denied.  The fee is 9.1 cents per song distributed for songs under five minutes and 1.75 cents per minute or fraction thereof over five minutes.  It’s not a bad price to pay for gaining control over rights to distribute a song.  Whether fans will think the covers are up to snuff is another matter.