So.....This Is Bad News, Right? (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Friday, February 11, 2022, 15:27 (1016 days ago) @ Morpheus

Just found out that Marty and Michael are both suing Microsoft for unpaid royalties with their music, specifically over Halo Infinite's use, and apparently they might cut the head off the Halo TV show before it even airs!

https://www.trueachievements.com/n48665/original-halo-composers-sue-microsoft-over-unpaid-royalties-could-also-block-...

I don't know how music rights work(Cruel, Xenos, mind shedding some light? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) but apparently this legal battle has been going on for Halo's entire lifetime. How did that happen?

I know just enough about music licensing to know that it’s incredibly complex and tough to navigate. With something like Halo, where parts of the original score has been re-recorded, and then themes and portions of music from the original games have been worked into portions of new music in the new games, I can only begin to imagine what a quagmire all that would be. It depends on the terms of agreement when the ownership of Halo went from Bungie to Microsoft, which would have been informed by contracts involving the re-recording of Marty and Michael’s original music for Halo Anniversary and Master Chief Collection, which all would have been based on Marty and Michael’s original deals with Bungie…

I’ll say this though; it would not surprise me one bit of Microsoft, who would have had less experience in this realm than Marty and Michael, are in the wrong here. Not that they’d intentionally try to short change the original composers (although that’s certainly a possibility), but more likely they just didn’t understand all the layered ins and outs of music licensing. There’s ownership of the composition, ownership of the recording/performance itself, various forms of usage rights, all of which can be subdivided and conditional in a bunch of different ways.