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“Who are all these people trying to kill you?” Freddie asked.

“I don’t know,” Chili answered. “I’m in the music business now. It could be anybody.”

I loved that movie, “Be Cool,” starring John Travolta as Chili Palmer, the shylock turned producer. And, at the time, I thought it’s comic take on the underbelly of the music industry was really funny. But now that I’m in the music business, it has taken on new meaning.

Well, let’s be clear. I’m not very deeply into the music business and no one is trying to kill me. But I am directing a play for community theater and I need a piece of incidental music for one of the dance scenes. I’m not in fear for my life, but I have realized that snatching that music without jumping through the proper hoops could get me sued or thrown in jail.

Behind every live theater production is a web of interlocking and overlapping contracts, statutes and rights dealing with intellectual property. (Intellectual property refers to things like copyrights, patents and trademarks protecting ideas and other creations people hope to make money from). And although infringements are frequent, especially it seems in this part of the country, you perpetrate them at your peril.

Getting rights to a play is generally pretty straightforward. You buy printed scripts for the actors and pay a few hundred dollars in license fees to a publisher. And you make some contractual promises, like ensuring the playwright’s name on your posters is at least 50 percent as big as the title, agreeing not to cut the scenes you think are boring, and not taking out any of the cuss words. But plays are written to be produced and publishers are set up to make that happen.

Music is a little more complicated. If you want to play music before a show and at intermission, you can get blanket rights by paying a few dollars each to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), Broadcast Music Inc. and SESAC, companies who bought the rights so they could sell them to us. But inserting a piece of music into a play while the onstage action is happening makes it more complicated. The money we paid to ASCAP? No, that doesn’t cover it. That payment covers our right to play the music for the public, provided it’s not synchronized with something like a movie, a commercial, or a play. So we can play it during intermission or during scene changes, but when it becomes a part of the performance, there’s another level of licensing called synchronization rights.

I’ll have to admit it’s probably a reasonable idea to have a separate right for synchronization. I can imagine, for example, an adult-movie producer thinking the climax of his story should be accompanied by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s rendition of Onward Christian Soldiers. I have a harder time imagining the Mormon church being thrilled by that idea.

As becomes obvious, synchronization (or sync) rights generally result from a negotiation based on an understanding of the intended use and the value of the piece. Were I Chili Palmer, it would be a matter of my people getting together with their people and hammering out a deal. But with me as the legal team and my $50 music budget — well, it’s a little harder for me to get the music publisher to return my phone calls.

The play I’m directing is self published by the playwright and the intellectual property requirements are pretty mild. Unlike the situation when I deal with a big publisher representing a noted playwright, I could talk directly to the playwright and negotiate contractual terms. I even managed to get permission to make a video of the performance for our use. (Although this might seem a simple concession, it’s generally almost impossible to obtain this right).

But you’d be surprised where these intellectual property traps pop up to grab you. In the case of this play, the stumbling block came in the form of a piece of incidental music: “Moonglow,” a 1936 jazz piece popularized by Benny Goodman. It’s background for a dance scene. Here in the winter of Montana, where it’s generally too cold and remote for the copyright police to come, I might — I mean a less scrupulous and more irresponsible director in my position might — consider sneaking it by. But where there’s going to be a legitimate video record of the infringement, it’s probably not a good idea.

So what to do? Well, long story short, I discovered Garageband, a five-dollar piece of software that runs on my Mac and let’s someone like me with limited musical talent create something akin to music. And how did that work out? Well that’s a story for another day.

David Vale retired from the world of psychology and statistics and now owns the Pocketstone Cafe in Bigfork. He considered a retirement career in music, but then his violin mysteriously disappeared.