Copyright as a Barrier to Music Therapy Telehealth Interventions: Qualitative Interview Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Music therapy is a multifaceted discipline that harnesses the power of music to treat a wide range of patient populations. A therapist who plays music in a private room for a patient is not subject to copyright restrictions on public performances. However, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, music therapy is no longer strictly confined to the face-to-face setting. This study explores music therapists' perceptions of copyright law with respect to their ability to provide mediated services to their clients. OBJECTIVE: The objectives of our study were two-fold. The first was to investigate whether concerns about copyright law are hampering the diffusion of telehealth innovations, and the second was whether these concerns are causing music therapists to avoid therapeutically beneficial telehealth interventions. METHODS: Semistructured interviews were conducted with credentialed music therapists (n=18) in the United States between May 2020 and June 2020. With participants' consent, we used video conference technology to record and transcribe the in-depth interviews. The median interview length was 45 (SD 16.37) minutes. This theoretically informed study employed thematic analysis of the interview data. RESULTS: The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of telehealth interventions to facilitate therapy outside of private face-to-face environments: environments where music therapy practices are largely shielded from copyright infringement concerns. Five main themes emerged, including therapists' uncertainty about permissible uses of music and therapists' erring on the side of caution causing lost opportunities for care. Our interview data suggest music therapists have altered telehealth interventions in suboptimal ways to avoid copyright liability in a physically distanced environment. CONCLUSIONS: Some music therapists "drag their feet" on offering therapeutically appropriate telehealth services to clients because of copyright concerns. Our findings suggest innovative mediated therapies were shied away from or abandoned. These findings offer a novel contribution to the public health literature by highlighting copyright law as an unexpected and unwelcome barrier to the diffusion of music therapy practices in technology-mediated settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.042 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".