Neil Young is a longtime supporter of Bernie Sanders. Trump's use of song was not authorized.

[jberryhill]

78. For a lot of reasons

First, very few artists actually own the rights in their recordings and, unlike your sale of a painting, they have assigned rights in those recordings or compositions to the owners - in MOST instances.

However, even among the very few artists who do actually own rights in the recordings and/or compositions, many of them have authorized ASCAP to license those works for various purposes.

The reason is that when someone is seeking to use a recording for a commercial purpose - an event, an incidental track in a TV show or movie, whatever - they typically go to ASCAP, because ASCAP has pretty much a universal library of popular music. If you run a commercial establishment, like a restaurant, and you play music over a loudspeaker system, you buy the right license from ASCAP, and you won't be busted by the people they send around to unlicensed bars and restaurants to see if they are playing music.

Political campaigns typically do buy licenses from ASCAP in order to use various recordings at events. If they have done so, they are covered, no matter WHAT the artist says.

This whole "I didn't approve of that" thing has become a regular ritual in American political campaigns. No actual legal action results, because it is typically the artist simply making a personal objection, and usually knowing darn well that if the campaign bought the license through ASCAP, there is nothing the artist can do about it under a copyright claim.

Secondly, there is the measure of damages. Basically, about the only thing practically available - in a situation where the artist owns the rights and hasn't authorized ASCAP to license them - would be an injunction against the campaign from using it again, or from using recordings of the event if the sound is included. There just aren't significant monetary damages on the table. To what extent did it impair the market for the recording? To what extent did the campaign profit from it? What was the license value for that snippet of the song anyway?

Interestingly, Europe has a much more developed notion of "moral rights" in works that go beyond the commercial rights in copyright, but that's neither here nor there.

These are primarily media exercises, and not real legal claims.

Now, if the song were used in a way that it was the theme or slogan of the campaign, or if it were done in such a way that one would think the artist endorses the candidate, then there are some non-copyright causes of action that become relevant, but almost never apply to these types of ritual situations.