USCIS Changes Service Centers For O and P Visa Petitions! • Music Licensing for Podcasts • Obnoxious Email Marketing
LAW & DISORDER
Performing Arts Division
October 24, 2023
Artist Visa News and Nausea
• USCIS Changes Service Centers for O and P Visas!!!!
Unless you exhausted all other conceivable ways to spend your time, you may not have noticed that on October 3, 2023 USCIS surreptitiously writhed onto its website and changed where to send O and P artist visa petitions.
Effective October 1, 2023 all O and P visa petitions are to be sent to the Texas Service Center!
After December 1, 2023, any petitions sent directly to the Vermont or California Service Centers will be rejected and returned!
Yes, they gave us less than 60 days notice!
This change means that, regardless of where the Petitioner is located in the US or where the performance is taking place, all petitions for any variation of an O or P visa (O-2, P-1S, P-3, Etc.) will no longer be sent to either the California Service Center or the Vermont Service Center. Henceforth, all petitions will need to be sent to the Texas Service Center at one of the following two addresses:
Standard Processing:
USCIS Texas Service Center
Attn: I-129
6046 N Belt Line Rd. STE 115
Irving, TX 75038-0018
Premium Processing
USCIS Texas Service Center
Attn: I-129 Premium Processing
6046 N Belt Line Rd. STE 907
Irving, TX 75038-0022
You can get more information at www.artistsfromabroad.org where the mighty paladins at the League of American Orchestras were the first to enter the dragon’s lair and break this story. For those with a penchant for convoluted and unhelpful garble, you can see the new filing instructions and official addresses at: https://www.uscis.gov/forms/lockbox-and-service-center-filing-location-updates
Whilst this change raises many unanswerable questions, amongst the most pressing is whether this means that the Texas Service Center will be replacing the Vermont and California Service Centers entirely; or, whether the Texas Service Center will merely be the location for an outside contracting service selected by the US Government as being the most minimally competent available at the lowest price to ensure that all petition forms are signed and the correct fees paid, jam them into a scanner made from a 1963 RCA vacuum tube, a rusty butter churn, and a dead hearing-aid battery, bound together with a piece of chewed twine pulled from an encrusted cow pie, and then forward them along to the correct service center, where, freed from the bonds of their own mailrooms, they will be able to more rapidly issue an RFE asking for proof that a conductor is a leading role in an orchestra.
The word on the street corner of confused and angry is that deep within the skank inner sanctum of the Department of Homeland Security, the entrails of a sacrificed goat were tossed by the High Priest onto a map of the US, landing on the Texas Service Center and thereby designating it to be the sole and only USCIS Service Center in the US that will review and process O and P petitions from now on. We have just begun sending petitions to the Texas Service Center and will need to see where they pop out.
• New Edition of the I-907 Form
In addition to changing the service center for filing O and P petitions, USCIS felt compelled to change the edition of the form used to request Premium Processing (I-907) by adding an "E" at the end, thus creating form: I-907E. Nothing else was changed. They just added an “E.” However, USCS has announced that you can continue to use either edition indefinitely, making all of this irrelevant.
So, what does the “E” stand for? Either “Extraordinary waste of time” or “Experiment not going well—Apologies to King George III.”
Legal Issue of the Month: Music Licensing for Podcasts (Don't get stuck in the stone age)
If your on-line social media campaign as a thumb fitness influencer tanked almost as badly as your Instagram posts of your pet lizard licking ice cream, you may be thinking of trying the world of podcasting. If so, you are doubtless anxious to know that creating a podcast with musical clips involves the same licensing issues and considerations as using an archival recording or streaming a concert. You will potentially need licenses from two different parties:
The Owner of the Music: If the music is still under copyright, either you or the platform hosting your podcast will need to obtain a performing rights license either from the composer/songwriter directly or through their Performing Rights Organization (PRO) such as ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GRM, etc.
The Owner of the Recording: A license from whomever owns the recording itself. As PROs only represent composers/songwriters, to get permission to use excerpts of the recordings you will need to reach out to whomever owns the recording: usually either the label/distributor, the producer, or the artists who performed on it.
The world awaits your weekly podcast exploring monotonal trends in Neolithic music.
Dear Law and Disorder: Actual questions we get asked and the answers people actually don’t want
"Obnoxious Email Marketing”
Dear Law & Disorder:
I am the executive director of a well-established regional symphony orchestra. As with most orchestras, I frequently receive emails from managers and agents asking me to consider their artists. After a number of emails from the same manager all within the same week, I wrote and told them that I was aware of their roster and asked to be removed from their email list. He wrote back and said that because our orchestra was a 501(c)(3) and also received state funding, we were obligated by law to accept his emails. He also said that because we were non-profit, these were not “commercial” emails and we had no right to refuse his emails. Is this true?
In addition to being generally obnoxious, the manager is impressively wrong on every possible level upon which there is to be wrong in this instance. Aside from being oblivious that desperation coupled with threats is never a good sales technique, the manager has grabbed the wrong end of a federal law called the CAN-SPAM act. This law states that anyone who receives an unsolicited commercial email has the right to request that he or she be removed from future mailings and places a number specific requirements on those who send such emails, including requiring the sender to provide an opt-out mechanism, a physical address, and to remove anyone who requests to be removed from the mailing list. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service.”
Under the CAN-SPAM Act, anytime you ask someone to “buy” something or spend money, its considered “commercial.” As such, sending emails to promote an artist or an ensemble is just as “commercial” as sending emails soliciting donations or promoting a concert, a fundraising event, or any program where tickets are sold. The fact that you are a 501(c)(3) organization or an organization that receives public funds doesn’t alter the fact that the manager sent you an unsolicited email asking you to engage or hire an artist...which makes it a “commercial” email.
Thus, in this case, the CAN-SPAM Act protects you, not the manager, and you have every right to demand that you be removed from the manager’s email list—assuming you have not already blocked them. If they fail or refuse to do so, the manager would be in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act and you could report them to the Federal Trade Commission...as well as have every right to befoul their booth at the next booking conference.
Deep Thoughts…
“Say anything you like about me, but spell my name right”
PT Barnum
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The purpose of this blog is to provide general advice and guidance, not legal advice. Please consult with an attorney familiar with your specific circumstances, facts, challenges, medications, psychiatric disorders, past-lives, karmic debt, and anything else that may impact your situation before drawing any conclusions, deciding upon a course of action, sending a nasty or threatening email to someone, filing a lawsuit, or basically doing anything that may in any way rely upon an assumption that we know what we are talking about.