Copywriting A Song

[Sadie]

John-

Thank you for the advice. I will definitely look into registering my work. In the future, I hope that someone establishes an association that recognizes who wrote the songs. I know that once you write a song, you own the copyright but there is always a risk of someone snatching it and making it their own. It will be something I have to really look into and be careful about! Thanks!

[Prometheus]

John-

Thank you for the advice. I will definitely look into registering my work. In the future, I hope that someone establishes an association that recognizes who wrote the songs. I know that once you write a song, you own the copyright but there is always a risk of someone snatching it and making it their own. It will be something I have to really look into and be careful about! Thanks!

The trouble is that you can register it all you want and never be able to prove that you wrote a song.

In the highly improbable event that a song I wrote was stolen by Andrew Eldritch, for example, he would undoubtedly re-record the material in order to pass it off as his own. With my instrumental style replaced with Doctor Avalanche and some suitably obsidian sounding keyboards and synths on the new recording, it would very likely sound like his work rather than mine.

Even though I've registered my song on the 9th September 2008, the jury could be forgiven for being convinced that the hugely popular and critically acclaimed Eldritch with a string of hits behind him over an illustrious career spanning the last thirty years was the victim of a bizarre publicity stunt that I was trying to pull when it was taken into account that I am creating what to very few people other than me is wonderful music using a cobbled together studio built into a rather insalubrious room in my council flat where people can drink in the heady ambience of computer spares and sundry mixing equipment that my girlfriend finds about as attractive as syphilis.

In short, a jury will look at the evidence available and judge on what seems probable. Sure, I can provide demos, drafts, handwritten notes, witnesses, my girlfriend whom I wrote the song about. I'm pretty sure anyone could cobble a paper trail like that together if they put their mind to it. The trials can get very complicated as this extract from a wiki article will demonstrate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Harrison

"Harrison was later sued for copyright infringement over the single "My Sweet Lord" because of its similarity to the 1963 Chiffons single "He's So Fine", owned by Bright Tunes. Harrison denied deliberately stealing the song, but he lost the resulting court case in 1976 as the judge accepted that Harrison had "subconsciously" plagiarised "He's So Fine". When considering liable earnings, "My Sweet Lord"'s contribution to the sales of All Things Must Pass and The Best of George Harrison were taken into account, and the judge decided a figure of $1,599,987 was owed to Bright Tunes.[94]

The dispute over damages became complicated when Harrison's manager Allen Klein changed sides by buying Bright Tunes and then continuing the suit against Harrison. In 1981, a district judge decided that Klein had acted improperly, and it was agreed that Harrison should pay Klein $587,000, the amount Klein had paid for Bright Tunes - so he would gain nothing from the deal, and that Harrison would take over ownership of Bright Tunes, making him the owner of the rights to both "My Sweet Lord" and "He's So Fine" and thus ending the copyright infringement claim. Though the dispute dragged on into the 1990s, the district judge's decision was upheld.[94][95]"

Edited January 21, 2010 by Prometheus

[john]

hey

It comes down to what you can prove Prom. Evidence needs to be dated, hence people placing notes such as you describe in bank vaults, with lawyers or even registered somewhere. Evidence is not absolute.. it is the weight of evidence overall that has to be decided... in that much you can either help or hinder yourself.

Cheers

John

[Prometheus]

hey

It comes down to what you can prove Prom. Evidence needs to be dated, hence people placing notes such as you describe in bank vaults, with lawyers or even registered somewhere. Evidence is not absolute.. it is the weight of evidence overall that has to be decided... in that much you can either help or hinder yourself.

Cheers

John

That's the trouble. Scientifically proving you wrote a song is very difficult.

[john]

yep, and the more evidence you have the better. The more reliable the source the better. Nothing is absolute... even court decisions in the main part. Although, it greatly depends on the case.

[MikeRobinson]

Sure... you make a claim, and anyone can counter-claim. It's always your right to "have your day in court," and the other guy can say the same.

But nevertheless it means a lot if you went through the prescribed legal monkey-work to legally assert and to register your claim. (Which you can do on-line in the US ... copyright.gov ... for $35 a bundle of as many songs as you please.) Call it "due diligence," if you will. If you claim that you've got a million-dollar race horse, but you keep him in a moldy barn with no fence ... it's gonna be hard to not get laughed out of the courtroom. But if you timely followed all the procedures and jumped through all the hoops, it means a lot, in a lot of ways. You "obviously acted in the way that someone having a valuable property would act."

Edited March 13, 2010 by MikeRobinson

[LilOrange]

Does anyone know how does the copyright law work in European Union? I mean, is there something like US Copyright office where you can register your songs in EU? I was surfing a little bit on their sites, but I couldn't find anything like that, only a bunch of documents and directives, especially not online registration...

[MikeRobinson]

The best thing to do is to go straight to "the source" and nowhere else. In the USA, that would be http://copyright.gov.

Sometimes, paperwork is important ... especially in matters pertaining to law. If you might have to accuse someone, and seek restitution from the court system, then there had better be some neutral thing that you can actually point to, that an impartial judge and/or jury can definitively look at (regardless of what "you sez" or "he sez") and see for themselves.

You can take a bundle of 1,000 of your very favorite darlings and register all of them, all at once, for about $30.00, so if you didn't get around to doing that, you can't exactly say that it was because of cost or inconvenience. (Your claim exists severally on every one of those songs; the ability to group them into a collection is just for everyone's pragmatic necessity.) Do it online. Ten minutes flat. You don't have to wait for the certificate to be mailed back.

I'm not a lawyer, but I do know enough about law to know that the law puts a lot of credence upon how you actually behave with regard to things that you now claim to have extraordinary value. "So you say this nag (well, it looks like a nag to me, but then again, I don't know horses...) that you say this guy stole from you, is a million-dollar race horse. Well, did you ever put a fence around the pasture? Did you ever put up a guard? Did you ever even put up a "Posted: No Tresspassing" sign? Did you take out an insurance policy on the beast? Remember, I don't know horses, but I do know how people ordinarily behave with regard to property that they consider to be valuable to them.

You say he stole your song. Did you put a © 2012 Me notice anywhere nearby? Given that you could have done so quite cheaply and effortlessly, did you bother to register it? (No, it isn't legally mandatory, but given that you now bothered to sue, why didn't you bother to register?) "We can dissect legal hairs later ... the first thing I want to know is whether or not your surrounding actions and behaviors were at all consistent with the claim that you now pray to this, my, court to enforce on your behalf against the defendant. He, of course, pleads 'innocent infringment' and he is presumed innocent ... why should not his defense motion now be summarily granted?"

If you posted your song to a web site, that web site is probably copyrighted, and it has certain terms and conditions that everyone is supposed to have read and understood. So that is certainly better than tacking the thing up on a fence-post somewhere, but it also implies that you intended to allow someone to have access to the entire song versus. say just a twenty-second (useless) teaser slice of it, as, say, iTunes customarily does. Obviously, people send out complete "demo tapes" all the time, and the mere fact that you made the entire song available to the public does not mean that you intended to give them carte blanche with regards to it; it is fairly obvious to ordinary common sense that you didn't. What will be looked at most closely, then, is what limits you did intend to set, and how you made those limits generally known and generally knowable to anyone who might have happened by, including the gentleman whom you now call a thief. Etcetera.

Edited February 13, 2012 by MikeRobinson

[jnslawoffices]

First, as was initially mentioned, your songs are already protected by copyright. You also do not need a lawyer to register them with the Copyright Office, if you so choose. The benefits of registering with the Copyright Office (as others have mentioned above) are (1) you can bring a lawsuit to enforce your copyright interests against infringers, (2) the possibility of recovering statutory damages and attorneys fees, and (3) if you register within 5 years of publication of the work, the registration becomes prima facie evidence of ownership. There is a pretty user-friendly online system - https://eco.copyright.gov/eService_enu/start.swe?SWECmd=GotoView&_sn=QoY1IwtNlMl5CtZnsLKbiYBOmOO5clk1syAllULiAj.TKsU8TGyWnab- . A lawyer may be able to help strategize on the best ways to register them, but it is very doable without legal representation.

If you don't know much about how to collect performance income and licensing fees, a good resource is www.songtrust.com. My understanding is that Songtrust registers your songs with a PRO (e.g., ASCAP/BMI), Harry Fox, SoundExchange, etc. and collects royalties for you. It also seeks out licensing opportunities, although I don't know how fruitful the results have been. Songtrust basically acts as a middle man between you and these other companies, which pay you roylaties for public performance, mechanical licenses, and digital royalties. If you want to do the legwork yourself, Songtrust is not a necessary tool, but it is a good resource for songwriters who don't want to manage with those aspects of their career.

Just some thoughts on the topic.. hope its helpful.

[Disclaimer: I am a New York licensed attorney. The information contained here is not legal advice and reading this post does not create an attorney-client privilege. You should consult with an attorney directly if you need legal advice.]