This is a post from my entertainment attorney, Hillel. He’s been protecting the rights of artists for years, given me a wealth of knowledge and is one of the main reasons I’ve been able to generate income doing something I love. His services aren’t cheap but if you don’t have your ass covered in this biz, you’ll pay for it one way or another.
www.copyright.gov/eco/
Copyright Your Songs
by Hillel Frankel

Songwriters need to protect their work. You would not pitch your billion-dollar reality show to MTV without protecting it would you? Well maybe you would, but remember, when you record and send out samples of your songs they can be spread all over the world in the amount of time it takes to upload an MP3. That dude in Russia who wants that American pop sound can re-record your song and get his US partner (that he pays in petrodollars) to pay the $35 filing fee and register the song first with the US Copyright Office, and you are shit out of luck and out of a hit song. Sure you could try and sue some day when the song is a hit for Sergey Putin. Just try and get a lawyer to represent you in a copyright claim using the CD of the song you mailed to yourself via U.S. post as evidence. If you came to me I would charge you a $10,000 retainer just to get started. That’s a bit more than the $35 filing fee, isn’t it? I would never take a case without copyright registration on spec or contingency fee as we call it, though artists and writers always try and get me to do so. Do you know why I won’t take it? Because without the official filed copyright form, registered with the copyright office you cannot get into federal court. You need to pay to play here, brother.

The online form is so easily available by googling “copyright forms” and downloading the new form “CO”, there is really no excuse not to go for it. Only in federal court can you be awarded statutory damages for copyright infringement of $150,000 + per infringement or request that all of the infringers profits be held in escrow. This is the leverage necessary to get a settlement from the person stealing or sampling your song without spending tens of thousands of dollars to get to trial. Remember, the person who files the copyright first is presumed to be the owner and creator of the song. Disproving Sergey’s first filing will require you to hire experts, take depositions and cost you more than you may ever earn in your entire music career. All because your cheap lazy ass did not want to file a (somewhat) simple form and pay a $35 fee to the Copyright Office..

To summarize; packages with the CD mailed to yourself, or the MP3 e-mailed to your gmail account? WORTHLESS! Don’t bother. If someone else filed first, You’ll never have the funds to actually prove that you wrote it first in court. And the Federal filing will trump your self-mailed song package and render it useless, regardless of the postmark date.
There are other varieties of copyright applications including Creative Commons forms, which offer the writer various options of ownership and control of the composition or recording. But if you simply want to own it all and pass the rights and the earnings on to your kids one day, use U.S. Copyright Forms. Consider these songs and recordings your music 401K. If it’s a hit it will never loose value and even if it isn’t there may be value out there from the catalogue as time moves on. The U.S. copyright protects the registered song for life of the author plus 70 years after the author’s death, so your kids will be able to enjoy income from your songs long after you die. This is what musicians can pass along. Intellectual Property. If not the vintage Maserati, then maybe that song Pretty Woman, or Blue Suede Shoes or Summertime Blues or any other classic rock song that great deceased rock stars wrote and is still paying income to the families of the writers.

article update on March 25th 2009:
You can file a CO application online at
www.copyright.gov/eco/ and it will save you $10 over the paper
application ($35 on line and $45 on paper). The way it works is that you fill out all of the information on the song(s) on the on line form and
then they give you a bar code that you can print to include in and on the package that you will use to send in your music. Click here for Part 2

Hillel Frankel email: hf@ent-law.net
website:www.ent-law.net

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