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You just caught your bus. You move to the back and settle into your seat, glad to be out of the wind and rain. You close your eyes and begin to run through the second verse of your latest song when it hits you; the perfect way to end your second verse. Reaching into your bag you pull out your notebook and start writing. You’re surprised at how well your ideas are flowing, they’re all coming so easy, that is, until a loud group of kids gets on the bus and sits near you. No longer able to concentrate, you close your notebook and lean it against your knee. Of course one of the kids starts talking to you. He seems kind of dumb, but you feel sorry for him so you keep talking to him. Maybe he’s not so bad, he just needs someone to tell him how it is. You kind of get into the conversation when suddenly you see your stop go by. You jump up and hit the stop request and quickly exit the bus…WITHOUT YOUR NOTEBOOK! You pound on the windows and yell for the bus to stop but it just keeps rolling on. All of your lyrics are in that notebook. Most of them you know by heart, that’s not the problem. The problem is the kids, or anyone for that matter, could pick up your notebook and see how good your lyrics are, and decide to pass them off as their own. If they do that is there anything to stop them?

The answer is Copyrights. There are a lot of myths about copyrights so let’s start with the basic truth.

1) By law, the minute you write something down or put it in a permanent form, like writing or recording it, it is copyrighted.

Let’s think about that for a minute. So, the moment I put my pen to paper the U.S. government will protect my idea no matter what? Or the minute I record myself singing my song into my junky tape recorder the government will protect me? Well, yes and no. Everything, including this blog I’m writing, is copyrighted the minute we write it, the only problem is proving to someone (a judge usually) that you were the first person to write it. Now in the case of those kids on that bus you don’t have any way to prove when you wrote your lyrics. Sure you could hire experts in handwriting analysis to help you prove that the writing was, in fact, yours, but how can you prove you were the first to actually think of it and write it? Couldn’t that kid turn around and say that you had heard him sing that verses on the corner and then written them down to claim as your own? And what if that kid knows more about copyrights than you and copyrights your lyrics? Sadly, as far as the U.S. government is concerned, he’d legally be the “creator” of your lyrics! You’d have no way to legally “own” your own lyrics. Now all this is very hypothetical, but it has happened before, and will happen again as long as artists remain ignorant of how to protect themselves. And as you will see, it’s a lot easier to do than many people think!

Alright, you can forget the first basic truth about copyrighting (that your work is copyrighted the minute you write it down) because the second truth is all you really need to know.

2) The only way to truly protect yourself is by filling out and sending a copyright form with the U.S. Copyright office and paying their filing fee.

Hold on, I gotta pay to protect myself? Well, yes. Think of it this way: You could pay $45 up front to copyright your lyrics or possibly $45,000 or more to sue someone who has stolen your uncopyrighted lyrics. Which seems like the better deal? Now there is something called the “poor man’s copyright” where the artist puts copies of their lyrics/music into an envelope and sends it to themselves. Upon receiving the envelope they then do not open the envelope. The idea here is to send your material through a government channel that will, in fact, date it (the post office stamps a date on everything you send through them). Then if someone steals your lyrics or music you go to court and have the court open your envelope with your material in it and are able to prove that you were the first to write it. The only problem is that there are ways to open envelopes without leaving a trace. Everyone who’s ever watched a spy movie knows that. So “the poor man’s copyright” is not foolproof. The U.S. Copyright office is.

Over the next few days I will be taking you through the entire U.S. Copyright Form SR (SR stands for Sound Recording) section by section and explain how to properly fill it out. Subscribe to my Blog or sign up for my RSS feed for these subsequent lessons:

1) How to Copyright Your Music: Section 1

2) How to Copyright Your Music: Section 2

3) How to Copyright Your Music: Sections 3, 4 & 5

4) How to Copyright Your Music: Sections 6, 7, 8 & 9

I hope these are helpful!

Hans Erik
Content Marketing Director
Hans@Next2Friends.com
www.Next2Friends.com