Copyrighting your Music. 

 

Before you go a about trying to sell your finished recording product, you should definitely think about commemorating your copyright in the sound recording by registering it with the U.S. Copyright Office.  The process is very easy, and you can do it right on the U.S. Copyright Office’s webpage.  There are lots of great informational sources explaining how copyrights work, and the advantages of formally registering your work, but the crux of the answer to the “Why Copyright It?" question is basically that if you do, and somebody later tries to rip off your art for their own gain, it's much much easier for yout get compensated because of something called "Statutory Damages."

 

If you don't register your work with the copyright office, it's true that in the digital age it's much easier to provide who came up with an idea, a picture, a literary work or a song first.  However, that's only one piece of the equation.  If you don't register your work and somebody rips you off, you only get paid for "actual damages," which means you have to prove in court what the person or organization who ripped you off earned by pirating your work.  This process requires lawyers, and accountants, and being able to effectively quantify that amount through litigation.  By comparison, a plaintiff who can prove someone intentionally and knowingly infringed a registered work may recover up to $150,000 per infringed work (but the typical range is between $750 and $30,000 per infringed work).  

 

From my perspective, what you really have to ask yourself is whether you believe the thing you’ve created has commercial viability.  If the answer is yes, then the $50 it costs you to register your sound recording will probably be money well spent… even if only for your own emotional well being. 

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The first time I copyrighted a song, I made the mistake of first copyrighting the lyrics (cha-ching) and then repeating the process to copyright the sound recording (the actual wave file of my finished product), for another (cha-ching).  You don’t have to do both!  Instead, you should just register the sound recording – your lyrics and the whole shebang are then protected too.

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There’s lots of other great info on the U.S. Copyright Office’s web page, but I hope this was a helpful intro :-)