[Paul]

Hi,

I realise that this is quite an old thread now but would like to briefly recommend the Guild of Songwriters and composers as a company who provide a very good copyright service.  I believe that the membership is about £55 pa. You also gain access to other services that come with your membership including legal services, song appraisal, songwriting and Composing magazine (very informative for pitching songs to companies that are looking for new material) etc.  The website is:  www.songwriters-guild.co.uk  or www.myspace.om/guildofsongwriters.

Hope that is of some help to everyone!

Paul

[Roshan]

He! this is a great website link you have added, a very valuable resource.  Thank you very much

[Paul]

You're welcome. I'm pleased that you found the site useful.  Paul.

[mattblack1]

People keep saying you need evidence like posting etc.....I email copies of the songs in MP3 format to myself and post them on website like soundclick

Does this stand up in court?

Surely if the first ever record of the song is it being emailed - which can be backed up by ISP or the fact it registered with a site is proof - assuming not gone bust by time the question arises?

We keep being told that the government keeps copies of all emails etc so would this not be proof?

Any thoughts?

[tone]

I do think this would be a good method of proving authorship of your song. Provided you use an external platform and not your own domain where you have access to logs, and could potentially change the timestamp on your emails/ uploads.
The only drawback I can see is that proving authorship this way requires the co-operation of a third party. If you use the old fashioned method, your proof is physical, and under your own control.

[mariec10]

hi im a lyricist and i get mine copyrighted with dulynoted
http://www.dulynoted.co.uk/

its £7 a song you register and it last 10 yrs you get a certifcate to print off as proof aswell hope that helps

[emmapeel]

I want to say a couple of things about this.

The method of posting songs to yourself is a bit shaky. This method has long been recommended but as mentioned above, it is not foolproof if things go to court. As far as I know, in the UK, recorded delivery or any form of this lasts only for a year. This is really not good enough for songwriters. Also there is the trick of posting unsealed envelopes to yourself. Sometimes these get delivered even though the post office says that it won't deliver unsealed envelopes. The person can then save the envelopes to be sealed in the future but with the postmark being possibly several years in the past.

I think the most secure idea is to lodge the songs with a legal firm or bank. It is also advised to use more than one method to prove the ownership of your songs.

Using the internet to prove ownership is very interesting and hopefully there is a reliable method in there somewhere.  I have not heard of one yet though.

I agree that stealing songs is rare but it is best to protect your songs as good as you can.

EP

[Paul Baxter]

Hey

Intellectual property exists from the point where you create whatever it is (song/novel/picture etc) so you own the copyright at that point. The problem isn't with how to legally own the copyright, but with proving that it was you that wrote it. If you have clear evidence of using or performing the music at a date that precedes the 'thief's' enclosed envelope then that's a start. It could be that a bank is your strongest evidence but then again, will that bank even be there next week 

[Tonsofpaperbrokenpen]

I use these methods:
- www.myfreecopyright.com
Not only limited to music, but any file. Upload your audio recording or song-text, and gain indisputable proof that it's yours. Check it out, I've all my tracks saved there.
- www.youtube.com
The date of your upload is enough evidence. If somebody steals it and posts their own version, their date is always later than yours. Same goes for anywhere else you upload it to; vimeo, soundclick, soundcloud etc.. IF you ever land in court, that proves you made it first, if not earlier than the thief.
- www.gmail.com
Digitally email it to yourself. Sending date and time cannot be altered.
- Postage
Well I don't use this method, because it involves a fee. And I'm stingy. But if you want more proof, do it. It's always better to have more proof.

I suggest to use as many authentic methods available to you, the more evidence you have, the stronger your case is in a dispute or in court (if you ever go there). And you have backups in case the others fail; websites can be hacked, your letters can get wet etc. Anyways good luck!

[Pescatore]

Just like to point out that playing your songs in public adds to the weight of evidence that a song is yours.  If you regularly play the same venues/ open mics/ folk nights the audience and other performers get to know your songs.  At the very least they can stand up in court and say " oh yeah, Pescatore's been playing this since 2005 to my knowledge"  and if you have recordings of said gig it all helps.  The point in a copyright case is simply to prove that you thought of the song first - not withstanding all the "your million seller uses the same 4 notes from the chorus as the thing I recorded 20 years ago cases", that's a whole different ball game 

[The Chitlin]

Hi guys great forum.
Regarding people you write / jam with.
It becomes awkward in the band scenario if you write songs and you have not discussed song ownership with the other members. 
If you want to leave that band to join another or go solo etc, and take your songs with you, they will feel the song belongs to them in some way.
Here is a situation, 
You find some of your old band “mates” have started a new band and continue to use your song for gigs, worse they have put the song on you tube or I tunes before you got round to copywriting or putting your material out there. 

[fastlane]

I've been a songwriter for a long long time now and I was confused about copyright for a long time so I studied up and found loads of ways but none really cut the mustard and if they did they were pricey. So I decided to create a solution when I founded Emeraz.com and built it into the site.

Basically, as others have mentioned, as soon as you create a song (or any intelectual property) on any physical medium you own the copyright. The trick is to prove that your copyright is yours at a specific moment in time.

So with that in mind our copyright solution gives you a time stamp at the moment you upload. We then send you a digital fingerprint and a hash copy that prove that the track you uploaded is yours The system we use is legally recognized worldwide and we guarantee it! And, there is no expiry so get it once and it's your for life! Even if our website disappears The best bit is it costs €1 per copyright!!

Try it out and see what you think, when you sign up and complete a little tour you get 2 for free just so you can try it.

Hope that helps you guys and just so you know, we are not trying to make money from this service. The €1 covers the cost for us to provide the service. We are a bunch of musicians so

www.emeraz.com

[fro0tyl0opy87]

Hi,

As my question is relevant to this topic, I didn't see the point of starting a new thread, but I was wondering has anyone thought about the properties attached to music files on your computer such as date last modified? Say "My Amazing Melody.MP3" hover over the mouse and see the date last modified 2005. Would that be enough proof do you think because that is something that can't be altered can it? Mind you, with computers it seems anything can be hacked/ changed

[Boydie]

The only problem with "electronic" copyright methods (PC metadata, website uploads, sound cloud, this forum, online copyright services etc.) is that they have not yet been tested in court with a real life case so there are no legal precedents yet

The burden of proof would fall to you to prove you created something when you did so I am sure all of these methods would help build your case but as you rightly point out I am sure a clever lawyer/barrister could argue against these digital methods - I can think of llts of was to "fake it" off the top of my head

I don't think there is a need to worry too much over copyright and if you are I would recommend GISC (referred to earlier in the thread) that offer this service and much more for a very reasonable annual fee

[Onelabel]

Best idea IMO is sticking it on something like YouTube which effectively time/date stamps your song.

However as mentioned earlier, you need to ask yourself why would someone want to take your song? Now it could be that you've written the greatest song in the history of the world, but that aside I think that copyright theft from unknown (ie non published) writers is so incredibly rare that it's practically non existent. The amount of work/marketing/investment that goes into making a 'hit' record is so huge that the potential risk involved in copying another's track just doesn't stack up.

Also, copyright theft is extremely difficult to prove, since it's not enough to say 'their song is a copy of mine'. If anyone stole another song they'd change a few parts, maybe some of the lyrics, a couple of melodies, a chord or two, the production etc. etc. EVEN if you could prove 'Song A = Song B' you'd still need to PROVE that the other artist heard your song and copied it. It's not enough to show that they're the same song as a popular defence is that two people wrote very similar songs completely without knowledge of each other. When you analyse somgwriting and see actually how few subjects are written about (love, loss etc.) and how often the same chord progressions are used it becomes extremely difficult to prove that someone copied another's work.

I think the risk is so minimal that it's not worth spending money on - hence something like YouTube is plenty enough for someone, unless they're really starting to get interest from major publishers, labels etc.