Copyrighting

We were wondering about the copyrighting the songs you create. This article is not a legal advise but here is what we seemed to have found out.

• Best and foremost, it is worthwhile for you to visit the US Copyright Office web site and read the Law and FAQs
  

The following were the main questions we had and were all answered in the Copyright Office FAQ. Again, we are not providing you a legal advise, so please don't use what we have written as the authoritative answer to secure your works.

• Do I have to register every song with the Copyright Office to get a protection?
  
  The answer seems to be no. We interpret that for us, song writers, as long as we save the recorded work in your own CD-ROM then the copyright will take effect. So the answer is that you do not have to register every song. The registration provides an official record of the copyright in case there is a legal claim against what you wrote. For this, if we are not making a lot of money and no very famous from our songs so we would forgo this, or wait until we have a major publishing deal. We would save them on CD-ROMs, make a written record of when they were created, and then don't share them with the public in any form if you think you could make a deal.
  
  It is also important to note that if you wrote a song under an employment contract (work for hire) from someone else, say composing a video soundtrack, then the copyright is most likely going to belong to the employer. We are not sure if you can include a clause written in our own contract to specifically sate that all the songs we write under the contract shall remain as ours. This has some implications for group efforts, for example, a rock band.
  
  
• Can we register online?
  
  Looks like we can. They prefer that you upload MP3 or other supported media format files using electronic submission and pay $30 (at this time of writing).

• $30 a song? That's way too much! Can I register multiple songs?
  
  So long as they were not previously published at different times, then the answer seems to be yes. We would interpret then all of my online demo songs were published so we need to individually register, but moving forward, we should publish multiple tracks under one title on the same day or an "album". Again, though, that is if we decide to register.

So this blog post is (C) 2008 Manabu Tokunaga.