Hiding in plain site...
Someone in a songwriting forum I'm involved with asked if he should be worried about sending his unpublished songs to friends via unencrypted email and went on to ask about the difficulty of filing a proper copyright and the likelihood of theft...
The copyright process is not too bad. You can now do it online. That said it is not free. (How about an advertising supported US Copyright Office? Can I take out a patent on that? With the clueless crop of bozos in the USPTO, the answer may sadly be yes.)
You can save money by collecting a (potentially large) group of songs together and copyrighting them as a collective work. But make sure you file an individual addendum listing each song individually or, I'm told, the CO cannot search on the individual titles in a collective work otherwise and that supposedly hurts your chances in court. Like you're going to court. Trust me, you can't afford to go to court (if you're like most of us).
Anyhow... with regard to folks stealing stuff...
In my long experience hearing musician horror stories -- and I've heard thousands -- I've only heard of a tiny handful of folks who've had their non-hit, unpublished songs appropriated. And that was almost always by folks in the songwriter's ex-band or former musical/writing partners.
OTOH, I've heard scores of folks who got screwed over on their songs/publishing by their own erstwhile publishers, managers, and agents -- to be sure. But in those cases, the crucial paper involved was typically in the form of contracts and legal agreements that the artist had signed or otherwise entered into with those entities (usually knowingly).
The thing with the generally unimaginative dorks who feel driven to steal songs is that they don't usually have enough imagination to steal an unknown song but often, instead, steal something that's already had some sort of success (maybe something on what they think is a lesser known older record).
But, you know, humans always proceed to amaze at the depths they can stoop to, so there's no saying for sure.
Me, I decided after watching for quite some time to not drive myself crazy. I hide my songs in plain sight. Or plain site, maybe. I post each new song on my songwriting blog, with the lyrics on the blog and the media file going to the Internet Archive. (www.archive.org)
I mean, most folks -- and I mean 99.999+% -- make music that will almost certainly go almost entirely unheard. Why add to the likelihood?
more discussion
The copyright process is not too bad. You can now do it online. That said it is not free. (How about an advertising supported US Copyright Office? Can I take out a patent on that? With the clueless crop of bozos in the USPTO, the answer may sadly be yes.)
You can save money by collecting a (potentially large) group of songs together and copyrighting them as a collective work. But make sure you file an individual addendum listing each song individually or, I'm told, the CO cannot search on the individual titles in a collective work otherwise and that supposedly hurts your chances in court. Like you're going to court. Trust me, you can't afford to go to court (if you're like most of us).
Anyhow... with regard to folks stealing stuff...
In my long experience hearing musician horror stories -- and I've heard thousands -- I've only heard of a tiny handful of folks who've had their non-hit, unpublished songs appropriated. And that was almost always by folks in the songwriter's ex-band or former musical/writing partners.
OTOH, I've heard scores of folks who got screwed over on their songs/publishing by their own erstwhile publishers, managers, and agents -- to be sure. But in those cases, the crucial paper involved was typically in the form of contracts and legal agreements that the artist had signed or otherwise entered into with those entities (usually knowingly).
The thing with the generally unimaginative dorks who feel driven to steal songs is that they don't usually have enough imagination to steal an unknown song but often, instead, steal something that's already had some sort of success (maybe something on what they think is a lesser known older record).
But, you know, humans always proceed to amaze at the depths they can stoop to, so there's no saying for sure.
Me, I decided after watching for quite some time to not drive myself crazy. I hide my songs in plain sight. Or plain site, maybe. I post each new song on my songwriting blog, with the lyrics on the blog and the media file going to the Internet Archive. (www.archive.org)
I mean, most folks -- and I mean 99.999+% -- make music that will almost certainly go almost entirely unheard. Why add to the likelihood?
more discussion
posted by TK Major at
12:47 PM
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