Copyright Talk

Need a how-to lesson? Here you go -

When you create a work, in the US you automatically have a copyright in that work. You do not need to do anything to have the copyright. However, if you want to put the world on notice that you have this copyright, you must register your work with the US Copyright Office. The basic registration fee is $45 for each registration, but in many cases you can include more than one work at a time in the same registration. The Copyright Office has separate forms for specific types of works, and you can get them here. In addition to the registration form, you must provide a copy of the work to the Office. The type of copy depends on the type of work you’re registering, and is explained on the registration form.

Copyright registration is very much a do-it-yourself project, but you’ll find lots of services out there willing to do it for you, for a small fee, of course. Whether you want to use one of these services or not is entirely up to you, but you should know that there is nothing tricky, “legal”, or complicated about registration that would require help form someone else. Filing trademarks are a little more complicated, and many people do in fact benefit from hiring services to help them. Same for patent filings, which is such a different and complicated animal that you should really, in most cases, have an attorney helping you.

But copyright registration is not that way. So if you are thinking about using a service, be sure that you are getting something useful for the extra money you’ll spend.

There are some questions that you might have when filling out the registration forms (like “do I have a co-author?”) but the questions that might come up are pretty easy to find answers to, usually on the Copyright Office website itself, or you can find all kinds of useful and reliable information by searching the internet.

And one last note: mailing yourself a copy of the work has no legal significance. If you need a copyright registration, spend the $45 and register it properly.

Okay, so I’ve said again and again that the person who owns the copyright to a work has the exclusive right to determine when and how it is used. The copyright owner can either give or withhold permission to others for the use of their copyrighted material.

Unless you are a songwriter. There are a few exceptions to the exclusive rights provisions, and perhaps the broadest exception applies to songs.

Section 115 of the US copyright code gives anyone the right to obtain a compulsory license that allows them to record a copyrighted song for distribution to the public, as long as the song has already been recorded and released to the public. The law provides a statutory rate of payment for use of the song, as well as notification and collection procedures.

Songwriters, like parents, must release their babies into the world and hope they find their way. Unlike parents, though, songwriters can expect their babies to send money home, even though they don’t get to approve the way they live.

Copyright will one day be overhauled. It won’t happen soon, and it won’t happen quickly, if for no other reason than that the infrastructure that supports the copyright laws is so huge and far-reaching that it will take some time to make changes that don’t completely blow up the system and leave chaos in the realm. But change will come.

Why am I so sure of this? It’s not because some few are calling for change. The renegade intellectuals, the well-muscled corporate giants, and the confused masses that call for changes - many of which changes don’t even make sense, and sometimes aren’t even real changes - are not the reason I know change will come.

The reason I am so sure that change will eventually come is that the populace has begun to be confused by the law, which leads to ridicule, which will lead to a public debate, and which leads to more and more outright defiance of the law. All of these things are already happening, and the incidence is increasing. It’s not a mere blip on the radar, it’s a surging of the sea that will raise the tidal line.