Yeah, copyrights takes quite a while to get. Furthermore, there are very few lawyers who specialize in this area as well.

The basic rule is that copyrights in the US reverts to a company if the writer dies and it was written in commission, and in Europe the copyright reverts to the writer's family, because you cannot do work-for-hire here (there are very few amendments to the copyright law (as stated in The Berne convention) in Europe, like in the US). My source for that is a danish phd report.

The basic distictions to make is that copyright is different from registration of a copyright. What you get at the copyright office is a registration, which makes it easier to handle a dispute in court. You already have your work copyrighted by default, if you wrote it.

The other distiction is that a copyright is different from a sound recording. The copyright covers music and lyrics and is represented with a (c), and the sound recording (of that copyright) is represented with a (p).

You can register both a copyright (c) and a sound recording (p) with the copyright office. Copyrights are for original and derivative works, and so is sound recordings, but also includes covers of PD songs and new arrangements (derivative arrangements).

I tried helping out with a search, but I couldn't find anything on the copyright.gov site, like I used to could. They seem to have changed it after the criticism in the fall https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...2-5261-11e5-9812-92d5948a40f8_story.html

Reportedly the copyright office had computers from the 90'ies that couldn't handle the data load, so I sure hope they get the systems back up and running smoothly soon.