JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Industry Message Forum Music Piracy

Xavi,

First welcome to the site since this is the first time I have crossed your path. Second, just for the record, your work is copyright protected the moment you fix it to a tangible medium. Registering it with congress, as you describe, only adds additional rights to the basic rights you already have. I strongly suggest that you get a copy of John Braheny's "The Craft and Business of Songwriting" (if you can't buy a copy, most libraries have them for free to check out) and read it as it will clarify this and many other things that are often discussed incorrectly on the web and elsewhere. Your comment is a very common misunderstanding of that law.

And to Mike, your post above (on the previous page where you waxed quite poetically) needs to be in Rolling Stone magazine or somewhere else where that type of writing might still be appreciated. It was among your finest written moments here.

As for Copyright and File Sharing, if you don't send other people a COPY (be it digital, analogy or otherwise) then you haven't broken the copyright laws. However, if you play it for crowds, there are also federal laws on Performance Rights of works. That's where you can get in trouble depending on the numbers and circumstances. Copyright is literally that. The right to make a copy of something. Play the song from your own copy for your friends and family, and that's fine. Make them a copy to listen to at their convenience, that's not legal. Sell them your copy, that's also okay because you didn't make a new copy, you simply transferred your rightfully owned copy to them for whatever terms you want. If you want to put it on a server and broadcast it to the world, you can absolutely do that as well. You just have to pay both the Songwriter Royalty for Peformance as well as the Artist Royalty for the Performance (which is relatively new and is collected by Sound Exchange rather than BMI. ASCAP or SESAC).

If you lived in Europe, you'd have to pay a lot more for a lot more uses. For example, if you have a party with 3 friends over and you're playing music on a boombox for them, you may very well wake up the next morning with a bill attached to your door for the usage. And I am not makign that up. They take their music rights very seriously in Europe. Of course it's also a corrupted system in many ways, but it's certainly far more restrictive than the US is in how you use your own copy of music.

Using someone elses work for your own commercial gain can cause you issues on many levels, but that's too complex to discuss here and as Mike likes to say, I am not a lawyer. If you push past the law because in your opinion it's wrong or stupid or you simply don't agree with it, you might soon be needing the services of a real lawyer however.

Brian