Stu,

I always say that if you feel like copyrighting things and that makes you feel better, do it. It is something that you should do if you have something ready to be commercially released. There is a stage to do it.

But in my world, writers write hundreds of songs and less than 4% of them ever get past a computer screen.That is reality. At 2040 songs in 7 years if you think I am going to spend a lot of money on copyrighting anything, you are nuts.

And EVERY SONG sounds like dozens, sometimes hundreds of other songs. There are a LOT of lawsuits. You can sue a ham sandwich. Winning them, and even getting them on a court docket is something else altogether, and people who have had enormous hit songs have had thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars held up by frivolous lawsuits from people that have no leg to stand on, and the suits are most often thrown out of court.

Liability lawsuits in every walk of life add billions to our ways of life, and from the position of trying to get songs out there, to publishers or to be heard by anyone, you are adding another level of leagalize and another level of difficulty by going through endless lawsuits,is adding even more problems than we already have.

And as you see,ask a lawyer and you will get a lot of answers to the same questions. I am not a lawyer, and having had my career torpedoed by one you are not going to get much support from me on anything legal. If people have a desire to protect themselves, they should do what feels right for them.

My conversations are more to practical application than legal. If every one I have ever encountered who got all caught up in the copywriting process, worried more about learning what was out there, perfecting the craft and understanding how difficult it is to have an original thought, they wouldn't spend thousands of dollars copyrighting "I Love You Baby" and working on new ways to say it instead.

I would rather they concentrated on writing new songs instead of getting into suits that almost never go anywhere except to fatten lawyer's wallets.

MAB