More from lawyer #1:

I am a lawyer and a composer — not in that order, for longer than I care to mention– all in exclusive libraries. I ‘ve been filing my own copyrights since I was 15.

As you may have observed there are two levels of copyright: one for unpublished works and one for published works. It gets deeper if you’re copyrighting the sound recording, as well as the underlying musical work.

The reason why you want to copyright your unpublished works is because you are presumably sending your work out to many libraries before its is published.

To be clear, we are talking about two different situations: 1) where you transfer ownership the copyright to the library, and 2) where the library takes no ownership, but takes a percentage of the publishing.

Under the exclusive model, where you receive upfront money, you will most likely be transferring ownership of your copyright to the library (this must be in writing). You are NOT merely licensing the work to them. You should not get this confused with an exclusive licensing deal, which may be of limited duration.

Under the non-exclusive model, you do not, or should not transfer any ownership.

The problem, as I tried to explain, is that a collection receives one registration number, it is one work. You cannot split that one “work” among different exclusives who want to to own your copyright. You are asking for trouble. It doesn’t matter that youve given each section of the work a different title. It is one work. You transfer the whole enchilada. Further, your deal with the exclusive will require that the copyrighted material is yours to transfer. You cannot do that if you’ve already transferred the copyright to another owner.

Further, the law is designed to prevent the kind of work-around that you describe. In other words, the copyright office doesn’t want for you to copyright 10 unrealated tracks and call it a collection. When I’ve filed copyrights as a collection, all of the “songs” were published by the same entity as a collection, e.g. the “sports collection,” the cinema colection,” etc.

OK — before digress too far. The issue is transfer of copyright ownership, which arises under the exclusive model, not merely publishing shares as under the non-exclusive model.

That is why I said that you MIGHT limit yourself by copyrighting things as a collection.

John smile

Stop analyzing; just compose the damn thing!
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