Amen Nightshift.

Jody, your's is the LA opinion and I understand it. But I would suggest you watch these lawsuits. I am going to further now that they will go to nothing. I am also going to further that you will never see lawsuits rendering anything now ever again.

You simply can't prove to me that someone using a line or two or melody is going to have any validity at all when the number one song of the year is a direct copy of a 1970's song,when overall illegal usage for music on the Internet is absolutely rampant,
when overall piracy is decimating the industry, not gonna happen. When rappers completely sample tracks and use their own lyrics with no fear of anything. Sorry,it just doesn't ring true to me any more.

I'll tell you what I do see. I see thousands of people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on uncopyrightable titles, uncopyrightable ideas, that are the weakest songs that exist. To me it is the "African General wants to give you $20 billion dollars. He just needs your account number to put the money in."

Someone is a writer with a song. How is anyone going to hear that song to steal it? Interent? Billions of songs a minute on the Internet. Millions of sites.

All I hear on these sites and others are people wanting to dive into one rip off web site or another and worrying about their copyrights. If you go to these sites, probably serves you right to lose your songs. Not one of them is worth the money it takes to get into.

If someone gets a title or idea I have written (happened 13 times to me in the past six years) and gets a big hit, more power to them. I write more songs. I write sometimes three a day with thousands and thousands of people.What do I need with some obscure song that I have never even listened to from someone I don't know, who is trying to slip me a CD? I don't.

And neither do professional writers. They are too busy writing their own stuff.

Sorry, we just have to agree to dissagree. I said there is a time for anything when you have a song about to be professionally released. The chances of that now are about as good as being struck by lightning in a submarine underwater but that would be the time. In order to get those songs to the level of even being considered they are going to have to be represented by a publisher because reputatble sources such as artists, producers, record labels,serious publishers, are not going to listen to anything from anyone they don't know because they are overwhelmed by product, are trying to figure out what to do with that, and are afraid of some idiot trying to sue them over their absurd song, "I love you baby, baby,WOAH!" because they are SURE no one has ever heard that before!

So yes, I believe absolutley that copyrighting for about 99.99% of songs is a complete waste of time and money.

Over the 12 years I have been teaching and then the years before that I have been dealing with people, I have listened to thousands upon thousands upon thousands of amateur songs. I have judged dozens of contests, listened to tens of thousands of artists and writers. In that time, there is not really one that I can ever remember being unique enough to steal. Not one.

They are always songs I have heard before, always something I can point to another song that sounds like it, is similar in theme and all but just a very few are so boring you can't get past the first one or two lines without turning it off and going to something else. With everyone of those people that sat down and went on and on about the copyrighting, I can almost always point to the song they are so worried about being in a musical from the 40's or 50's done thirty years before they were born.

So anyone who wants can go through the money and time on this copyright forms and legalese. That is fine. They can wait around with their song for the 3-4 years it takes to get their forms back.And they can sit on their song until it is out of date, and they have written forty or fifty more songs they like better.

We all have our take on this. Mine comes from reality and all the "They stole this.. from this songwriter or that songwriter' is never gonna change my mind. I've heard em all before.

MAB