Even though registration of your song doesn’t give you any greater legal protection than creation and fixation does, for all intents and purposes, you can’t use the courts to remedy an infringement until the work has been registered. That said, if you decide to take the person who you accuse of infringement to court, what general principles should you know to guide you? First, your song has to have been registered in the Copyright Office. Bringing any lawsuit is, after all, an expensive proposition, and you need an expert in the field to give you all the facts before you decide to go that route.

If it doesn’t, your lawyer will know what you can expect to gain from a lawsuit and what the costs will likely be as compared to what you may receive as damages. But if you haven’t transferred your copyright, my suggestion is to retain a lawyer who is experienced in litigating copyright cases, since often a knowledgeable attorney’s demand letter to the alleged infringer will end the matter. If you discover that your copyright has been infringed, what can you do? First, remember that if you have assigned your song to a publisher, the publisher is the one to deal with the infringement, since it is the copyright owner. Since all of those activities are ones that a copyright owner has the right to control, those persons who do them without permission are, as the law calls them, copyright infringers. However, once in a while, a songwriter will discover that a song he or she has written has been appropriated by another person or, more likely, that someone has taken his or her song and used it without getting the proper licenses, such as including it in a new work, making an unauthorized recording of it, placing it in a film, arranging it into another genre, or playing it at an unlicensed club. By getting the legal protection that early, the odds against someone else stealing your song and getting away with it are greatly in your favor.

Given the volume of new songs being written every year, the percentage is so small as to be virtually non-existent.Īs I’ve written previously, the way the copyright law works offers the best protection to a songwriter by giving him or her a copyright in the work as soon as it is fixed in a tangible medium of expression, such as on paper, CD, tape, etc. Although most new songwriters (and many veteran ones) spend a lot of time worrying about having their creations stolen by someone else, the reality is that very few songs are pilfered.

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