Who Can Claim a Copyright?

Series Summary

Make sure you get the credit and cash you deserve for your songwriting talents. Songwriters spend their time struggling to write that big hit that will bring them fame and fortune. But what if someone else takes one of your songs and hits it big. Will you get paid? Not if you haven’t gone through the proper channels to register and copyright your song. Imagine the pain of watching someone else get rich on your hard work! Don’t let it happen to your or your band.

In this series of legal advice clips for band members and their manager, out music business expert tell you what you need to know about copyrighting your songs.

Video Transcript

"ANTONIO NEAL: Hey, this is Antonio Neal with Artistic Soul Entertainment on behalf Expert Village. Today we're going to talk about copyrighting a song and also publishing a song. And now we're going to talk about copyrights. Copyrighting, the inquiry of copyrights, is probably one of the most important questions that I get asked as a producer. I mean, almost every day someone comes up to me, whether online or in person, and say, "Antonio, Antonio, I wanna--I got a song I wrote," or "I have a video," or "I have a play and I want to get that thing copywritten." And a lot of times, they don't understand, really, what it takes to actually get a copyright. So, really, getting a copyright is really, to break it down, is really telling somebody that you own something. There's no difference than, that if you created some type of recipe for your family; if you are a lady out there and you're cooking this recipe and you got some people in your family saying, "No, no. I can cook this," or "I did that," really, what it's saying is you created it and the government really looks at you as the owner or the person that created that intellectual property. So that's really what a copyright is, something that the government says, "You know what? Person A created this at this certain time and person B didn't," because a lot of times, as you know, you guys know in the entertainment there's somebody, people write and they collab all the time, and a lot of times people go to court based on the fact of who wrote the song or who owns the song or who owns the rights or the money or the monetary value of that song. And so that's one important reason why the government set up copyrighting to settle all those issues."