How Do Musicians Copyright their Music and What is fair Usage?

Copyrighting your songs is straight forward. However, you need to know other legalities surrounding this strange copyright law. I will first teach you how you protect your songs. To copyright your songs for free

1. Keep a draft copy of the song and keep it in a safe place.

2. Go to your local post office and post it to yourself date stamped they received it from you.

3. When the package arrives at your house do not open it. This is proof of ownership. This process is recognised in any court of law.

For more information on the laws of copyright you can get this book ‘An Essential Guide for Serious Singers and Musicians.’

An Essential Guide for Serious singers and Musicians : Watson, Saphron: Amazon.co.uk: Books

However, let us look at the laws of fair usage. Lots people on YouTube, are reported by the original artists; for using music without written consent. However, the video creators then cite a disclaimer of: Fair Usage, against the original owner of the song. The people performing your songs on social media are claiming that they have a right to perform your material because of this legal term. In law they have a case.

But what is interesting, no other companies faces this kind of free loading abuse. You could not reproduce Nike or Calvin Klein, and then pass them off as your own. It would be seen fraud. But the same rules do not apply when it comes to the reproduction of music. And it gets worse when it comes to having your music reproduce with any laws being broken because of it!

The Musicians Union to date has not challenged this vagrant abuse. How the law attempts to get around this is this: Fair use is the right to copy a portion of a copyrighted work without permission because your use is for a limited purpose, such as for educational use in a classroom or to comment upon, criticize, or parody the work being sampled.

There is nothing wrong with this. However, these days’ social media is packed with video creators earning a good living misusing this loophole. And they do not give credit to the original owner of the songs.

What they cannot do is release the song and pretend that it is their creation. That would be plagiarism and deception. What is interesting though is that, the law states that: you are allowed to use only segments of the songs. But people are not doing that.

They are performing the whole song hiding behind the clause of fair usage.
In US Laws the definition of fair usage slightly differs from the UK. U.S. fair use factors. Examples of fair use in United States copyright law include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, and scholarship. Fair use provides for the legal, unlicensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author’s work under a four-factor test.

In a classroom situation, whether it be commentary or other means, it is fair to use portion of the musicians’ work without their consent. This is for academic or creative usage. Most people would agree to this.

‘The Essential Guide for Serious Singers and Musicians,’ goes into tips and tricks how to challenge this nonsense, and empowers you the musicians to totally protecting your work from this abuse. You will also learn:

 Dealing with bad music managers once you signed their contracts!
 How to copyright your songs and if the band breaks up who owns them.
 How copyright works and who really wins if your songs are stolen!
 Why the music industry today is more about hype than talent today.
 Why you should never sign a five year contract no matter how tempting it looks!
 Dirty dealings which goes on inside the music business, and why it was doomed to fail!
 Music Publishers and how they work for you
 Promoting your band as a business and merchandise.
 Why the music industry is suffering sales
 The decline of rap music sales and it’s political racial and social effect
 The Importance of marketing your band and why it can be catastrophic
 How Justin Beiber could have lost everything all because of bad marketing!
 Tribute Bands and your lawful responsibility
 Vocalist guide to working in a full sized band and more…

 

 

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