Copyrighting Individual Songs?

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Inspired

New member
I've heard that it's better to copyright each individual song on a CD, rather than the whole CD as one. That way if one song is taken off of the CD, it's still considered copyrighted by itself. How true of a statement is that? If this is correct, how do you go about doing this? I know how to copyright a full CD using Form SR, but I'm baffled at the individual song concept...
 
Short form PA will do nicely.

As to registrations, you can register a group of songs as a compilation, or as an individual song if you want registered copyrights for the writer/s.

If you want to register a recording, form SR will do nicely.
 
Inspired said:
I've heard that it's better to copyright each individual song on a CD, rather than the whole CD as one. That way if one song is taken off of the CD, it's still considered copyrighted by itself. How true of a statement is that? If this is correct, how do you go about doing this? I know how to copyright a full CD using Form SR, but I'm baffled at the individual song concept...
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I'm not a copyright lawyer (I just play one on TV), but I feel certain that you do not need to copyright songs individually. The purpose of the copyright is just to have a federal institution put at date stamp on your work so that no one else can come along later and claim that they composed the same piece at an earlier date. (Whoever has the oldest date stamp wins.) That stamp applies to every song in a collection just as surely as it covers the collection.

If Beethoven had copyrighted the Fifth Symphony on December 28, 1808 (I'm making that up, of course), then no one could challenge the fact that he also copyrighted the fourth movement of the Fifth Symphony on that same day.

Besides, copyrighting a single song costs the same as copyrighting a collection of a thousand songs, so at 30 bucks a pop, not many of us can afford to copyright individual songs.
 
At $30 a pop, it's much more economical to copyright a bunch of songs rather than one at a time.
 
Copyrighting each individual song makes no sense at all. Copyright the entire CD as a compilation (send best copies, including the cover, inserts, etc..). Every song on it will be protected.
 
Awesome. You guys helped to ease my mind. A friend of mine once told me about the individual song concept, and I thought it sounded ludicrous, but I had to find out for sure. And yes, at $30 per song it just wouldn't make sense.

This is straight from The Copyright Office:

If you register a group of songs on one application, the individual
songs of the group have the same protection as if you had registered
them individually. The only difference is that you will not be
able to find the individual titles in our database if you register them
as a collection, only the collection title.

Thanks again for easing my mind...
 
Copyrighting individual songs is obviously a common misperception. I just found out that my grandad also thought the same thing. I'm sure glad I know the truth now, thanks to you guys, and the "straight from the horse's mouth" e-mail that I got from The Copyright Office.

Now I want to study up on copyrighting mp3s and content on a personal website...
 
MP3's: do it the same as with a CD. Burn the songs to a CD and send them in with your payment. Burn the wave files to CD and not the MP3s because they want your best copies. The MP3s will still be covered by the same copyright (you are copyrighting the material and not the format). If you copyright a CD (album) and send it in and then later make MP3s for a web site then you do not need to register them again, they are protected by the original copyright that you have for the CD. I hope that makes sense. You can do web pages in a similar manner, but I forgot what form to use and have to eat now, otherwise I would look it up.
 
As a relevent point of interest:

In registering a collection of songs on the CD, ALL SONGS MUST HAVE THE SAME AUTHOR(S).

We had our forms sent back because the songs on our CD were authored/co-authored by 4 different bandmembers, in various combinations...

So, we got to file Form SR for the sound recording itself, but individual PA's (along with accompanying $30 fees) for each authorship grouping...

Ended up being $180 in fees... :eek:
 
You can do both!!!! Use the short form PA to copyright the collection of songs(which does cover the individual songs) and also submit the PA CON(continuation) form along with it. The PA CON allows you to have the songs registered individually(I don't know what the benefit is but I do it anyway) and doesn't cost anything extra. The Copyright website should explain it in detail if you're interested.
 
jalbert said:
You can do both!!!! Use the short form PA to copyright the collection of songs(which does cover the individual songs) and also submit the PA CON(continuation) form along with it. The PA CON allows you to have the songs registered individually(I don't know what the benefit is but I do it anyway) and doesn't cost anything extra. The Copyright website should explain it in detail if you're interested.
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Interesting... Does anyone know why someone would need to do this?
 
jalbert said:
You can do both!!!! Use the short form PA to copyright the collection of songs(which does cover the individual songs) and also submit the PA CON(continuation) form along with it. The PA CON allows you to have the songs registered individually(I don't know what the benefit is but I do it anyway) and doesn't cost anything extra. The Copyright website should explain it in detail if you're interested.
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Something like that would only need to be done if there were more than one author/co-author though, correct?
 
jalbert said:
You can do both!!!! Use the short form PA to copyright the collection of songs(which does cover the individual songs) and also submit the PA CON(continuation) form along with it. The PA CON allows you to have the songs registered individually(I don't know what the benefit is but I do it anyway) and doesn't cost anything extra. The Copyright website should explain it in detail if you're interested.
Click to expand...

The PA CON form is used when you run out of room on the main PA form... It has nothing to do with 'individual' registration.
 
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