Recording - April 2010 - 46

By Todd Gascon and Bruce Kaphan Last month we started this series that is intended to lay out Now it’s time to put this into practice—copyrighting a song is exactly what you can and should do to protect your interests and supposed to be easy to do with the help of forms readily availto make money from your musical and recording activities. able on the internet. Bruce Kaphan walks you through the Entertainment lawyer Todd Gascon outlined the basics of copy- process and gives you fair warning about some surprisingly right—what it is and what it is designed to do for you. tricky aspects that you’ll be glad to know about.—LzR Chapter 2: FILING A COPYRIGHT CLAIM A good many of you readers of Recording come from a background of writing songs; writing songs leads you to want to record them, and once your songs are recorded you want to get them out into the marketplace. Like me, I’m sure you want to protect your intellectual property, in the hope of being able to carve a career out of your craft. In last month’s issue, Todd defined copyright and explained how it protects your intellectual property. This month I’ll walk you through an example of actually registering a copyright claim. As Todd pointed out, copyright can protect many permutations of authorship—too many for the scope of this article. For our example, we’ll just consider a simple example of filing a copyright claim for a Sound Recording, an album consisting of a group of songs written and recorded by one author/performer who is sole owner of the record company that will be releasing the album. In this article, we’ll print some screenshots to get you started, but you’ll find a set of 27 screen shots detailing every step of the process up on our website (see the entry for this article in the April 2010 Table Of Contents). The screenshots we print will be clearly numbered so you won’t get lost between Figure X and Figure Y. Please note that this article is merely a guide—neither Recording Magazine nor the authors of this article assume responsibility for the application of ideas presented in this article. Please get the advice of your own lawyer for your own projects. The Copyright Office offers two variations of Form CO for the type of copyright registration described above. Form CO is a paper form and requires a registration fee of $50 per basic claim, whereas form eCO is an electronic/online form andRECORDING APRIL 2010 requires a lower fee of $35 per basic claim. In this article, we’ll only be covering Form eCO. Fortunately, the Copyright Office allows you to register more than one song at the same time, as a collection of works. Therefore, for example, it is possible to register an album of 10 songs as one entity, for the total basic claim price of $35. Registering with the Copyright Office This first step gives the directions for creating an online account–— 1 don’t confuse this with registering a copyright claim, which is covered in “Registering a Claim” below. You’ll save yourself some wasted time if you first note these Form eCO compatibility requirements: • eCO is compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and Netscape Navigator 7.02 • eCO is not compatible with Safari! • Firefox 2.0 [and at least 3.5.6 and presumably other versions as well] users must adjust the Tabs setting to “New pages must be opened in: a new window”. The Tabs setting is under “Tools/Options” for Firefox for 2 PCs and under “Preferences” for Macs. • Disable your pop-up blocker. • Disable any third-party toolbars. [I’m using Mozilla Firefox as I navigate the site for this article.] 1. First, you’ll either need to create an online account at the U.S. Copyright Office, or if you’ve already created an account, you’ll need to log in. Go to www.copyright.gov. Once there, you should see this page: (Figure 1 above, with “Figure 2” in red circle)

http://www.copyright.gov

Recording - April 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - April 2010