Recording - November 2016 - 56

never set a statutory rate for sampling. Note that the commonlyrepeated tale that you don't have to do this for samples under two
seconds long isn't at all true; if a single sample is identifiable in
court, you can be sued for using it without clearance.
Your own kind of music
If you only record music that you've composed yourself,
there are still hoops you need to jump through for your own
protection. Let's take a brief look at them, keeping in mind that
this is only the single version-the full-length dance mix is in
This Business of Music.
First of all, as soon as you've created the music and "fixed" it
in a permanent form (either as a recording or sheet music, or
for that matter a MIDI file), copyright is created automatically,
and you usually own it. The "usually" is there because a "work
made for hire", like the jingle that Marcella's Pizzeria paid you
to write, belongs to the person or company that signed the
check. In days of old, the copyright didn't exist until you registered it, but now it comes with the territory, as long as you can
prove that you created a particular song at a particular time.
Does that mean you don't need to register copyrights anymore? Not really; if someone infringes your copyright by, say,
recording a song you wrote without getting a mechanical
license or paying royalties, or by sampling your music without
getting permission or paying you, you can sue them, yes, but
the burden is on you to prove that the music or performance
was copyrighted when they ripped it off.
Also: if you can prove someone infringed your copyright,
and can prove it to a court's satisfaction, you can collect actual damages-the amount of money you lost by not receiving
royalties. However, if (and only if) your music has its copyright
registered, you can collect punitive damages from the offender-money intended to punish them for stealing from you, and
to deter other people from stealing in the future. Registering
the copyright is also considered the most solid evidence that
your music existed on a particular day.
Now's probably the best time to address a practice which
has attained the status of urban legend: the "common-law copyright". Instead of registering the copyright, and paying the fee,
the story says that all you need to do is mail it to yourself, in a
registered letter, and then file the received envelope without
opening it. The idea behind this is that the postmarked date on
the unopened envelope provides adequate proof that the music
existed on that date, and therefore it's enough to persuade a
court that you created the music. Therefore the person you're
suing for infringement is a lying dog to claim authorship.
In three words: it ain't so. In the few cases that have
involved "common-law copyright", the courts have refused to
recognize a mailed letter as adequate proof of prior authorship-and under our judicial system, case law is settled law. In
any case, without registering the copyright, there's no chance
of collecting punitive damages from an infringer.
So you need to register the copyright. Actually, you probably need to register two copyrights-on the song and the
recording of it. If you want to be protected, you need to establish by registration that you own the composer's rights to the
song (indicated with a C in a circle) and the performer's rights
to the performance (indicated with a P in a circle).
The place all this happens, for people who live in the United
States, is the US Copyright Office, at www.copyright.gov/eco.
Be warned: if you just Google "US Copyright Office", the first
links that pop up include a couple of private outfits that charge
extra for registering your copyright; the URL above, with a
.gov suffix, is the real thing.
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RECORDING NOVEMBER 2016

In past years, you could only register copyright in a song by
submitting a lead sheet. With fewer pop musicians working from
sheet music, this didn't make sense, and a while ago the
Copyright Office began accepting recordings for song registration. If you're submitting your song registration on paper rather
than online, you can enclose a CD or cassette (!) with the application. However, these days it's faster and easier to do the whole
thing electronically; online registration has an estimated turnaround of 8 months, as opposed to 14 months for paper registration. The Copyright Office accepts audio in formats including:
.aif or .aiff, .mp3, .mid or .midi, .ra or .ram, .wav and .wma.
Publish or perish
If you anticipate that your recordings will get radio airplay,
or that someone besides you will want to record your songs,
you may want to set up a music publishing company. That
company should in turn be affiliated with one of the performing-rights organizations (BMI, ASCAP, or SESAC) so that you
can collect royalties if your songs are played on the radio.
(The royalties are small, but they're real.) If you hope that
another artist will record your songs, and pay you some royalties, your publishing company needs to be part of the Harry
Fox Agency's clearinghouse. One wrinkle: you can join BMI
as an individual for free, but a publisher has to pay.
How to set up a publishing company? There are lots of
guides on the Internet (Google "how to start music publisher"
without the quotation marks); one of the guides, put out by
Recording advertiser TAXI.com, is at tinyurl.com/taxipublinfo;
another, issued by the Performing Rights Organization BMI, is
at tinyurl.com/BMIpublinfo. Probably best of all, look in This
Business of Music.
What I did
In the case of the Ottoman Underground session clip that
goes with these articles, "Arbetsloz", I didn't have to dot many
I's or cross many T's, because the composer, Mordechai
Gebirtig, died in June 1942, killed in a Nazi massacre.
Because of the "Death-Plus-70-Years" rule (Poland is also a signatory to the Berne Convention), his works entered the public
domain in June 2012, so the music and Yiddish words of the
song can be used without royalties.
However, that doesn't apply to the English translation of the
words that Will sings, which was created by an artist who is
still living. To avoid issues, we didn't include the English words
in the clip that we put on the web.
Wrapup
In this article, I've scratched the surface of issues relating to
using copyrighted material and protecting your own compositions. There's way, way more, and I recommend that you
check out some of the references I've provided.
Meanwhile, where do we go from here? In writing the First
Steps series, I've tried to cover as much of the big picture as
possible, including the basics of monitors, control rooms, microphones, cables, preamps, EQ, compression, digital recording,
computers, DAWs, overdubs, mixing, reverb and mastering.
But in addition to the big picture, making a good recording
demands attention to a myriad of small points. That's where
we'll go next month, in the concluding episode of the series-
stay tuned!
Paul J. Stamler (stamler@recordingmag.com) is a recording
engineer, guitarist, educator, and collector of fascinating old
recordings of all kinds, living and working in St. Louis.

http://www.TAXI.com http://www.tinyurl.com/taxipublinfo http://www.tinyurl.com/BMIpublinfo http://www.copyright.gov/eco

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - November 2016