Copyright is the intangible, intellectual property right you have in your original creative works, starting the moment those works are fixed in a tangible medium. In the United States, copyright is a Constitutionally protected right, but its exact parameters are set by statute and case law, as well as by international copyright treaties and agreements.
Wow, that's a lot of big lawyer words. Let's parse them out.
Copyright is an intangible right. You can see or feel a painting, sculpture, novel, play manuscript and song lead sheet or thumb drive holding a recording. These things are tangible objects that you can own as personal property. Copyright is the package of legal rights attached to property that you can’t easily touch: the words of a novel rather than the physical book; the lyrics and notes of a song rather than the printed score or disc containing a recording; the image contained in a painting, rather than the physical canvas and paint. I can sell a used book from my bookshelf, or a painting from my wall, or CD from the pile stashed in my car -- but I do not have the right to reproduce and distribute that book, painting, or CD, because I only own the physical object. The person who created the work still owns the copyright.
Copyright protects original, creative intellectual property. Copyright laws are intended to protect the economic value of creative original ideas, so that creative people can be able to make a living and generate more creative ideas to better all of society. To secure copyright protection, your intellectual property must be original and it must be creative. You can’t copyright the word “the” or a C major scale, because it is not original.
Copyright protections attach to an idea when it is 'fixed in a tangible medium,' which means written down or recorded somewhere. The song or story in your head is not yet protected by copyright law. It may well be original and creative, but you don’t have copyright in that idea yet, until you fix it in a tangible medium. Sing or speak it into your hand-held digital recorder, and copyright protections attach. The danger is, if you walk around singing it before recording it or writing it down, or tell everyone at the bar about your story, and someone else writes it down, you will not hold the copyright on it.
Copyright gives the author (creator) of a creative, original work certain exclusive rights to use and sell that work. Copyright law calls everyone who creates an original, creative work an ‘author’ regardless of whether that person is a composer, painter, sculptor, or book writer. The original drafters of the copyright laws probably were wary of the religious implications of referring to people as ‘the Creator’.
Copyright helps protect the economic value of creative works by ensuring that only the ‘author’ of that work has the right to duplicate and distribute it, perform it, create variations of it – and license other people to do the same. If you wrote a song, only you have the right to record it, make CDs, sell digital downloads, perform it live, or create a music video from it. You also have the right to license other people to use your song, and you can sell your copyrights outright as well.
Copyright belongs to the 'author' of a work – unless it was created under a ‘work for hire’ agreement. If you are a composer hired as an employee by a television network to write jingles for their shows, or a graphic artist working for an advertising firm, your employment contract likely specifies that copyright to anything you create on the job belongs to the employer as a ‘work for hire’. If you are commissioned to write a song, be it a custom ballad for a wedding or a major commemorative symphony for a public event, your commission contract should state who is going to own the copyright to that opus.
Copyright of a product can be shared on collaborative projects. It’s common for two or more songwriters to share copyright ownership of a song. Multi-media projects often involve even more joint copyright holders.
For example, in the animated music video of my band O’hAnleigh’s song The Mermaid's Tale, my band partner Tom Hanley and I share the copyright on the music and lyrics of the song about the mermaid who lures sailors to their doom, but the extremely talented Emilie Rodgers, www.emilierodgers.com, created the animated interpretation of the song and owns the copyright in the animated video. In this case, Emilie and I exchanged a license--permission to use each other's copyrighted works--so that we could show the video with our song, and she can show people the video with our song in it.
Copyright attaches to a creative work, like a song, as soon as you fix it in a tangible medium--but enforcement of your copyrights may be difficult if you have not registered your song with the U.S. Copyright Office. Registration is easy and inexpensive--and is even easier and less expensive if you register a batch of songs together as a collection. More on registration in a future post, but in the meantime, bookmark the U.S.Copyright Office webpage, http://www.copyright.gov/, and make it your friend. It's a surprisingly user-friendly, with plain English FAQs and simple online forms.