Geoffrey Loker writes: | Can anyone here tell me how to go about checking to see if a song or a | tune is under copyright protection?
You have a lot of work ahead ... ;-) Quite a lot of people have looked into this, and concluded that in general it's not doable. If you know who owns the copyright, it's not too difficult, but of course that assumes you know the answer before you go looking for it. If you have a tune of unknown ownership, it seems that the best you can do is to go to a repository such as the US Library of Congress and do a manual search through all of their musical publications. This is a full-time job that will last several years on the average. One of the funnier examples of the difficulty: I've had a few email exchanges with people at a couple of publishers, which I started by asking how I would check to see if a particular tune was one for which they owned the copyright. Their answer (written with a straight face as far as I can tell) was that I should buy all of their publications and search them for the tune. I'd specifically ask if this was really their suggestion, and they said that yes, it was. I've only tried this with a few publishers, but I suspect that all of them view it this way. As far as can be determined, the only fast way to determine who owns a tune is to publish, record or perform it, and see if anyone files a lawsuit. But even this has a problem: If nobody sues you, you still don't know whether the tune has a copyright. Maybe the owner didn't notice what you did. Or maybe they're waiting to see if you make any money from the tune before suing you. Anyone know a faster way? (You can also ask on a list like this one, FWIW. ;-) I've also been involved in another sort of discussion of how we might set up a searchable online archive of ABC versions of copyrighted songs, and use it as a sort of "sting" to entice lawsuits. The idea would be to get the courts to decide that the current situation is illegal, since it requires that musicians know something that is being intentionally hidden from them by copyright owners. But doing this would require some pretty deep pockets to handle the legal battle, so the discussions don't get anywhere. | I am in the midst of compiling a collection of old-ish songs (using | ABC to enter the tunes for printing, storage, etc. [there - I've made | the post relevant to the list]), and I need to know how to check on | the copyright status for songs *and* for tunes (since a number of the | songs are parodies of other songs, or share tunes). I am primarily | interested in how to check the copyright status of songs in Canada, | although knowing how to do it in the United States and the United | Kingdom would be interesting and potentially helpful too. You really have a lot of work ahead ... ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
