Music Copyright

egon spengler

Hey, is there a copyright registration office in Ireland? Is there a more secure way of copyright protection than poor mans copyright here? I contacted some organizations that collect royalties etc but they require you to have played x amount of gigs/or to have been on the radio.

egon spengler

anyone?

haz

egon spengler wrote: »

anyone?

Copyright exists from the moment a work is created. There is no system for registration, unlike trademarks (on names or logos etc) or patents (on ideas, designs, techniques etc). There are organisations collecting and distributing royalties on commercially released works, but they don't register or arbitrate the copyright.

Copyright infringement would be determined in a court when another had benefitted in some way from an intellectual property, and would require evidence like recordings, lyrics, melodies or witnesses to the claimed dates of creation.

Pines

Just to add to what Haz said, the crucial issues to prove are:

1) that you are the author of the copyright work -- so you need to keep or create reliable records of when the work was first recorded or "fixed"; and

2) that your work was actually copied by the alleged infringer -- so normally, you will have to provide proof that the infringer had access to your work, i.e. you should keep records of who gets copies if the work is unpublished.

Putting a copyright notice such as "(c) egon spengler 2008" puts people on notice of your copyright and is admissible as evidence of your ownership of copyright, and presumed to be correct unless the contrary is proved (s. 139 CRRA 2000).

In other words, if you put a notice on copies of the work then the infringer will have to prove to the court that you were not the author, which shifts things rather nicely in your favour.