how do you copyright music?

Question

is posting it to yourself the thing to do?

im in the uk

Answer 1

if you have made the music piece, then you are the original author of the work, which means you automatically retain all reserved rights of your music, under international intellectual properties laws protected by the (WIPO) World Intellectual Property Organization.

however, you should register it and pay for a service to ensure its originallity compared to other works.

go to http://www.copyright.gov to read up about it. but reading some of their FAQs will definitely help.

advantages to having your work registered with a copyright office allows you to:

get damages in a legal case
get reimbursed attourney's fees
have it registered in your state and federally

you're lucky, i just got out of a com law class this semester. =) hope this helped!

Answer 2

In the UK every piece of music is automatically copywrited the minute you write it, you don't have to send it off anywhere - you just need to prove you did it first. The musician's union says that if you post a copy of the score/a recording to yourself then the postmark on the (unopened until you need to prove it's yours in court) envelope is proof enough that you had the idea first.

However, this is not good practice if you live in the US who have different copyright laws. Even if you live in the UK and you want to be REALLY sure then you need to visit http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/ and get it officially registered.

Answer 3

So I've heard - make sure the copy is dated & you have a postmark also showing the date. It isn't strictly necessary, but is a way of proving when it was written in case of a dispute.