On another message board somewhere, a freind of mine posted the lyrics to a song I wrote without my permision. Most message boards claim they have rights to anything posted on them. What can I do to be certain that I maintain the rights to these lyrics? He posted them without my permission, and even said that he didn’t write them. I can prove through many witnesses that I wrote these lyrics long ago.
But did you copyright your work? If not, your “rights” may be limited.
Check with the board before you go running off to a lawyer or anything, and good luck.
Is there an easy way to copyright my work?
poor man’s copyright:
write out your lyrics and mail them to yourself… DO NOT OPEN THE LETTER when you get it. This way you will have proof from the government on what time/date you mailed your work to yourself. Make sure you clearly label the letter though because if you open it you’re screwed (once open it negates the origional contents of the envelope).
The site I listed below has some basic copyright information. Hope it helps.
Sorry. Try it and you’ll be laughed out of court. See this posting. and more in the thread. The operational point is that there has never been a single case where this was held to prove copyright.
You: “See, the envelope is sealed.”
Attorney: “He could have mailed an empty envelope to himself unsealed and filled it later.”
You: “It’s got a post office tape on it.”
Attorney: “That could have been added later.”
You: “There’s a stamp across the seal.”
Attorney: “He sent the empty envelope and steamed open the other end.”
etc.
Try this experiment if you think this has any validity: Send an empty, unsealed envelope to yourself. Wait five years (ten to be sure). Then retype the latest best seller and put it in the envelope. Try to claim that you’re actually the author. Good luck.
As far a genuine advice goes, you hold a copyright on the lyrics merely by creating them. You can take the person to court, but can only ask them to stop publishing the work (whatever that might mean in an electronic context hasn’t been determined). You can also register your work first (you hav to do it within a certain time frame, though) and then sue and get damages.
Most message boards claim compilation copyrights, not copyrights on the individual posts. What this means is that they can reprint a thread that contains your work, but can’t just reprint the lyrics. However, this is also legal terra incognita.
No jackass, you mail yourself your own lyrics, NOT an empty envelope. Did you read my post?
Here is a lawyer’s opinion of “Common Law Copyright.”
Sorry about that jackass comment. 
bad night. My bad. And it does work if you do it right. The post office is not supposed to mail unsealed packages.
If you don’t want to take my opinion, take the lawyer who I quoted.
My point was that you cannot prove authorship by “common law copyright” (a right, BTW, which does not exist). The attorney for the defense would shred your claim to bits.
The post office doesn’t allow unsealed envelopes? Fine. Send one sealed and filled with paper. Carefully unseal the bottom. Wait five years. Stuff in a bogus manuscript, and glue the flap. I have your ass, Mr. Grisham.
Bottom line: it proves nothing, and has no legal standing. Even a sympathetic judge who believed your story would ask to see the proof of copyright registration.
I’d think probably the safest, quickest, and easiest way to have something important attributed to you would to visit your local notary public and get your documents notarized. I mean, yeah, theres a little fee to it, but at least then youd have a record that someone saw it on such and such a date.
I don’t know too much more as I’ve never needed a notary public for anything, but that’s the way I understand it.
As a notary public, I validate signatures, not facts. It is my job to assess that you are indeed John Q. Public if that is who you claim to be. I do that by requiring i.d. if I I don’t know you.
If you give me a page of lyrics, with a statement that says, “I wrote these.” and ask me to notarize your signature, I can do that. The lyrics could be “Yesterday/All my troubles seemed so far away” and I’d still sign it. Because I’m notarizing the validity of the signature not the validity of the document.
Since there is a signature and date, that might work as proof that what you wrote pre-dated what someone else wrote. But there are thousands of notaries and I’ll bet you’d be able to find a few hundred who would sign and pre-date something for you. And therein lies the problem with that form of proof.
We’re arguing about proof here, and that doesn’t seem to be part of Christopher’s problem. He says many people know that he wrote the lyrics (including, presumably, the person who posted them.) His problem is retaining rights in material that he (can prove that he) wrote but which have putatively been transfered to another party (the message board) by the friend’s act of posting thereon.
Here’s one thing that might be helpful. ISP’s are generally required by law to remove material that’s available on their system in violation of copyright. However, they only have to do this if they are aware of the infringement. So mail them a letter and ask them to remove the material. Also, you should immediately tell your friend to stop posting your material without permission.
As for the loss of your rights, I don’t think you’re in a lot of trouble. Your friend didn’t have authorization to post the lyrics, so he didn’t have authorization to transfer copyright. It’s analagous to a situation in which your friend had stolen a shirt from you and then given it to another person. No matter what the terms of their deal, that third party’s rights are inferior to yours, because the friend never had the rights in the shirt that he purported to give. The 3d party might sue your friend for the loss of value of the shirt, but it’s yours and you can get it back.
The same deal should apply in this case. Your friend can’t give away your rights in the lyrics without permission anymore than he can give away your rights in the shirt. Furthermore, message board posters do similar stuff all the time with news articles. This board’s pretty good, but on other MB’s I frequent, I often see entire articles posted verbatim. That doesn’t mean that all of a sudden Joe Shmoe who runs a message board has rights to the NY Times, because the person who posted the article didn’t have any rights to give him.
If you’re very worried about this, you should see an attorney. But unless these lyrics are already making you money (have you recorded them anywhere?) then it’s probably not worth the trouble and hassle.
Cliffy, Esq.
Really? I’ve received many letters that weren’t sealed. In fact, there have been times when I’ve accidently mailed letters without sealing them. I’ve never gotten anything back from the Post Office rejecting the letter due to the fact the envelope hasn’t been licked. I think that’s why the “mailing a document back to yourself” isn’t a valid method of establishing copyright…
Let’s cut to the chase.
If you are a serious writer, music or otherwise, you will copyright your work. Every songwriter I know does. If not, you leave yourself open to the possibility that someone can steal your work and copyright it themselves.
All your friends can get together and say you wrote it, and you can show off a bunch of letters you sent to yourself, but that won’t do you much good in court. He who gets to the copyright office first, usually wins.
Do the research and get on with it!
Again, let’s try to be more careful about the question asked. There is no dispute about whether Christopher is the actual author of the lyrics. He’s worried about whether the posting thereof on an MB serves as an effective authorization such that the MB owner can publish them later. Registering his copyright in the lyrics wouldn’t help him one bit with this problem. That answers the question “Who owns?”. He’s not afraid of that; he’s afraid of the answer to the question “Did the owner authorize republication by the MB?”.
–Cliffy, Esq.
Yes, Cliffy, but if he hasn’t copyrighted the work, how does he prove he owns it or produced it? If the question is “Did the owner authorize republication by the MB?” well, who owns it? Not the poster, who stated this on the board, according to the OP. But who then, legally and officially, not just by word-of-mouth?
Most of the theories posted about “proof of ownership” (friends, mailing to onesself) seem easily contested. I would think that the copyright issue would solve many problems before they start. As stated in the OP, “What can I do to be certain that I maintain the rights to these lyrics?”
If someone steals the lyrics you wrote, if you can prove that you wrote them, you can sue them for damages. If someone steals your idea for a machinery or gizmo and you can prove that you invented it, you can sue them. All the copywrite and trademark do is allow you to sue in federal court under a federal statute. One that allows treble damages for wilful infringement. It also registers it as proof of when you invented it.
The site should take down your lyrics if you tell them that they are yours. I can’t imagine any site that would keep up material without the consent of the creator.
I scanned each post and this didn’t seem to be pointed out: The copyright exists the moment the work is created. Period. You own the copyright the instant you create.
However…the issue becomes proving that you are the creator, and registration is the easiest way to do that.
Just wanted to point that out.
stoid
I wrote every post in this thread in 1992 as part of my story “An Outbreak of Mumps”. I am well aware that I failed to copyright, but I must say, the way you’ve mocked my foolishness so cruelly has really hurt.
::sniff::