What Does Copyright Really Protect?

Written by Gary Ewer, Senior Instructor, Dalhousie University, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website.
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It might surprise you to know the aspects of songwriting that are not covered by copyright. In the world of music, there is much confusion surrounding copyright, what it is and what it protects. Let’s try to clear up some of this confusion.

In simple terms, copyright is the right to control almost every aspect of a created work. It is copyright that allows you, for example, to be the only one to publish, adapt or distribute a work. Copyright is automatic upon the creation of a work; you do not need to apply for copyright. When you write a song, assuming that you wrote the melody and the lyrics, you own the copyright. Setting someone else’s lyrics to music means that you own the copyright on the music, while the lyricist owns the copyright on the lyrics. And in such a case, you’d need the lyricist’s permission to set the words to music.

Copyright is transferable, but authorship is not. For example, if someone asks you to write a piece of music for their use, you may be able to transfer the copyright to that person, but that person can never claim authorship.

So you’ve just written a great new lyric, “Ooh, Yeah, Baby, It’s All About the Lovin’” and set it to music. You automatically own the copyright to this new song, but there are three things, you need to know, that are NOT protected by that copyright:

1. The title is not protected. Yes, sadly, that amazing title is not protected by copyright. Copyright also won’t protect names, slogans, or other short phrases. It is possible, however, that some of these aspects of a song can be protected by trademark. (Probably not the title to your song, though).
2. The chord progression is not protected. This is not too surprising. Given that there are really only certain chords that work together well in any given key, (and the amazing number of 3-chord songs out there) there would be millions of court cases dealing with copyright infringement over a song’s set of chord changes.
3. Your band’s name is not protected. Similar to the first point, a band’s name might be protected as a trademark, but using another band’s name does not constitute copyright infringement.

So here are the aspects of your new song that ARE protected by copyright:

1. The melody;
2. The lyrics; the copyright is owned by whoever has written the lyric, and shared if there are multiple authors);
3. The musical arrangement; if you wrote or otherwise indicated inprecise terms (i.e., written out, ideally) how the instruments in the band should play the song, that arrangement is protected by copyright.

Some other things you need to know:

• An idea for a song is not copyrightable. For example, if you said, “I want to write a song celebrating the inauguration of Barack Obama that uses the cooing sound of 1000 doves as the chorus…”, this idea cannot be protected. Someone can overhear your idea, write a song that uses the doves, and you can’t contest it.
• Copyright lasts for anywhere from 50 to 100 years. After that, a creative work becomes public domain unless the copyright is renewed. Sometimes, composers will slightly alter a piece so that the copyright on the revised work can be extended.
• A song does not need to be published in order to be protected by copyright.

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