Benefits of Copyright Registration

Your songs are your intellectual property. Same for anything band related that you produce - this is what you own. (You may think you spent a bundle on equipment, but it's your copyrightable material that truly represents your value.) Music piracy is a big enough problem as it is - the last thing you want to do is make it even easier for someone to steal your material without giving yourself recourse.

Advantages of federal copyright registration for musical compositions and sound recordings include:

• Copyright registration establishes a public record of your copyright.
• Your copyright must be registered in order to take legal action against an act of infringement.
• If registered within five years of publication, your registration certificate is prima facie evidence of the validity of your copyright.
• If registered within three months of publication or before an infringement occurs, once proven, statutory damages of up to $150,000 plus attorney's fees could be awarded to you as copyright owner, even if your actual damages are minimal.
• Registration provides powerful ammunition against potential infringement.
• If you don't register your copyright and someone else claims your work as their own, you will have to prove that it is actually yours. Registration avoids this burden of proof.
• Copyright encourages creativity by giving exclusive property rights to works of authorship, enabling you as the creator to reap financial rewards from your works by controlling access to the works in the marketplace.

The United States has copyright treaties with most countries throughout the world, and as a result of these agreements, each country respects the copyrights of the others. Currently, a U.S. copyright is honored in 190 countries around the world.

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