The new GRAM and GRUW applications finally make it affordable

If you’ve written a Song, you want to share it. You feel a pressing need to share it. Of course you do. As Paul Simon observed many years ago, writing songs that voices never share makes no sense. When you post your music online, though, you risk losing your rights to perform it, make copies of it, and distribute them to others. It is not uncommon for people to like something they’ve heard online, perform and record it themselves without permission, and then beat the songwriter to the Copyright Office, with the result that they have been able to stop the actual composer from performing his or her own song. There have been cases where the original songwriter has even been sued for performing or distributing copies of his own song!

Is registration really necessary?

You might think it is not necessary to Register copyrights in songs because you’ve heard that copyrights comes into being as soon as you write them down or record them. It is true that in the United States a copyright can come into existence when a work is fixed in a tangible medium of expression.  The catch is that it has to be an original work when that happens.  Registration creates a presumption that the copyright in the work is valid, which means the person with the registration has the benefit of a legal presumption that it was original to him when he wrote it down (or recorded it, as the case may be). To defeat the registrant’s claim, the actual songwriter will have to prove not only that the person who stole the song copied it, but also that the person who really wrote it did not copy it himself. Without the benefit of a legal presumption, that can be extremely difficult to do.

Another reason copyrights need to be registered is that it is necessary to have a registered copyright before you can enforce it in a U.S. court. Yet the Copyright Office takes months, sometimes years, to process a registration application. An awful lot of infringing can take place before that happens. You can ask the Copyright Office to expedite your application, but that will cost you an extra $800, on top of everything else. So the sooner you can get your application in, the better.

Next, registration gives constructive notice of your claim to all the world. That can help you defeat a claim of innocent infringement.

Finally, waiting too long after publishing a work to register it can cause  you to lose your right to claim statutory damages for infringement. You lose your eligibility for statutory damages unless you register the work either before infringement begins or within 3 months after first publication.

The ideal thing to do, then, is register the copyrights in your songs before you publish them. If the songs have already been published, then registering them within the first three months after publication is ideal. If it is  too late to do that, then at least try to get them registered before someone begins infringing them.

Bottom line: The sooner you get your songs registered, the better.

New group registration options to the rescue

Until now, songwriters (who are notoriously poor when they first start out) have been in a real bind. The filing fee to register a single song by one composer who still owns all the rights to it is currently $45. To register a song you co-wrote with someone else, or a recording with more than one performer on it, it’s $65.* So, if you’ve written 10 unpublished songs, it would cost you $450 to $650 to register each of them individually. If you’ve published an album with 20 original songs on then it, it would cost you $9o0 to $1,300 to register them all individually. If you were to individually register a collection of 50 songs that you and/or you and other members of your band have written, you’d be looking at paying $3,250 in filing fees

Now here’s the good news. You can apply to register up to 10 unpublished songs together for a single filing fee of $85 if you use the GRUW application. Here’s even better news: In March, 2021, the Copyright Office premiered a new option for registering a group of published songs together for one filing fee. Called the GRAM application (short for “group registration of an album of published musical works”), it allows you to apply to register up to 20 published songs on the same album for a single filing fee of $65, potentially saving you over $1,000.

Learn  how to do it yourself

The eligibility, application and deposit requirements for the various kinds of registration options for music copyrights — Single, Standard, GRUW, GRAM, collective work registration — are fairly detailed and involved. Failing to comply with them to the letter, though, can hold up an application for months, sometimes even a year or more. Worse, it may result in the denial of your application. Filing fees are not refundable. So you are going to want to make sure you select the right form, complete it correctly, and send in the correct deposit in the right format and in the right way.

To learn how to register music copyrights yourself, click here to enroll in my on-demand course, Copyright Registration for Songs and Music Albums. In the course, I also explain what declarations of ownership in musical works (DOMWs) are, and when and how you should use them. Udemy has this course listed at $69.99, but songwriters can enroll for $14.00 (80% discount) by using this coupon code at checkout (copy and paste): 0ED0415F5FD15A083158

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*Fees stated are as of August 15, 2021. Fees change periodically. Check copyright.gov for current fee information.

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