When Is Your Song Considered 'Published'?

[mojobone]

This Q&A article speaks to photographers, but the principles apply equally to music and licensing, so it should clear up any confusion on how the copyright office makes the determination.

http://www.copyrightalliance.org/2016/03/copyright_qa

[Casey H]

I've always been taught that for songs, "published" means offered for sale. So once a song is, for example, up on iTunes, CD Baby, etc. for download purchase, offered for sale on a CD, etc. it is published. What I am not as sure about is if it is placed in a music library to be pitched for Film/TV. We'd have to ask a lawyer that one.

One reason this matters a lot is regarding whether others can record your song. If a song has never been published, the artist has to get your express consent "First Use" authorization and AFAIK the mechanical royalty rate is negotiable. Once a song is published, it falls under the "compulsory license" law and anyone can record the song without your express permission as long as they pay the statutory rate which is currently 9.1 cents per mechanical copy (CD, vinyl album, cassette, etc).

Casey

[mojobone]

Excellent point. According to the article, the point of distinction is monetization, roughly speaking. For example, your exclusive tune in a library has never been offered for sale, but if it comes out in a feature film, it's published on the date of the film's release if it wasn't before. How could it be published before? If you signed it to a a publisher, as opposed to pitching direct to the supervisor or director. If you have a demo reel on Soundcloud you probably shouldn't authorize downloads unless the track is private; even then, you should probably register it as a collection, even if the individual tracks may later be re-registered by other parties. If you registered your Soundcloud tracks with any royalty collection agency, they're most likely considered 'published' if they can be streamed.

http://blog.songtrust.com/publishing-ti ... from-both/

My take on the matter is if anyone is actively pitching your track, you should probably register the copyright unless that entity has done so 9or will do so) as part of the agreement.

[Kolstad]

Wasn't the copyright office the ones who had Win XP computers in 2015?
I think the text is a little biased towards registering.

The is such a thing as a webcrawler at archive.org, which in fact "crawls" the websites of the world and archive them. This means that you can validate old material that has been uploaded on the web, because archive.org is an independent organization.

For copyrights this means that you can find evidence of your copyright from the time where archive.org registered the content on the website.

Because this evidence is collected by an independent organization, you can use this in a court of law.

A court of law will evaluate the collected evidence as a whole, so every little bit counts. And evidence collected by an independent organization, which you cannot manipulate, is hard proof.

So, for the question it implies that your song is basically "published", in the sense made publically available, when you upload it to the Internet. Anywhere on the Internet, where the general public (and webcrawlers) has access.