If you're going to copyright songs using the $35 thing, bundle them up and copyright a group of songs as an album. Or double album. The protection is no less than if you copyrighted them one by one. The risk of being robbed between writing song #1 and song #12 is negligible, and don't worry quite so much about making a legit album that holds up-- you're just doing this for the copyright, right?
But the letter of the law is clear, it seems, though
I am not a lawyer. As soon as you write it, it's copyrighted, and the only way someone else can legally create something that would otherwise seem like "infringement" is if they never were exposed your work. That's a key piece of information, and it's kind of why mailing it to yourself isn't a strong protection. Putting an album up on soundcloud, or amazon.com, etc. That's pretty strong I would think, though of course
I am not a lawyer. It would be hard to make a case that you had no chance of being exposed-- unless everybody is prepared to get a list of your IP addresses from your internet provider and then convince Spotify or whoever to tell you which IPs had listened to which songs, etc.
Posting to Song Fight is definitely a way to publicize copyright (or publicize your infringement of same, natch), though a fairly low-trafficked method that could probably be defended against by an honest "WTF is a Song Fight?" response in a deposition.
It's not exactly true that the people with money always win copyright infringement cases, as shown by some of the more high profile incidents I've linked below. That's not to diminish their ability to get their way, but it's still possible to defend your copyright as an independent. And the law will say what the law will say, even if you're an idiot like the first lady below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/nyreg ... d=all&_r=0 But Ms. Harley proceeded to do just about everything possible to sabotage her own claim. She failed to appear for hearings or showed up late. Judges accused her of interrupting them, filing frivolous motions, disobeying court orders and refusing to participate in the discovery process. She accused judges of bias. She was admonished in court, ordered to pay about $13,000 in sanctions and even barred from using certain evidence. One particularly exasperated judge observed: “The world is going to end someday, and my job is to try to see that this case gets adjudicated before the world ends.” And then something remarkable happened: Ms. Harley won her case.
http://www.davies.com.au/pub/detail/536 ... ght-appeal the iconic flute riffs of the 1980s Men At Work hit ‘Down Under’ had infringed the copyright in the children’s campfire song ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gumtree’ penned by Marion Sinclair in 1934. The decision brings to a close one of the most high-profile copyright cases in recent years, and will mean the EMI companies (owners and licensees of the Down Under copyright) must pay Larrikin (owner of the copyright in Kookaburra) 5% of all royalties they received from Down Under.
http://www.hitfix.com/news/marvin-gaye- ... right-case
http://www.delcotimes.com/arts-and-ente ... king-songs Oasis took the song, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony),” which was a jingle for Coca-Cola in the ’70s, and made it into the hit single, “Shakermaker.” The band was successfully sued by The New Seekers, the group that performed the song.
George Harrison’s post-Beatles No. 1, “My Sweet Lord,” is one of the most famous sound-alike cases. Bearing an uncanny resemblance in almost every respect to The Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine,” a long litigation followed, resulting in all of the royalties from “My Sweet Lord” having to be surrendered, along with some of the money earned from the three-album set it came from, “All Things Must Pass.”
The Stones released the bland single “Anybody Seen My Baby?” in 1997 on the equally abysmal “Bridges to Babylon” record. But the song’s refrain sounds exactly like k.d. Lang’s hit, “Constant Craving,” which landed on the charts five years prior. Both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards denied having ever heard the track, but agreed it was similar enough to give Lang and her co-writer a songwriting credit on the song.
HTH,
JB
