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Have you ever worried about your valuable, copyright material getting ripped off?? I got one piece of copyright material ripped off. A little song, nothing special. It wasn’t even a hit – but we found that it had been recorded by at least six different record labels, on various ‘Dance’ compilation CD albums in North America – you know, the kind you see in those ‘Bargain Bins’ in supermarkets, at 99¢. Which is great - apart from the fact that nobody told me about it. They reckon the rip-off cost me about $225,000. As far as copyright theft goes, not a great deal of money. But a heck of a lot of money to me! Anyway, we went through the usual court proceedings, and I was represented by an attorney in the United States. (It was in Nashville). She did her best, but the main problem was that I was unable to prove that I had copyrighted the work when I claimed – or even that the copyright was mine in the first place. So why didn’t I have a US Copyright? Well, to begin with, I’m neither a US citizen nor am I based in the USA. I could have still used the US service, yes, but at the time, the $50 fee per work was a lot of money: I was putting out 20 - 40 songs or books or articles or jingles every month. I just couldn’t afford to copyright everything I was churning out. I had used what’s known as ‘Poor Man’s Copyright’ – you know, where you put a copy of your Intellectual Property in an envelope, seal it, send it to yourself by recorded delivery, get it delivered to you by your friendly postman, then keep it, without opening the envelope. And these days, you or I (if we’re crooked, that is) could easily forge just about anything with this computer you’re looking at and a little, Epson printer. So forget about that old-as-the-hills, ‘Poor Man’s Copyright’ notion. Plain daft. It didn’t work before computers and people still do it! Here’s another myth-buster: “If I put the Copyright Symbol after my work, then it’s copyright.” Hello-o-o-o-o-o-o... Nope. The ‘©’ symbol is no longer required under the terms of The Berne Convention. I mention this because it’s a widely-believed myth that the © means something - probably because we see it used so much in books, on CD’s, on Internet sites, album covers and so on. Just remember it means diddley squat. So at one point, my lawyer presented my ‘Copyright’ to the Court - my song, on an old-style audio cassette, in a sealed, stamped and date-post-marked envelope. A Court Official opened it, took a look, and handed it to the Judge. He more-or-less threw it aside. “What else have you got?” he demanded. My ‘Poor Man’s Copyright’ was classed ‘Inadmissible Evidence’ or some such other legal term. (I wasn’t at the hearing myself). But the point was this: it’s just way too easy to fake. But one thing that cannot befaked is the virtual, digital 'paper trail' that is left when you send an e-mail – because it passes through hundreds of servers along its trip, and each server keeps a record of that e-mail. So one way you can ewasily copyright your material is to e-mail it either to yourself, or better still, to a 'third party witness' who can independently witness the existence of your copyright, right down to the very second you sent it! IntelLoc provides that service, online, 24/7. By Norm MacLeod, Author, Musician and Copyright Consultant. For gathering more info about how you can copyright your work online for free, please check out this link.
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