Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Composer's Lounge alternatives to U.S. copyright?

Hi Everyone,

There is a saying that it isn't wise to place all of one's eggs in one basket. As a composer, I wonder about this in regard to reliance on the U.S. Copyright Office. One can think of scenarios in 2015 such as cyber warfare, and hackers deleting overnight all electronic files and records there. Maybe the data would be recoverable, and maybe there are secure backups, and maybe not. Either way, a loss of the digital records including the date of deposit and for millions of accumulated items, even when a physical score is there in deposit, would not be something that could be recovered from.

And one can ponder other scenarios. With 18 trillion dollars in technical debt plus interest that will be spread out over decades, and growing, I do have concern about the long term political stability of the U.S. I am a U.S. citizen, so this is not intended as criticism of the U.S.A., and yet this and some other unsustainable trends show no indications of reversal and even have accelerated in recent years.

Maybe someone here is aware of alternatives to U.S. copyright, just in case there ever is a "black swan" scenario that impairs the function of U.S. copyrights and also the effective national and international enforcement of them?

You're touching on different subjects. No copyright office is ENFORCING any law. Neither are the PROs around the world.

Universal copyright laws claim that if you have tangible proof that a work of art is yours from a certain date, then it's yours. The end! The "tangible proof" part is the problematic, as in the US copyright infringement is a federal crime and federal courts ONLY accept the copyright office registration as proof. None other.

Alternatives can be found in other countries, but the best you can bet on is getting published and getting rich and famous and all that!

Years ago I used to worry about copyright. Would my precious words be stolen and commandeered by some thief who would then go on to spectacular fame and rob me of my rightful fortune? Well I had an editor who assured me that this was highly unlikely. Very few unknown artists, writers or musicians are in danger of having their creations "stolen". Scouring my memory I can think of none ... apart from already famous artists who often attract people who "fake" new creations and the artist's signature. Dali made the error of signing thousands of sheets of blank paper for $40 per signature, a practice he stopped in 1980 or so. And so there are a goodly number of Dali prints circulating which bear a genuine signature but are blatant forgeries.

However to be in danger of having one's work stolen, one must be already famous. A popular tune might be cadged I suppose. But classical musicians are quite safe. I had one theft ... a young composer who took my work and made variations on it. I told him to either acknowledge his source ... which was me. Or to stop. He very quickly stopped.

What really requires formal copyright are inventions. Here is where huge amounts of money are involved and genuine thefts do occur. My incredible little ten pound machine which captures solar energy at a highly accelerated rate and is a viable replacement for solar roof panels, deserves protection. A LOT of protection, since this device will transform the use of solar energy. This is worth hiring a lawyer, making sure my copyright is air tight and paying whatever fees are necessary. Quickly. Before someone bumps me off and runs off with my specs.

But alas, my entire collection of Sonatinas are quite safe.

Hem... Nicky?

Inventions do NOT get copyright. They get patented instead!

And a patent is highly different to copyright for several reasons:
1. A patent only lasts a handful of years and the specs are NECESSARILY available to the public.

Copyright lasts 70 years after the death of the artist (in most countries).

2. A patent is free to access because science needs to carry on progressing and money is no excuse to that. Copyright is NOT free in all accounts because there's no advancement if you get to see Thomas Ades new work or not.

3. Patent is professional and all about business.

Copyright is personal and all about the artist's personal experience.

(Work for hire is a separate issue that I won't touch here).

Think of it this way, because it's not about money: You write your best work, based on your experience of loosing your mother (god forbid this should happen) and after a short while you find out that someone used that music to put music in their next porn video.

Do you exercise your right to copy, or not?

_____________________________

That said I will agree that chances of getting anything stolen are really slim, and learning about it is even slimmer, and even more so getting the US copyright office archives hacked is even slimmer.

In all we're talking about getting hit by lightning, a car and bitten by a shark at the same time!

Ah Nikolas ... I am so embarrassed that I'm sitting here in a little ball of shame. My only excuse for this obvious and egregious error was that it was after 2 AM when I wrote the comment. And was so eager to make the point regarding "material value" ... that I jumped the gun ..

But without the patent, those specs are indeed vulnerable to theft. They become available only AFTER the patent has been registered. Which is
a similar protection. The fine line being of course that I'm not required to publish or make available my copyright music. Copyright doesn't make disclosure mandatory. ( Thank goodness ... )


And you bring up an excellent point regarding "usage". On the face of it, most people are thinking that their precious Sonata must be protected from some else claiming to have written it ... not the ( to my mind anyway) much more horrific possibility that it be mis-used. As far as I know, any score I've offered on my website could be used for anything from advertising cat food to background music for a pole dancer. I have no control over that. I can only hope that at least the pole dancer will opt for something less ...er ... classical.

Thanks for the kick in the butt. I've learned a good lesson. No posts after midnight. And re-read before posting!

I agree with all that you say. The odds of an eventual and catastrophic financial and monetary crisis in the U.S. though appear to be 100%. Buildings will be ransacked and burned, I think, when gasoline is $20 a gallon.

You are quite right, and for my part, I can't imagine Funeral Sarabande working well to advertise cat music . . . though doing something crazy like that might actually get people to watch it . . . maybe the hypothetical pole dancer should use the slow movement of Bruckner's Symphony No. 8, or Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstucke Op. 11?

One never knows what can happen. I wouldn't doubt that at least some composers with deadlines, and waning "inspiration", might look around here and there casually for something to adapt or use when they can not get the motor started.

Maybe an unethical student has an academic deadline . . . and there is a whole industry now for ghost written student papers . . . and maybe some students seek to borrow for composition assignments.

I think a Polyphonist post from years ago mentioned a composition student who did this, but lifted the material from a public domain source.

As long as you can prove you created whatever it is you worked on, it should be fine. This is why I use MIDI piano files and upload them onto the internet. Most sites will keep the date of which they were uploaded or made (which can also be determined by the file's properties). This can also be done by compressing files or taking pictures, as long as it gets uploaded to another host with credibility, or it can be released to multiple people and keeps consistency.



I'm not sure when this assurance was made, but I can assure you myself from experience that nowadays it's much more likely. I've come across plenty of people who have stolen works from other less known artists and friends of mine, as well as even myself at one point. With the internet, it's easy for people to just look for something that has little attention and then attempt to take credit to show off to their friends, claiming it's theirs and thinking the original creator won't find out. I would say it's pretty common.

Sketch XII:

I don't agree that it's common really. Can you link us with an example, please?

And I also don't agree with the idea that uploading something on the net is proof enough. The "credibility" part is the problem. Even youtube and soundcloud have issues with credibility, so what's left?

Okay, to say that it's common to come across I isn't exactly what I mean, but that it likely happens a lot considering I've come across it about 8 times on youtube, and that's with the people doing it being completely unknown themselves. Not to say that it's something that should be worried about (until the stolen content becomes more known through the wrong person). I looked through my reply history on youtube to look for some but could only find two and most others seem to have deleted videos now anyways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv3kyxYc2EY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMcdwRBFTzs (see my comment)
(the second one isn't necessarily stolen, but originally the uploader claimed to have remade it from scratch in description and boasted about it. While it's not exactly a totally unknown track and is from something somewhat popular, I would still say it's still a valid point as to not have a midi file released and being somewhat obscure as something from a soundtrack, up for grabs in a similar enough sense without the variable of fame but rather showing off).

As far as credibility of sites, what I mean to specify rather is that as long as you can put a [globally consistent credible (as in not determined by your computer alone)] date on something you made without being able to change the date (or if you do, it's made known) or change the content and as long as you have no direct affiliation with the owners of whatever host site in a way that you can edit code that has to do with the way it keeps dates, it's credible enough.

For example, here you can see when I edited this post. I can't change that, however, it would be suspicious if I had personal messages between the owner of the site but that isn't the case and I can prove it isn't at this moment. \/
On the subject of keeping copyright and if I were to, for example, have a file attached, I would just have to be careful to not edit this again, therefore changing it's content.
(with that said though, the theoretical file attached, not that it's possible on this site, would have to be through here only and not through a third party or possible to edit through other means)

Hi Nikolas,

The difficulty with the alternatives in these other countries is that they seem a bit nebulous in defining the requirements. The definition is there, but there isn't a catalogue of criteria that one can use to verify if one has or has not successfully copyrighted a work. Maybe - for instance - my compositions already have copy protection in Sweden simply as the result of various and particular, innocuous actions, but how is this verified and why would a country such as the U.S. accept a seemingly impossible to verify copyright in Sweden?

The only exception I have found is China, which does have a copyright registration system similar to that in the U.S. - and one could register everything at both to spread out the risks.

The obvious difficulty is - and I have some Chinese friends - is that one is not necessarily going to want to provide financial support to, or do business with, the People's Republic of China. I am not going to do that.

Yet there are almost 200 countries in the world, and I have a feeling that there may be a third country where one can comprehend if a work is or is not copyrighted. Though I haven't researched it, I am thinking that maybe Piano World with its welcoming of an international community of members may have someone who knows of at least a third country to consider. This would save one a lot of time in not having to go down the list researching the countries.

There are numerous treaties relating to copyright, e.g. the Berne Convention, which give reciprocal protection among the countries that are a party to them (Sweden and the US are both adherents to these various treaties).

Here's some information about this from the US Copyright Office, including a list of the treaty countries: http://copyright.gov/circs/circ38a.pdf.

Obviously, countries that won't adhere to the treaties aren't likely to care about your rights regardless of what you do.

Most treaties between countries don't last very long.

The quest is to identify a country in addition to the U.S. - and not the People's Republic of China - in which copyright protection is verifiable as a matter of government record. In Sweden, for instance, there is no way to have knowledge as to if a work of the performing arts is copy protected unless it winds up in court.

First of all, most treaties last a very long time, sometimes even when the countries are at war with each other. The Berne Convention itself is well over a hundred years old. If you don't trust the treaties or the abilities of the various countries to enforce their own laws, why would you think there's some magic form out there somewhere that's going to protect you above and beyond those things.


The US Certificate of Registration is prima facie evidence of the validity of copyright in all 180+ treaty nations, and if you don't trust cyber records, you still have the physical paper certificate itself. Furthermore, if the paranoid apocalyptic doomsday scenarios that you mention in your first post actually did come to pass, there will be no-one on earth anywhere who is going to give a crap about whether your little composition is protected from some punk music pirate from Afghanistan.

Whether a treaty lasts ten years or one hundred and twenty five years, the duration is finite. Why should one care that the Berne Convention is almost 125 years old if there isn't any guarantee that it can make it to the 130 year mark?

What good is the certificate or a treaty if the copyright registration records are deleted and no one even can find an item in its physical deposit which links through the (deleted) records back to the certificate and the owner?

Maybe you know of an alternative to both the U.S.A. and the People's Republic of China where it is possible to have knowledge that a work of the performing arts is copy protected as per that nation's requirements. This is the focus of this thread.

Maybe by having a work of the performing arts registered in two jurisdictions, then if there is a failure of service in one jurisdiction, one still is covered through the services provided in the other jurisdiction.

Michael, if you're so paranoid about the civilized world sinking into the sea five years from now, and all the laws of nations and digital records relating to copyright obliterated by the Script Kiddie Collective, including all the redundant backups and all the physical copies everywhere, and the US and Sweden overrun by hordes of roving cannibals, then how could you imagine that there's any place on the planet that's going to guarantee that someone's freakin' copyright registration will be kept safe from such things. IOW, why would you think Country X and not Country Y would be immune from the Zombie Apocalypse.

Hi Daro,

Why are you trying to take this thread off topic?

Michael, this question of yours is completely off-topic, and I have to say, I don't much care for your egregious attempt to derail what future historians might very well have characterized as an "Awesome Thread." Now that honor might be lost forever thanks to you. In any case, any answer I might give to your question would itself be completely off-topic, and I tell you that I am not going to let that happen. No sir!

As for the topic, as I recall, you wanted to know where would your registrations be safe if the USA was destroyed, and all the treaties governing copyright were abrogated. Perhaps you found my responses too oblique, so try this: The answer is, "Nowhere." I'm very sorry that you don't like the answer. Now if you wish to discuss the matter further, I can only respectfully suggest that you do so with your local psychiatrist, and neither of us waste any more of Frank's bandwidth on this nonsense.

</thread>

Hi Daro,

Thanks for your observations. I don't have any detailed references here on every nation's copyright laws, and I don't think you have such a reference handy either.

Why don't we avoid off topic meanderings, and let's wait and see what other members may want to contribute [and on topic] to this thread, shall we?

Okay, well, I guess Daro finally figured out that in the event of a global "Zombie Apocalypse" I would reestablish the governance of New Sweden, with copy protection in force and through a universally offered registration system. I would proceed to offer Daro the position of Secretary of Music, with a primary mission goal of observing upon the successful reduction of the quantity of parallel fifths in the standard repertoire, and also in regard to the adequacy of safeguards in place against invasion by quarter-tone scale systems and versus the propagation of subversive graphic notation.

Now that this is settled, maybe someone knows of a jurisdiction in addition to that of the U.S.A., and also in addition to that of the People's Republic of China, which provides the service of a copyright registration system . . .