How to protect my work?

DiscoStu

How do I protect my ideas?
We're in lockdown; a very good friend of mine suggested swapping ideas back and forth for a bit of fun to keep us occupied which initially sounded like a great idea but now I'm getting alarm bells.
I got sent a drum track made from preset Garageband loops as a .wav file, I then wrote a guitar track over it in Reaper and sent it back as an updated .wav.
The reason I'm worried is that my friend has told me that they've now passed my updated .wav recording to a third party to overdub, which is not what I agreed to and which puts my writing in to the public domain. I wrote something over some Garageband loops, remember.

I have the original drum loop, and all my takes, saved as Reaper project.

How do I go about protecting what I've written?

andy_k

copyright is a bit of a minefield, drum beats can't be copyright for music terms.
generally, once the piece is put into 'fixed' media. copyright applies.
It used to be sent to the copyright office for storage, and filing, but now that is not practical.
You could burn the idea to CD, and post to yourself-the postcode is supposed to guarantee the date if a dispute arises later on, but that doesn't really hold up in court---who would guarantee an envelope has not been opened?

The modern equivalent is possibly a dated Reaper project, and I would create a dated PDF explaining the writing process in the folder, anything to support the date of writing, if that is possible.
I am not sure what else you can do, other than release the idea first-even as a rough demo.
It only really matters if, at a later date, there is a court case arguing over money, the cost of pursuing a court case has to be factored in to the profit worthiness of such a move.
At least that is how it looked to me this time last year when I wrote about it for my dissertation.

Jez6345789

No expert but as said document the process save any messages between you. Document and make sure it’s all backed up in case of accidents.

pray it sounds nothing like Marvin Gaye lol

thegummy

What does the guitar part consist of?

If it's a specific melody that you've written then it's definitely copyrightable. You could even write the melody on paper and post that to yourself (that's the method I've always known of but I'm sure there must be modern digital ways of copyrighting these days).

If it's a rhythm track of a chord progression then it's not copyrightable (and is pretty much definitely not original anyway). Even if you could prove you played that specific recording, if it was going to be a hit they could just re-record it since chord progressions can't be copyrighted.

If it's an improvised noodly solo then I'm not sure how that stands really. I don't think it's really something that would be important to the success of a record so if it was to be included in a commercially successful track, I don't know how much you'd be able to claim you added to the writing of the song. I'm sure I've heard of cases where songs whose instrumental sections really do make a huge part of the success and think I remember it being hard to get writing credits. Whiter Shade of Pale comes to mind and I think even then the keyboard player only received quite limited credit. So compare how that keyboard part contributes to the song to the average improvised guitar solo.

In short, I think that if you wrote a specific original melody yourself then you can easily copyright it and I'd probably do the sheet music thing.

But if it's anything a session player would be expected to do, e.g. recording some chords as a rhythm track, improvised licks etc. then I think it'd be hard to get anything from it.

I just wouldn't swap tracks with that guy again if he was passing it on to people against my will.

Snags

The old "post it to yourself in envelope" thing - you include dated material in the envelope and seal it with something tamper proof, like sealing wax.

The problem with electronic stuff is that it's trivial to touch files in order to tweak their date stamps etc. so if you want to do something electronic you will probably need a third party who can verify what you submitted, and when it was submitted, and then puts it in the data equivalent of a vault. Which is likely to cost.

Or just upload it as a private video on YouTube or something; that way an independent body is responsible for date stamping it.

Or do all of the above.

As andy_k says, it only becomes relevant if there's a punch-up down the line, which will only happen if someone makes some money. It's that old imbalance between copyright being inherent in the act of creation, but largely impossible to prove if you create in a (semi)vacuum.

TheBigDipper

I've been through this loop a few times and - TBH - it's probably stopped me from collaborating once or twice with people that I really should have. Sometimes your pure vision is the right one and sometimes things are better with the eyes of someone else on it. 

Today, there's so little money being made from recorded music, that I no longer feel at risk if I share an idea with someone else and they have a go at working with it. 

So, no practical advice about proving your original work was done at a certain date/time, but a suggestion that you don't worry too much. Maybe the thing to do is pop your playing over the drum track up on here and we'll all be able to say we heard it on a certain date?....  :-) 

digitalkettle

TheBigDipper said:

Today, there's so little money being made from recorded music, that I no longer feel at risk if I share an idea with someone else and they have a go at working with it.

Had a situation years ago where a band member went rogue...after a bit of thought the remaining three of us figured out what 25% of fk all was and left it at that

 These days I’d just be happy that something was out there.

TTony

DiscoStu said:

a very good friend of mine suggested swapping ideas back and forth f

DiscoStu said:

How do I go about protecting what I've written?

They're either a "very good friend", or they're not.

TheBigDipper said:

Today, there's so little money being made from recorded music, that I no longer feel at risk if I share an idea with someone else and they have a go at working with it. 

And this ^^


Just have fun doing it.  Enjoy the contributions/suggestions of others.  See if they take the track somewhere you wouldn't have done.  You may even end up "borrowing" their ideas ...

thecolourbox

I've avoided having to look into this sort of thing by only ever writing useless crap that nobody would ever want to copy or steal...

spark240

What about the old IRSC code thing?

DiscoStu

4:54am. I'd had a good drink in me alright! But hey, it was my birthday yesterday so to hell with it.
I'm probably overthinking it. I've played with this person a few times in the past and we're good friends, I just wasn't expecting my idea to be shared around is all, I thought it was just a bit of fun between us. It won't change the world and it won't buy me a house but I liked what I did and might want to use it again in the future, but if it becomes part of something bigger then do I have a right to use my parts later?
It was a few riffs as a rhythm track.

thegummy

DiscoStu said:

4:54am. I'd had a good drink in me alright! But hey, it was my birthday yesterday so to hell with it.
I'm probably overthinking it. I've played with this person a few times in the past and we're good friends, I just wasn't expecting my idea to be shared around is all, I thought it was just a bit of fun between us. It won't change the world and it won't buy me a house but I liked what I did and might want to use it again in the future, but if it becomes part of something bigger then do I have a right to use my parts later?
It was a few riffs as a rhythm track.

What I was really getting at with my reply was that a few chords and riffs on guitar isn't really seen as anything by music publishers or legal types. Unless the riff is very obviously the main thing in the song (like smoke on the water, maybe). They really care about the melody and lyrics. Maybe some other kind of hook if it could be proved that it really is massively important to the song.

It does make sense really, if you took an average hit record and, instead of having a top-of-the-game session player play some incredibly clever, well played rhythm track that guitar players would be in awe of, just had the producer play a simple part on guitar instead, it would have pretty much zero effect on the success of the song.

Best thing to do is just not even think about any legal aspect of it, it's just going to stop you having fun when it's so unlikely to ever come up. In the odd chance someone did have a hit record that used your guitar part you could always apply for work as a session player by saying you played on a hit.

thegummy

There's a few documentaries out about the legendary session player groups of the 50s, 60s and 70s - it's well known they played on countless massive hits and even contributed greatly to some of the songs with parts they came up with but they just got paid to be session players, they didn't receive writing royalties.

andy_k

Its all about the song.