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?
Comments
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.
pray it sounds nothing like Marvin Gaye lol
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.
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?.... :-)
These days I’d just be happy that something was out there.
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 ...
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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.
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.