My name's Michael Harrington.
I'm a professor of music and intellectual property.
I'm a musician.
I've been a professional musician since I was 12.
I fell into the world of copyright later on,
and I work as an expert witness and a consultant in cases involving music.
Copyright is something that's mysterious.
Most of us know little about it.
You're not born knowing it.
You're not born with an inclination to do it.
You fall in love with music, usually, and then you start doing that.
And later on you start to learn something about law and business.
So you have a copyright from the moment you create something.
It only needs to have two things-- it needs to be original,
that means it came out of your head.
And has to have some tiny bit of creativity.
The Supreme Court called it a modicum of creativity.
So if you want to sound heavy and legal, you'd say modicum of creativity.
So it has to be original.
And has to be fixed in a tangible medium of expression.
But that they mean sheet music, you recorded it, audio or video,
formed in an MP3 or MP4, something like that.
So that's what you need to have a copyright.
There are a lot of myths about copyright.
For example, people think you have to send your music to Washington, DC
and it has to be registered with the Copyright Office.
That's a nice thing to do.
There are benefits to registering your copyright.
But it already is copyrighted from the moment of creation.
So all you have to do-- it has to be original, you didn't copy it.
And it has to be fixed.
You have copyright right from the moment of creation.
If you took 30 days to write something, every version in those 30 days
is protected.
You have copyright protection in your work.
Someone couldn't come along and take what you did day three.
You own all of them.
So that's important to realize.
We still operate under two copyright laws.
If you're born after 1978 and you're creating music,
then what affects you is the one law called the 1976 Copyright Act.
The 1976 Copyright Act went into effect January 1st 1978.
It protects all music from January 1st 1978 onward.
The term of copyright, meaning how long does it last,
is now the life of the author plus 70 years after you're dead.
That relationship will outlast any marriage.
Marriage does end at death.
It really does.
But copyright goes 70 years after.
Next thing to know is what stuff is covered by copyright.
Copyright protects your expression.
It doesn't protect an idea.
So if you had an idea to write a song about someone you broke up with,
then go ahead.
And if the person's name is Amy and you wrote a song Breaking up with Amy,
so you did it.
That's an idea you had.
You want to then express it in a certain way.
Someone else could have broken up with someone named Amy,
and they broke up with this Amy years before you did.
And then suddenly they think you're copying
their music or their expression.
Which you're not, because by default this is just a basic kind of idea.
So it's also not original.
What type of creativity-- this is more a fact, it's an idea.
So the idea is not protected.
The expression of the idea is.
Copyright is really important because it's
the only time you have federal protection in what you do.
The entire federal government is behind this.
It's a federal law.
It's not state, city, municipal.
So that gets to be really significant.
It's a federal action.
You have our government backing you.
In fact, copyright is in the Constitution.
When they were writing the Constitution, Article 1
was what powers the legislators should have-- and this is 1787 or so.
Congress had the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
And that was about protecting copyrights and patents.
So copyright goes back to those days.
And the point of copyright is to promote the progress
of science and useful arts.
The sentence goes on in the Constitution to say
by securing to authors and inventors the exclusive rights
to their respective writings and discoveries.
So in other words, the government gives you
a monopoly on what you created, but also for a limited time.
And then when you have this incentive to create
and have a government backing you, you're likely to create more and more.