Infringement is what occurs when one party (meaning a person, group, or company) violates another party's copyright. Examples of infringement could be illegally copying or distributing someone else's copyrighted work or claiming ownership of a work that's substantially similar to someone else's copyrighted work. Depending on the type and severity of the infringement, the skills of the lawyers involved, and the disposition of the judge on a given day, a “guilty” verdict in an infringement case could have results ranging from a “cease and desist” order prohibiting further infringement to fines and damages totaling millions of dollars.

Concern over copyright infringement is also a factor on the inside of the music business: Some of the newest genres like electronica and rap rely largely on taking samples and creating loops directly from the work of other songwriters and musicians. This raises the questions of who should receive credit and royalties for a given work and how they should be divided.

Fighting Back

What can you protect against infringement? The lyric and the melody are the parts protected by your copyright. What does that mean? The closest thing to a tangible explanation is that the lyric is a work resulting from the order in which you place the words and the melody is a work resulting from the order and duration of notes. Thus, if a work duplicates a substantial portion of the patterns of order and/or duration of notes or words in your work, it might be infringing on your copyright.

Might? Well, you may also have to prove that the authors of the other work had access to yours. If you write something, show it to no one, and put it in your attic and someone a thousand miles away who's never even met you writes a similar work, you might have a hard time getting any money out of a lawsuit. If it was not the person's intent to violate your rights, it's considered a “no harm, no foul” situation. If you have a good lawyer and a copyright registration predating the other person's work, you might get a portion of his or her copyright and/or a “cease and desist” order.

This reinforces once again the importance of copyright registration and of publicly performing your work. If you register your copyright, you establish with certainty a date after which any similar works may be suspect. If you perform publicly, especially on radio or television or in a touring act, you increase the odds of proving that access to your work was readily available and that infringement was intentional, which is a criminal offense, carries tougher fines and punishments, and the possibility of a higher damage award to the copyright holder.

Prepare to Be Boarded

Perhaps the biggest concern of songwriters these days is the issue of Internet song piracy. By some estimates, ten of billions of copyright violations are occurring every year. Music pirates are illegally downloading songs from the Internet and making copies of downloads without paying the songwriters, publishers, recording artists, or record companies.

This has caused a slump in the music business. However, if piracy problems can be addressed, songwriting revenues could hit an all-time high. Downloadable music reduces material, packaging, transportation, and warehousing costs to zero, so records can be sold for far less — people can buy more records and we can all make more money.