Furthermore, these broad rights translate into hundreds of more specific rights. Technically, all you have to do to get these rights is put your song in fixed form, like on paper or a recording. From that moment on, you have a copyright on your song. Registering that copyright with the Library of Congress is something you must do in order to protect your rights and cash in an infringement. All you have to do to register your copyright is fill out a form and send it in, along with a copy of your song and a fee to cover paperwork and storage in the archives.

You can't copyright the ideas or topics you write about, even if you're the first person to think of them. If you figure out a totally new way to look at love, nothing prevents every other songwriter in the world from writing a song using the exact same viewpoint. The same is mostly true for hooks and titles — they're up for grabs.

However, if you in any way give the impression that your song is related or the same as someone else's, you could be in legal trouble. Common phrases and clichés can't be copyrighted, neither can chords or chord patterns. Also, the notes and words you use aren't new, so you can't copyright them.

The only problem with all these exclusive rights is that it's hard to make money without getting rid of most of them first. What? That doesn't make sense? Okay, let's put it this way: Most of these rights are assigned to a publisher when you sign a contract. The publisher will then, hopefully, get your song recorded, collect money for use of the copyright, and give you a share of the profits. The rights you keep after assigning the copyright to a publisher are whatever rights are spelled out in your contract and the right to money from performance royalties.

Copyright term is the period for which you have exclusive rights. The term of protection offered to copyright holders has come a long way. The 1710 Edict of Anne provided a twenty-one-year term of exclusive rights. The first U.S. Copyright act, passed in 1790, provided only fourteen years of protection, but was renewable for another fourteen.

The term offered to member nations of the Berne Convention went up to the life of the author plus fifty years in 1908. The United States increased it to a total of fifty-six years in 1909 and signed the Berne Convention in 1988. The “Sonny Bono” Bill added another twenty years to the Berne convention's “life plus fifty” provision. If you assign your copyright to a publisher and don't get a reversion in the contract, you may apply for one after thirty-five years and possibly get it back.

With respect to co-writes, in a song with a lyric and a melody each is considered to be worth 50 percent of the copyright. Furthermore, even if one writer composes the entire lyric, and the other the entire melody, each owns 50 percent of the melody and 50 percent of the lyric. So if you write a melody and your co-writer writes a lyric and you put the two together and call it a song, your co-writer now owns half of your melody and you own half the lyric. Neither of you can reuse that melody or lyric without your co-writer's permission.

Unless otherwise agreed, all co-writers on a song are assumed to have an equal share. The key words here are “unless otherwise agreed.” Some writers actually go through a song lyric with a pen, marking which lines came from whom, and then figure up a percentage ownership based on the number of lines each writer contributes. In the music business, the term for this kind of person is “obsessive freak.”