How to Copyright a Song

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I'm just compiling the information available on the Web for those who want to copyright their songs.  When you Google "How to copyright a song", you immediately get a whole lot of links from those who want to offer you their services to help you do this.  However, the present legal climate is friendly towards holders of intellectual property; a little too friendly, as I have said before.  To not run away with a story or a piece of music or a piece of art as soon as it is made public is a social agreement; the laws are not derived from the principles of natural justice, but carefully put in place by the Constitution to give inventors and creators some degree of encouragement, a lot less encouragement than they are interested in acquiring.  As said before, copyright for books was severely limited initially, but was gradually increased by pressure from lobbyists for such corporations as Disney and various Hollywood studios and media companies.

1. First of all, Wikihow states that
"Under international law, copyright is the automatic right of the creator of the work, this means that copyright exist as soon as you have a tangible version of the music, such as sheet music and/or CDs."

In other words, if you've written a song and recorded it on tape, or had someone videotape you singing it, the song is yours.  The copyrighting is a procedure to deposit the song with the Federal Government, which simply acts as a fair witness, it seems to me (much like making an entry at a Police station that you have been robbed of such-and-such, so that if the stolen goods are subsequently found, you can establish that you declared them lost before credible witnesses, namely the Police).

The Website http://www.copyrightauthority.com/song-copyright.htm gives the following case study to illustrate the situation

[Taken verbatim from "www.copyrightauthority.com, with minor editorial changes]:

CASE STUDY: Imagine you were in the bathroom, and you sang a song to yourself that you made up on the fly. However, your flatmate was outside in the garden, and could hear your song. Whilst you were drying off from the shower, your flatmate writes down the song on paper in a tangible form. It is now copyrighted --and is his work-- since he wrote it down first.

HOWEVER, you don't know that he heard the song. What YOU do is write the song down and visit the copyright office and file a copyright on that song. The date and everything is recorded with that copyright filing.

[Two] years later, you have moved out of your flat, and are driving in the car with your partner.   On the radio is that very song that you made up in the shower - and the DJ announces your old flatmate's name [as being its composer].

You hunt down your old flatmate and he says to you "Yeah - it's your song - but look, I wrote it down first, so I own the copyright [to the song]," and he shows you the two year old piece of paper. It even says on it "Copyright 2003, FlatMate - All Rights Reserved".

The problem is (for your flatmate) that he cannot prove when he wrote it.   YOU, however, have an official US Copyright Office filing, which shows the date, time and content of the song. The fact that your flatmate lived with you and could have heard the song and copied it, sticks out like a sore thumb.

You are now in the winning position, with the backing of the US Copyright Office to take him to court.   All HE has, is a piece of paper that he wrote on.  [He has] no evidence that he created the song before you or that he copyrighted the music before you did.  What you have done --by taking the proper procedures to copyright music-- is win through using the correct procedure. END OF CASE STUDY

2. The Federal Government has set up a website called Electronic Copyright Office(eCO).  Those who want to copyright creations that are completely digital, or which only require references (rather than actual materials) can be copyrighted at this site.  In order to do this, you have to set up an account (no cost), connected to an e-mail address.  Once you have done this, you can take your time over a particular application.  (However, apparently they threw out all incomplete applications at the end of December 2009, and can be expected to toss incomplete applications intermittently.)

Since using this site helps the Government just as much as it helps us, the fee is reduced from the usual $45 per item down to a low, low $35.

More later, as we figure this out!

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What I'm Doing on My Vacation

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Being a college professor of sorts, I have the liberty of taking long summer vacations, and this year I'm spending several weeks in the Southwest, with my daughter.

Several weeks ago, (before I got here, certainly,) she brought home a little puppy, called by the whimsical name Bibbet.  It was a couple of months old (not just a few weeks as reported previously), little more than a highly animated little mop, full of life and no little charm.  Very soon the new arrival took over my daughter's house.  By great fortune --for the mistress, if not for the pet-- the puppy had been trained to a "crate", in this case a traveling cage, and she (the puppy is a female) was left in it for four hours at a time, while the mistress tried to concentrate on her work a couple of miles away.

It appears that the puppy had been initially procured for someone else.  But within a few days my daughter and her gentleman friend were too attached to Bibbet to even consider parting with her.  When the originally intended owner finally met the puppy, it was love at first sight.  So at the time of my arrival, all parties were totally infatuated with the little lady.  I have a link to a video clip from those early animated mop days:  Bibbet.  From studying photos on the Internet, it has been guessed that Bibbet is a Chihuahua-Maltese cross (sometimes called a Malchi).

Soon after I got here, my daughter was notified of another stray that was available for adoption from the Shelter.  We took Bibbet along to the Shelter to make acquaintance with the new puppy, Tillie, a Poodle cross, and seeing that they got along nicely together, we brought her home.  She was about the same length as Bibbet, but had long, spindly legs, twice as long as Bibbet's.  So now we have two pups, of around the ages of 8 to 10 months old, running around the house.  When their mistress is at work, they follow me around everywhere, and if I turn around and look at them, they blink back at me in stereo, fascinated.  Wow, what's he doing?

It is fun to watch them fool around together!  They wrestle, very quietly, and all you can see is two balls of hair rolling about, with an occasional, alarming glimpse of teeth.  Then, especially in the afternoon, they suddenly flop down on their doggie beds, sometimes with their cheeks on the cool tile floor, as if they're asleep, but with their eyes wide open!  They seem to alternate between extreme energy and total exhaustion.

All these sights must be old hat to owners of terrier pups, but it's quite new to me, and fascinating.  The conspicuous absence of yipping is an enormous relief; perhaps their previous owners performed some magic, and they hardly bark at all, unless they hear or smell a delivery man, or something equally interesting, quite invisible and inaudible to me.

I have also been reading Anne of Green Gables books, and I've made it to the end of the second book (Anne of Avonlea).  I have to confess, with a blush, that many of my own literary values have an echo in Ms Montgomery's writing.  This either means that Ms Montgomery was very forward-looking indeed, or that my own style hearkens back to the turn of the previous century.  I have been very much influenced by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott as well, so I know: I'm something of an anachronism.

For the benefit of those who are familiar with the Anne of Green Gables, I want to say that I find the character of Charlotta the Fourth absolutely delicious!  OK, gotta go.  More later,

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Fruit Dips

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When I was growing up, there were no such things as fruit dips, let me tell you.  (Maybe there were, but we did not move in Fruit Dip circles.  Harrumph.)

However, the other day, junior brought home lunch, and part of the ensemble, as we would say in France if we ever get to go there, was a little bowl of fruit, and an even littler bowl of dip.  (It really was rather good.)  Of course, I had to get on the Internet and look for fruit dip recipes.  Goodness; I never came across such a lot of silly recipes in my life.

Recipes can be pretty tricky.  Some of them are such that if you depart from the recipe the slightest bit, the whole thing goes for a six, as we say in Cricket country.  Others will come out ok, and taste reasonable even if you take lots of liberties with the recipe.  Some recipes are very sensitive to the proportions and amounts of the ingredients; others are sensitive to the preparation method, and some are sensitive to both.  This phenomenon is called stability in mathematics; if small changes do not make a huge difference, the recipe is stable.  If a small variation makes a huge difference, it is an unstable recipe.  (The word stable can also be used to describe whether, once the food is prepared, it goes bad quickly; that's not how I'm using it here.)

Fruit Dip, as you can imagine, is among the most stable of things you can make.  Here is one suggestion:

Mix together some
**Sour Cream -- any amount.
Blend in some
**Softened cream cheese, e.g. Philly Cream Cheese.  Any amount, as long as you don't get the mixture too stiff, and it isn't more than the sour cream.  Less than a quarter of the amount of sour cream sounds like a good rule.
Add a little sweetener, such as
**Sugar (possibly brown sugar), or some artificial sweetener, according to taste.  Don't make it too sweet; remember you're eating it with fruit.  A teaspoonful of sugar per cup would be plenty; you should get away with a lot less.
Add a dash of
**Salt.  I hate myself for suggesting this, but there's salt in everything these days, and a tiny bit of salt in a dip can hardly be faulted.  But JUST A DASH, mind.
Add a dash of
**Vanilla essence.  A quarter teaspoon will be plenty for a cup or more of dip.

Finally, you can add any of the following, for extra bite and flavor.  I'm suggesting less than an eighth of a teaspoonful at the very most: finely ground black pepper, finely ground cayenne pepper, finely ground nutmeg or mace, finely powdered cinnamon, lemon or lime, or a tiny bit of frozen orange juice, e.g. a tablespoonful.

Book Review: The Stone Pony, by Patricia Calvert

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I've just finished reading this book, and I think it has a lot of charm and style.  There are lots of references to horse riding and museums; and teens who have wide interests --or at least interests in those areas-- will enjoy it.

The book starts out slow.  In an attempt to convey the complex feelings of the main protagonist and her family environment, the author packs the beginning of the book with just a little too much density.  I can't quite figure out whether the reader just gets accustomed to the darkness of the writing, or whether the author actually lightens up slightly, to convey the changing mood of the main character.  But the character has a lot of charm, which eventually spreads its fragrance through the whole book.

The dialog could be better, and some of the minor characters could do with a little more dimensionality; even in a book written for teenagers, an adult mind at work would be welcome.  But the entire thing (a very short story, but not really too short for what it sets out to do) is presented from the point of view of a single character, as teen novelettes tend to be, and I couldn't help thinking that if the dialog were stronger, the whole book would have been stronger.  This book could easily earn itself a sort of cult following; I suppose it could already have done so, and I wouldn't know!

[These one-point-of-view pieces bring up an interesting problem: should the dialogue be filtered through the voice of the narrator, or should the dialogue be presented in an objective way, and not as the character (of the principal voice) would have reported the conversation?  I'm sure the experts have technical terms for such issues, but being an outsider I don't know what they are!]

So, I'd say four stars!

P.S.  Mano Singham's analysis of the lightning strike that destroyed Touchdown Jesus is excellent.  In more religious times (e.g. Old Testament times, when people were figuring out what Yahweh liked and disliked) a lightning strike would establish something as repugnant to the Almighty.  In these more enlightened times, a lightning strike is not seen as an act of god, but rather a purely physical coincidence.  It is interesting how Christians tend to choose what things are considered god acting in nature, and what things are to be considered random.  Even more interesting is how they reconcile depictions of Jesus as being exempt from the proscription on idols.

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Atheism and Jesus

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This post is going to be on atheism and religion, so be warned!

Ricky Gervaise, a well-known British actor was recently featured on Mano Singham's Web Journal in the usual video spot at the end.  This clip shows Ricky Gervaise explaining some of his thinking about a couple of interesting topics in a persuasive, understated style, typical of some of the most beloved and admirable Brits.  It's their language, I suppose, and the best of them are very good at getting across the ideas that matter to them.

Once again, I have to emphasize the following fact: just because we atheists do not believe in god does not mean that we do not admire Jesus.

As I made clear some months ago, around the first century, a new tradition of true historical writing emerged from the established tradition of a sort of history that was more a work of art than one of documentation.  I am not an expert, but in the earliest attempts at history [e.g. Norse and Greek histories, and Chinese and Indian histories], which came out looking more like epics and legends, the idea appears more to capture tribal pride, to create something that could serve as a basis of political and social education.  Why are we so proud of such-and-such a tradition?  Why do we celebrate this hero?  Why are these things part of our communal identity?

The Old Testament (the Jewish Bible) has, between the passages of true history (even if tainted by self-aggrandizement), a lot of propaganda.  But there must have been in some individuals among the scribes an instinct  to present a clear account of events and movements, so history does emerge despite the desire on the part of the powers-that-were to subvert the facts for particular purposes.

In the New Testament, though, we see attempts at an honest biography of Jesus of Nazareth, though the temptation to subvert the facts for propaganda must have been almost impossible to resist.  The picture of Jesus that emerges--once we discount the statements attributed to him that claim divine origin--is a surprisingly coherent and admirable one.

[In the composite above, on the right is the actor who portrayed Jesus in the recent movie The Passion of Christ.  On the left is a representation of the face of Jesus developed from the Shroud of Turin, a piece of fabric to which some ascribe miraculous properties.  In the center is the reconstruction of the face from a skeleton of a man contemporary with Jesus.  His height is estimated as between 61 and 71 inches.]

Like most of my readers, I learned the Jesus stories in my early and uncritical youth, but I have had lots of opportunity to revisit the accounts and correct any errors of perception.  There were surprisingly few:  Jesus hated cruelty, viciousness, hypocrisy, bullying, and poor logic.  He hated legalism, bigotry, and oppression.  He was all for helping the poor, and those in trouble (Dives and Lazarus, Good Samaritan).  He was against hoarding.  He lived simply, and by all accounts, seemed to have been a generous and warm person.

Remember that the accounts of Jesus in the New Testament were carefully selected by committee.  The Emperor Constantine, thinking it politically advantageous to make Christianity the State Religion, called for a committee of clerics and scholars to establish an officially approved collection of writings to be added to the Old Testament, and the result is the Bible we know.  On the face of it, the object of the exercise was religious, but to the skeptic --and where would we be without skepticism?-- the object was political control.  The Bible as it stands today, enabled the Roman government, and its present-day successor: the Catholic Church, to rule the faithful effectively.

There were hundreds of Christian writings at the time, most of which were rejected, not because they did not present an accurate picture of Jesus, but because they probably did not support the Constantinian agenda.  In particular, any writings that depicted Jesus as conceding that he was entirely human were rejected.

Conservative and fundamentalist Christians, of course, insist that the bible came into existence under the control of god.  In actual fact, it is a political document, compiled by kings and emperors from King Solomon all the way up though Emperor Constantine to King James.  It is not that these people were vicious; it is just that they were not interested in truth.  Still, to the interested eye, the man Jesus does emerge, not because of the power of god, but despite the cynicism of those in charge.

Ultimately, whether Jesus believed he was divine is irrelevant.  (Lots of people have persuaded themselves that they were divine, and many of them were quite decent folks despite that unfortunate propensity.)  I don't think that (divinity) claim should disqualify Jesus from being regarded as the best documented champion of the underdog at his time in history.

Jesus still speaks to us, on behalf of what has come to be called decency; a mind-set that is difficult to define without reference to religious morals.  Ethics (to the best of my knowledge) teaches what is duty.  Jesus, from what we know of him, went a lot further: he declared that the modern human being, in addition to his or her duty, must take responsibility for his or her neighbors.  It is this idea of neighbor that stands out.

The Christian Right is busily intent on circumscribing, narrowing what the concept of neighbor should be.  Charity may begin at home, but if they had their way, that's where it would end.

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