Welcome to Songwriters copyright information!
What is copyright
Copyright is the means by which a person or a business makes a living from creativity. Copyright springs from a simple notion: the people that create, produce or invest in creative work should be the ones that decide how that work should be reproduced and made available to the public.
In general, copyright is the right given to the owner of an original work. This right can subsist in literary works such as books and computer software, musical works such as musical compositions, dramatic works such as plays, artistic works such as drawings, paintings and sculptures, sound recordings, films, broadcasts, cable programmes and the typographical arrangement of published editions of literary, dramatic or musical works, as well as performers' performances. Copyright works made available on the Internet environment are also protected.
Enshrined in international law for more than 200 years, copyright provides the economic foundation for creating and disseminating music, literature, art, films, software, and other forms of creative works. Copyright also protects culture and fosters artistic integrity.
Copyright provides that the rights holders determine whether and how copying, distributing, broadcasting and other uses of their works take place. This gives talented people the incentive to create great works, and entrepreneurs the economic reasons to invest in them
.Copyright has underpinned an extraordinary modern economic success story, accounting for tens of millions of jobs worldwide. The dramatic growth of the artistic, cultural and other creative industries in today's major economies would have been impossible without the strong levels of copyright protection that those countries have developed over many decades.
The latest available government estimates in Europe and the United States value copyright-based industries respectively at 360 billion Euros and US$430 billion, representing more than 5% of GDP. As we enter the age of electronic commerce, copyrighted material will be one of the most valuable commodities to be offered and sold on-line.
Copyright and the music industry
Copyright and similar rights protect the true value behind the sale of any musical recording - these rights represent and reward the creativity, sweat and toil of those who create and sell music. The proportion of the price of a CD or cassette accounted for by the cost of manufacturing the product is minimal. The real value is in the rights and the creativity that they protect.
The international recording industry
Is driven by dynamism and enterprise, but these would be meaningless in a world of inadequate copyright protection. Record companies invest billions of dollars of the industry's total worldwide revenues in new artists, many of whom will never prove commercially successful. It is this culturally diverse bedrock of investment in new talent that weak copyright protection hurts most.