Loopy Pro: Create music, your way.

What is Loopy Pro?Loopy Pro is a powerful, flexible, and intuitive live looper, sampler, clip launcher and DAW for iPhone and iPad. At its core, it allows you to record and layer sounds in real-time to create complex musical arrangements. But it doesn’t stop there—Loopy Pro offers advanced tools to customize your workflow, build dynamic performance setups, and create a seamless connection between instruments, effects, and external gear.

Use it for live looping, sequencing, arranging, mixing, and much more. Whether you're a live performer, a producer, or just experimenting with sound, Loopy Pro helps you take control of your creative process.

Download on the App Store

Loopy Pro is your all-in-one musical toolkit. Try it for free today.

Copyrighting your songs... do you bother?

Do any of you copyright your songs? Is it worth the trouble? And if you do... what's the easiest way to make it happen?

Thanks!

  • Joe

Comments

  • No. I figure if someone going to steal a track copyright not really likely to mean anything to them anyway.

  • Before people would just suggest sending a copy to yourself recorded delivery, now you could just open a bandcamp account and just choose the all rights reserved option when you upload your tracks, bandcamp pro you can set your stuff to private too.

  • Thanks. Do you have to do anything besides record the tracks? Does anything have to be written in any kind of score? Or is it enough to put the music up with your name? Btw, what I would like to do is record music and post lyrics. Joe

    Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

  • Pretty sure that your own work is copyrighted no matter what you do or don't do. The question is whether you can enforce that copyright against someone else who wants to use your work without your permission. It's easier to do that if you've registered your work- but I don't believe that's an absolute requirement (in other words, as long as you can prove you created the work first, you're good).

  • edited May 2015

    Indeed—as soon as you create it, you are the holder of the copyright. The problem is proving that you are the copyright holder. Easiest way, somewhat surprisingly, remains to put your work on some sort of physical media like a CD (even paper if that's your sort of thing) and mail it to yourself. Don't open it! Postmark will prove the creation date. Edit: false. See below.

    Whether or not you can defend yourself against Beyonce's lawyers is another question all together. ;)

  • And, with regard to the original question, no, I don't bother registering my copyright to anything. Or mailing myself anything. No one cares. If someone used my music and made a bunch of money I'd at least get some satisfaction out of it.

  • Now you got me nervous @syrupcore! I'm sure Beyoncé has been eying my Different Drummer bits on Soundcloud. ;-)

  • As mentioned, you automatically own the copy right, just back up your project files and you can show exactly how and when it was created. The postmark as proof of creation date thing is an old wives tale, it has NEVER been accepted in court as a means of proving anything, so save your postage.

    Also as mentioned, I never really worry about it as the odds of me needing to prove it are slim to none.

  • edited May 2015

    I work in book publishing, where pretty much the entire business model is to licence copyright from creators, and I can confirm all that's been said:

    (1) Copyright comes into existance at the point of creation.

    (2) The creator owns it automatically.

    (3) No need to mail yourself anything.

    More significant might be the T&Cs of the sites where you choose to upload your music to. I did a quick web trawl of pages explaining this stuff and Soundcloud's T&Cs seemed to be really good. The artist retains all ownership of the music and only agrees to giving Souldcloud a “limited, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid up, licence” allowing other SoundCloud users to listen to your music. Which is the whole idea anyway,

    The day to start worring about this stuff is the day you are given a contact to sign by any sort of publisher. Then it's time to read the small print vey very carefully...

  • @syrupcore said:
    Indeed—as soon as you create it, you are the holder of the copyright. The problem is proving that you are the copyright holder. Easiest way, somewhat surprisingly, remains to put your work on some sort of physical media like a CD (even paper if that's your sort of thing) and mail it to yourself. Don't open it! Postmark will prove the creation date.

    Whether or not you can defend yourself against Beyonce's lawyers is another question all together. ;)

    Haha, I remember doing this back in the late 90's. I still have them and intend open them to listen to them with my grandchildren. Unless Williams/Thicke decide to steal them of course ;)

    Theses days putting your work on the internet is 'publishing' therefore official. And then there's Creative Commons. As others pointed out proving that somebody actually nicked your stuff is another matter.

  • I experience this kind of thing on a regular basis with graphic stuff. Best way to resolve it is to send the person nicking your stuff an invoice.

  • Absolutely - as far as I know !

    I think all my stuff is seen as being copyrighted, I have to say I don't know the ins and outs of it, but when I send stuff to go up on iTunes et al (through CD Baby), I'm credited as the publisher as well. I had to go through mad hoops with IODA years ago, but it all got sorted out.

  • The biggest problem is not so much people ripping off your song as sampling bits and pieces of it for use in their work, difficult to spot, expensive to prove

  • A reasonable concern, but one that many would consider an interesting problem to have....

  • I think my songs are safe.

  • @Tarekith said:
    As mentioned, you automatically own the copy right, just back up your project files and you can show exactly how and when it was created. The postmark as proof of creation date thing is an old wives tale, it has NEVER been accepted in court as a means of proving anything, so save your postage.

    I'm a spreader of rumor?! Dammit.

  • "Haha, I remember doing this back in the late 90's. I still have them and intend open them to listen to them with my grandchildren."

    Careful relying on older CDRs to still work in a few years. I have some from around 2002 that already are no longer readable, they do go bad just like tapes over time unfortunately. One of my mastering clients last year wanted me to remaster his first album, and every single one of this CD and DVDr back ups couldn't be read anymore in any drive I tried. :(

  • @monzo said:
    I think my songs are safe.

    Especially all those tucked away inside your head :)

  • @Tarekith said:
    Careful relying on older CDRs to still work in a few years. I have some from around 2002 that already are no longer readable, they do go bad just like tapes over time unfortunately. One of my mastering clients last year wanted me to remaster his first album, and every single one of this CD and DVDr back ups couldn't be read anymore in any drive I tried. :(

    Sadly suffered the same. Even on what were expensive CDRs burned at 1x on nice machines. I spent a while pulling what I could to hard drives and made backups. Now if I could only find a copy of cakewalk 4. :)

  • @JohnnyGoodyear said:
    Especially all those tucked away inside your head :)

    I'm halfway through one at the moment - so should have something listenable for this months song thread!

  • To make up for wives tale... http://numly.blogspot.com/2006/05/poor-mans-copyright-20.html is a blog post detailing why it doesn't actually hold up in court. Note that owner of that blog offers a more secure "poor man's copyright" at http://www.numly.com/.

  • What I was told or maybe I read it, was send your stuff recorded post, make sure the recorded post sticker covered the seal on your envelope and give it to a lawyer or bank manager for safe keeping, although in court all that would need to happen would be to introduce doubt, that the chain of custody was somehow compromised.

    The online method (uploading your tracks to a service like bandcamp or soundcloud) to me seems better as you have logs when things were uploaded and also ip's, although maybe this might not be good enough unless you used a service like syrupcore pointed out. If you don't won't to go down the exposure route having your work up on multiple sources, which can be done for free there are a number of services that offer you protection for a small fee, if your in the uk for instance.

    http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk

  • Obviously not a lawyer but I imagine uploading to your own server or really even showing it on a drive with a timestamp could be thrown out—it's pretty easy to change time stamps. A think a service like the above offers the 'independent third party' aspect that should help to add credibility to the claim.

Sign In or Register to comment.