You are totally right that the most egregious thing we’re likely to run into in our careers is an unlicensed performance, or a dance company or non-profit using our work without asking. And the best way to handle that is probably a phone call or an email. Lawyering up at the drop of a hat certainly isn’t the way to go, but we should be prepared to protect our interests in the event that something major does happen. The phone call/email/asking gently option was quite the oversight on my part, and one that I’ll address more fully next week – so I sincerely thank you for pointing it out!

I still think it’s important to register your copyrights for the same reason I think it’s important to have home or renter’s insurance. Most of us (knock wood) won’t have to deal with the heartbreak and anxiety of losing everything in a flood or earthquake or fire or other disaster. And most of us also won’t have to deal with any sort of major copyright infringement. But it’s not unheard of, even in our industry. I’ve got an example in mind that was related to me, in which someone did put their name to another person’s score, but I don’t want to share it here until I check that I’ve remembered the details correctly. I’ll post it here when I’ve heard back.

Also – thanks so much for commenting! I’m glad to hear that you’re enjoying the series!

D

Aside from file sharing, the most common copyright-abuse scenario is a small non-profit like a dance or theater company using a recording of a piece without any attempt to license it (either willfully or in ignorance). The most consistently productive response to that is contacting them and insisting on a retroactive licensing fee. Suing them would be enormously counterproductive in career terms.

I am constantly hearing stories of composers successfully interacting with users who didn’t know they needed a license. Those users need a push, not a lawsuit.

(At least in concert music, I have *never* heard any modern example of the copyright theft of popular imagination — someone just claiming they’re the actual creator of another person’s score.)

Registering copyrights at $35 a pop feels to me less like insurance and more like entering a vague lottery in which the prizes/payoffs aren’t defined or realistically imagined.

There are, of course, composers who have a drive to teach, and for whom the balance between composing and teaching is a happy one. Others – and these are the ones I’m mainly speaking to when I say that teaching is a “day job” – teach only to get by, to subsidize their composing time. I have my own (probably strange and logically faulty) designations of composers in my head that are dependent largely on the composer’s intent in regards to their music.

So for some composers it isn’t a day job, for some it is, and for many it’s probably in the halfway-space. I actually have a multi-part section – “The Composer and the Day Job” – planned down the road where I intend to address all of this in more depth, and after talking to a range of composers in academia so that I’m not talking completely out of my sit-upon. ;-)