The U.S Copyright Act was enacted by
Congress in 1790, and a number
of revisions followed throughout the
past two centuries. Its terms
and provisions are crucial for the
music business and industry,
and shape many of its components,
methods and practices.
Being that music is an artistic expression,
it is considered an artistic type of
intellectual property and is,
as such, protected under the Copyright Act
together with the works of literature,
drama, pantomime, choreography,
painting, drawing, graphics, photography,
sound recording, architecture, motion pictures,
and other visual and audiovisual creations.
This legal protection, as defined in
the Copyright Act, is a result of
seeking the balance between the
interests and needs of the copyright
owners and the copyright users.
Its purpose is to provide benefits
and an impetus to the creators
to continue creating,
but also to make their creations
available to the public in a
reasonable manner, for the benefit
and the good of the society at large.
The complexity of its numerous provisions
and parameters is largely due to
the pursuit of this balance
between often opposing interests.
The music copyright protection begins
at the material inception of the
musical creation. In order to be
legally considered and classified
as protected, a musical composition
must be fixed in a tangible form
of expression, such as being
written down or recorded.
Other words, it must take some physical
form and be perceptible from
that form, either as a musical
language (or music notation, right?), or as a
physical sound (recording). This legal
requirement constitutes the first
fundamental principle of copyright
in general: copyright protection
does not apply to an idea,
but to a tangible expression of that idea.
For example, the general idea and
the form of blues music are not
protected, but a particular,
original blues song,
written down or recorded, is.
Most of the blues songs consist
of several cycles of a 12-bar
blues chord progression,
containing particular three chords.
Neither this cycle nor its three
chords are copyrightable
as an idea; on the other hand,
an original blues song,
using the blues cycle and chords,
is copyrightable, if it is
written down or recorded.
This copyright principle and issue
is often referred to as the
“idea-expression dichotomy”,
signifying the separation and the
essential difference between
these two intellectual forms
when it comes to copyright.