Hambone said:
If I'm not mistaken, lyrics and music can be viewed as seperate products for the purpose of establishing ownership. You can easily see the need if you think about lyricist/musician collaborations. Each has their own contribution to the song and each can claim ownership of their part seperately from the other. I would suspect that if you've written your lyrics out, that would satisfy the "tangible medium of expression" criteria that the barrister has mentioned. The music, on the other hand, would need to be recorded or written in some sort of recognizable notation to meet the same specs.
Music Attorney, how'm I doin'?
You go to law school for 3 years and spend a bunch of money when the only thing you really learn to say when someone asks you a question is: It depends ;-)
To fully address your question would require a small treatise. This is an area of copyright involving joint works. A joint work is defined in the 1976 Act as: "a work prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole." That language, for the intellectually curious or for those who have trouble sleeping, can be found at 17 U.S.C. 101. Therefore, to establish that the contributions of two or more authors constitute a joint work (and, therefore, co-ownership of the copyright), it is essential the parties INTENDED the creation of a joint work at the time the work is created.
Whether a work qualifies as a joint work is critical because Section 201(a) of the Copyright Act provides, in part, that the authors of a joint work are co-owners of copyright in the work. Thus, absent a contrary written agreement:
1. The only duty co-owners have to one another with respect to the joint work is to account for profits from its use.
2. All joint authors share an equal percentage of ownership in a joint work.
3. All joint authors share an equal percentage of ownership even if the respective contributions of each author to the joint work are not equal.
4. Each joint author may license an entire joint work, on a nonexclusive basis, without the consent of a co-author.
Look at #3 and #4. #3 says if someone writes 90% of a song and collaborates with someone to finish that last 10% and INTENDS for the other persons 10% to merge into his 90%, then each writer owns 50% of the song unless there is something to the contrary in writing and signed by both authors. #4 says that each joint author may license the entire work without the consent of the other co-author which means one writer could license the work for use in a porno film, religious themed film, or other situation that a co-author finds objectionable.
Lets look at another example. If someone writes a piece of poetry with no INTENTION of having that poetry become lyrics and (1) a musician comes along and wants to write music and use the poetry as lyrics and (2) the author of the poetry grants the musician the right to add music to the poetry, then the author of the poetry retains a separate copyright interest in the words with the musical collaboration becoming a derivative work and the copyright interests in the derivative work being agreed upon by the poet and the musician. Here, the poet is control and (1) does not have to grant permission for the use of his poetry as lyrics; (2) has control over how much of the copyright in the song he wants to give the musician; and (3) since the musician only has a copyright interest in those elements which he added to the poetry, the musician cannot license the whole song like in the joint work scenario above.
Now lets say a lyricist writes lyrics with the INTENT of combining them with music at some later date. One day, the lyricist happens upon the TB message boards and thinks a certain TBer has it going on musically so the lyricist mails the TBer the lyrics with the INTENT to create a composition with the TBer. The lyricist lives in CA and the TBer lives in New York. The TBer writes music for the lyrics. At this point it becomes a little like scrambling eggs. The egg whites and the egg yolk become mixed and its a little hard to undo. What if the lyricist doesnt like the music? Its probably a little grey, but the courts seem to say that as long as the lyricist INTENDED that the lyrics would be merged with music at the time the work was created, then Id say you probably have a joint work with all of the rights set forth above (i.e., #1-#4) unless there is some agreement to the contrary in writing.
If its not clear by now, your question totally depends on the facts of the situation and the INTENT of the authors involved.
