Hey Stella & readers,
There are a few important distinctions which need to be made here:
- the existence of copyright and
- getting your copyright protected
are two things which need to be talked of seperately, while
- what does copyright tell me about ways to use something is a third aspect worth looking into.
Your copyright comes into existstance the moment you created a creative work (intellectual property rights apply right away), and that is what the (c) is there to remind of.
The question wether you can proove that you are the copyright holding creator of a work, and if someone actually enforces your copyright against others who may not be allowed to use your work (both activities fall into copyright protection, not into copyright) is not answered by the (c),
and wikiloops does not offer such services - a database entry signed by a wikiloops user name only is hardly a legally failsafe proof of authorship, and we neither monitor wether the text shows up somewhere else on the web, nor do we collect royalties in your name, so in the end one could say your text is under copyright, but not actively protected.
Last, the (c) is not equivalent to "can't use this" - if you for example buy a CD, all the tracks on it ship with a (c), but you still have a right to buy that CD and own it, listen to it and so on, so regardless of copyright, one needs to look at the use-rights granted based on the copyright ownership.
In the CD case, private use is granted to the buyer.
As far as wikiloops lyrics are concerned, there is no document available that clarifies their use-rights explicitly, since they are shared as part of the music upload, one may assume they will fall under the same license conditions as the tracks, but since there is no explicit mention of the lyrics in the license, that may be arguable (mind the lyrics addition came way later than the track licenses on wikiloops).
So, to round it up, the wikiloops lyrics are in a legal state where:
- they definetly fall under copyright (as any other creative work)
- they do not explicitly ship with some kind of use-rights granting license at this time, so anyone acting responsibly should come to the conclusion of "It didn't say I could use this anywhere, so I might better not." The presence of the (c) is intended to spark that thought, not more.
I hope that puts things into perspective a little,
it is one of the concerns I have about the licensing system on wikiloops:
We'll either have to re-word the license to make sure it explicitly includes lyrics as well as user-generated chord sheet information, or we'll need to offer seperate licenses on these "works" at some point. All that legal business is quite a nightmare to chew on, but it is & has been on my radar for some time.
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