Actually posting your track to soundcloud, myspace, youtube, etc is a valid proof of copyright as the respective owners of these sites can testify that this track has been uploaded at the given time and has not been modified since.
There are also precedents on this.
There is a big problem with virtually every DRM technique I know - it’s painfully annoying to the listener who has made the mistake of buying DRMed files.
Consider this - a copy-protected CD can’t be read in some CD-players, and can’t be easilly read on the computer, which prevents listeners from loading the music on their portable players. This means that many people will find it difficult or impossible to listen to such a CD. Same goes for file DRM. If you use iTunes, only people with iTunes and iPod will be able to listen to these files. If someone has a neat Cowon player, he won’t be able to listen to your stuff on that player.
However, if one downloads pirated files from RS or whatever - these files are not “protected”. One can listen to them on every player without any hassle. What this means that as soon as you protect your files you make the pirated files more valueable than your legal ones. If pirated material contains more value than the legal one - we’ve got a problem. If you want to reach the people with your music, you should make listening to your music a good experience for them. If you outright treat your potential listeners as assholes, idiots and thieves, you will never gain the respect you want. Believe me.
I’m definitely not a supporter of piracy, but I’m all against copyright protection. At least till someone invents a technique, that allows me to listen to the files the way I want to, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
As an artist you should always remember one thing - you’re making the music for someone to listen to it. Preventing people from listening to the music is the exact opposite of what you want to do.
So, really - don’t protect. Instead, promote yourself, be friendly with your listeners, get fans and get a good distribution (either digital or “real-world”) to make buying your records easilly. You’ll get your money then.
Hadn’t thought of that.
Although any server can crash, get hacked and digital files can always be tampered with.
But then again it’s not a complete impossibility to steal a rubber stamp from a Post Office…
Although you obviously need stamps that also were available at the date you stamp on it but bit of researching plus Ebay and I’m pretty sure Bob WILL be your mother’s brother.
One thing - its not about politic, really.
Its about recipitiens of your music.
I will give you example - I am not really into DRM today especially with CD - but I am almost sure that I woudnt be able to play DRM records on my Linux box.
During my visit in London last day and attack for music shop - i was checking every fuckin CD to make sure that its DRM free. Fortunately all 15 CD which I wanted to buy and I bought finally were DRM free. Awesome. But I spend almost 30 minutes just for noothing…
Please, don’t push more guys into this stuff 
Lets
The logs and stuff like that is not a proof in court. The important thing is the testimony by the representative of the website or some other people who trust the song has been on the site and have data to back up their claims.
With postage, you can check the logs in the mail service, but there is noone to testify that this is exactly the same package and it contained your music while it was being posted. Stamps are really easy to forge and this doesn’t hold in court at all.
Also if you want to be completely sure, check out this topic: Trusted timestamping - Wikipedia
my reply was aimed at the reply cralias made to your question, not to you directly (that’s why i quoted him). although, if you care, you can read up about the history of modern art and related stuff.
There is no such thing as effective DRM or “copy protection”. There is a lot of pointless fannying around designed to please recording industry executives, but even they are more or less giving up now since it doesn’t make an atom of difference to illegal copying and just pisses off the paying customers. It is logically and physically impossible to make data “uncopyable”. If you can play it, you can copy it.
I’m also not aware of any attempted DRM schemes which would actually be accessible to the average Internet user; I suspect they are provided in the form of large-scale commercial contracts with music publishing companies.
Suva’s right on this: if you want to make it so people can’t copy your audio tracks, don’t release them. Just play them at parties or something.
Yes, I’m a kind of an hopeless romantic. In turn, I can appreciate the thought of exploiting the system rather than trying to change it. For these changes are, more often than not, in vain, having a very limited success, or defying their own purpose. However, this exploitation has a property of addictivity, that becomes more harder to resist the more one succeeds. There are people who are able to limit or block out this “dark force”, so to speak, that constantly lures one into an unhealthy desire to obtain more than one would need. The thing is called a sane mind, required to come to that conclusion, and it also requires a strong character to actually pull it off. Both may be obtained somewhere along this road from the poor bedroom artist to becoming the next best popstar. May also be lost or simply insufficient. Even if it were enough, then, obviously, there are many different views, opinions and circumstances of how much is considered as decent living and how much is considered as already too much. From this follows that some people will always think about the obtained wealth as too little and some, quite the opposite, that it is more than adequate. An equilibrium may theoretically exist, although the possibility is very small and it’s duration - very little. So, in practice, it is not considered meaningful.
To clarify, I’m not a communist, I’m not for measuring the worth of one’s work and putting this variable into an equation to calculate how much one deserves something.
For a pure artist that can entirely suffice from the spirit of art itself, consumer means nothing. This artist does not earn anything material. For businessman that wants to earn infinitely more, consumer is everything. And we are all balancing on this scale, as soon we get a wooden nickel off it and as long as we intend to continue doing so.
It’s just a very slippery area. My personal (romantic) opinion is that for an artist to successfully navigate through this without having this postulate of ever-increasing greed always thrown into his/her face by some angry group of consumers (or someone like me), he/she must not resort to oppressive methods, such as DRM, to earn his living (that can freely be as much as one can rake in). When this income is not enough by effective standards, the production has some defects, a definite reason why consumers do not want it. This problem (or a set of problems) must be at least attempted to be solved. Or the (partial) failure should be accepted as such. All reaction against this fundamental will only result in counter-reaction. It may be effective in a certain timeframe (lifetime, possibly, sometimes considered enough), but, nowadays more likely to backfire with a force that is a function of strength of the oppression, until either one of them is exhausted, the (partial) failure is accepted or the interaction is stopped by a third party.
Now that’s a crapload of philosophy, I’ve come to the wrong forum with it, no? 
Other fine folks here have already clarified the woes of DRM in unison with my own base thought in my first post. I just wanted to express my thoughts more. I rarely get the chance, you see. 
As far as I can tell the easiest way to protect your composition is to upload it. Soundcloud is a good example. You make your track public, lets say today, and soundcloud.com can prove it. And courts accept this afaik.
On the other hand you dont really have to fear that someone will steal your composition unless it is a hit. And if it is a hit nobody can steal it because everybody knows it.
Just upload it to soundcloud and then send it to labels and see what happens… 
Protect it by making it popular and building a fan base.
Your fans will be your DRM.
Dont release the high quality version.
Some brainstorm:
Put your website/name into the music, perhaps in a cool way so that it fits the song.
BTW, I would note that when discussing copyright it’s good to know your country’s cupyright law. Things are different between places, especially the USA has a totally different copyright law than the European countries, because they were created based on different ideas. For example in Poland sending a post letter with your record to yourself is a perfectly good way of protecting your copyright, because the post stamp provides the so-called “sure-date” (data pewna in Polish). As I heard it doesn’t work so well in the USA. On the other hand I’m not sure if soundcloud would work that way in Poland.
Discussion of law on an international forum always should be taken with a certain amount of doubt.
I know the posting of the letter to yourself is not valid in USA and Estonia, and in Estonia, the copyright laws are pretty much just a translation of the general EU copyright directive or whatever it was called, so it should apply on most of the EU countries.
On the other hand the court system and validity (or even the definition) of evidence is totally different thing and may not work the same in all countries.
Don’t quote me (ahh the forum irony) I’m pretty sure with tracks you don’t enfringe copyright (at least in the UK) as long as you only use a maximum of 30 seconds or some other limitation. Copmpletely justifying my thread about sampling methods. As for this thread. We still havent nailed how to burn to a disk professionally (where you get the CD Audio Track file that is 1kb)
Can we stop discussing DRM so in-depth? I agree totally that DRM is bad idea. I have read pretty much all of the links I’ve been given. Uploading to soundcloud will be my first option along with making a website. But can we dicusss how to FINALISE an audio file for release as the word PROTECT seems to have touched so many nerves lol
Those small .CDA files are present on every Audio CD. AFAIK, they are not really there. Audio CD does not have any file system, whatsoever. Windows just fakes those files when you enter audio CD. They are some sort of helper files for windows CD players so they could quickly seek to next song or something like that.
This doesn’t mean the CD is somehow protected, you can still easily rip it with CD ripping software.
To make a CD like that you just have to pick “Create Audio CD” in your CD writing program, as opposed to creating data CD with files on it.
This is common myth, but is also untrue. It doesn’t matter if you use 30 seconds or 1 second, if you modify the sample or not.
There are some cases with plagiarism, that if someone accuses someone else of stealing a melody. There have been quoted some lengths which can not be considered plagiarism. Legally there is no definite length for this either it’s up to court to decide whether it was plagiarism or not.
But yeah, this applies to stealing of melodies, sampling is totally different deal and there are no time limits which are “OK”.
As Suva says this is an urban myth. The letter of the law is a little confusing and I have to admit my memory is a little rusty. Goes along the lines of something like “it has to be recognisable as…” with guidelines of something along the lines of seven notes or the main hook. As I say they were only ever guidelines and Channel4 sued for the use of the four notes used at the start of the late evening news on C4, even though far shorter than any guidelines it is instantly recognisable and thus can be proven as somebody else’s intellectual property. (Think it was C4 anyway, may of been BBC, memory quite rusty on the matter.)
Yes, but that applies to plagiarism, which is another topic.
Sampling even 1 second of material definitely violates the recording copyright, whether or not it does violate the song writing copyright is open for debate.
Interesting stuff. Thanks for that note on ‘create audio CD’ I haven’t chosen the software I’ll be using yet, simply because I’m not sure if it’ll be me doing it, I was under the impression I should prepare files beforehand. I purchased Nero a few years back… any recommended softwares?
Nero is probably your best choice on Windows.