How to copyright a song, and what registration actually buys you

Your song is protected by copyright the moment you write it down or record it. You do not have to register anything, pay anyone, or mail yourself an envelope. That is true in the United States and in every country signed up to the Berne Convention, which is almost all of them.

So why does registration exist, and why does anyone bother? Because protection and enforceability are different things, and the gap between them is where the practical advice lives.

This summarises published positions rather than giving legal advice. For anything with money attached, talk to a lawyer.

The two copyrights in every song

This trips up almost everyone, and it explains most confusion about licensing.

The composition. The song itself: melody and lyrics. Owned by the writer.

The sound recording. A specific recorded performance of that composition. Owned by whoever made the recording, often a label.

They are separate property. When you cover someone else's song you need permission for the composition but you make your own recording. When you sample a record you need permission for both. When you separate stems from a commercial track you have copied the recording regardless of what you do next, which is the rights point that separation tools do not solve.

What registration actually buys you

In the US, registration with the Copyright Office is not what creates your rights. It gives you three practical things:

The ability to sue. US copyright holders generally must register before filing an infringement suit.

Statutory damages and attorney's fees, available only if you registered before the infringement or within a window after publication. Without registration you are limited to proving actual damages, which for an independent artist is often close to unprovable.

A public record with a date, which settles arguments about who had it first.

The "poor man's copyright", mailing yourself a sealed envelope, does none of this. It is folklore, not a legal mechanism.

Outside the US, registration systems vary and several countries have no registry at all, because protection is automatic and disputes turn on evidence rather than filings.

The part specific to AI-generated music

Here is where it gets genuinely different, and where a lot of published advice is simply wrong.

The US Copyright Office addressed this directly in Part 2 of its report on copyright and artificial intelligence, published on 29 January 2025. Its conclusions:

Human authorship remains the requirement. Fully AI-generated output lacks it and is not copyrightable.

Prompting is not authorship, however detailed the prompt. The Office compared it to describing a commission: describing is not authoring.

Selecting among outputs is not authorship either. Generating four takes and keeping the best is not, by itself, a creative act.

Human contributions are protected where they are perceptible in the result. Your own lyrics, your creative arrangement, your modifications. The protection covers your contribution, not the AI-generated material standing alone.

Registration requires disclosure. If a work contains more than a trivial amount of AI-generated material, you must say so and describe your human contribution. Overclaiming on a registration is a bad idea entirely separate from AI.

The practical consequence is a rule worth internalising: the more you actually do, the more you own. Prompt-and-pick gives you the least. Writing the lyrics, arranging deliberately, editing and mixing gives you the most. The full ownership picture works through the cases.

Licence and copyright are not the same thing

The confusion that costs people the most.

A platform licence says what the company permits you to do with the output. Copyright says whether the output is protected property. You can hold the first without the second.

On Suno, commercial rights attach to songs made while you hold an active paid plan, never retroactively. That lets you sell a track. It does not, by itself, give you a copyright in it, and if it is uncopyrightable you have limited ability to stop anyone else using it. The commercial-use rules are a separate article for a reason.

What to do, in practical order

1. Keep your working files. Session files, drafts with dates, lyric notebooks, the prompts you used. In a dispute, evidence of the work in progress is worth more than the finished file, because anyone can hold a WAV and only the author has the process.

2. Write the lyrics yourself if the song matters. It is the strongest and simplest human contribution, and it is the one most easily documented. Deliberate arrangement decisions count too, which is one reason working from a specific style recipe rather than a vague prompt leaves you with more to point at. Ours are in the catalogue, with ten open free.

3. Register before publishing anything commercially significant, if you are in the US and the track has real value. Registration is inexpensive relative to what it enables.

4. Disclose AI involvement honestly on registration and increasingly on platforms, since detection and tagging systems now exist and disclosure is moving toward mandatory.

5. Do not build a business on unclear rights. Someone else's lyrics, a sampled recording, a cloned voice: any one of them undoes everything downstream. The rights rules behind making money are non-negotiable in a way the creative advice is not.

Related mechanisms worth knowing by name

Mechanical licence. What you need to release a cover of someone else's composition. Routine, obtainable, and skipped by almost everyone who should get one.

Sync licence. Permission to use music with visual media. Required for the composition, alongside a master licence for the recording, which is why a couple's favourite song cannot go in their wedding film.

Public domain. Works whose copyright has expired. A composition being public domain does not make a specific recording of it free, and that distinction catches people constantly.

FAQ

Do I need to register my song to own the copyright? No. Protection is automatic on creation. Registration enables enforcement and statutory damages in the US.

Does the poor man's copyright work? No. Mailing yourself an envelope is folklore, not a legal mechanism.

Can I copyright an AI-generated song? Only the parts reflecting perceptible human authorship. Prompting alone does not qualify under the US Copyright Office's position.

What are the two copyrights in a song? The composition, meaning melody and lyrics, and the sound recording, meaning a specific recorded performance.

Do I have to disclose AI use when registering? Yes, if the work contains more than a trivial amount of AI-generated material, along with a description of your contribution.

Does a platform licence give me copyright? No. It permits use. Copyright is a separate question decided by law rather than by contract.