Lyrics in Progress

There are two - slightly incompatible - concepts of copyright. The European understanding of copyright distinguishes between the personal rights, like being acknowledged as creator, and licensing issues. In the US these aspects are blended so you can (and have to!) transfer your copyright to others. That's why they have a copyright registration office that is affiliated to the library of congress. In Europe it suffices to be able to prove that you've been the first to have published a particular song or poem, or presented a painting or foto to claim your copyright. Licensing is simply a matter of individual contracts.

The creative commons initiative tackles the licensing aspect of ones copyright by 'attaching' differentiated conditions to a publication. Before that only 'fair use' could be claimed if you used copyrighted material privately in a non-commercial manner of for scientific purposes. CC-licences explicitely add sharing data as an accepted use, and you can specify precisely which usages you mean.

I've published my songs and song lyrics since about 12 years. Quite obviously, I've done so for advertising purposes, but also to provide proof of my copyright in case of litigation. Every once in a while I publish collections of my lyrics on the Internet Archive because I trust them to survive while other internet portals may perish. On their servers each item is attached a time stamp automatically - that's my proof!

The Internet Archive requires all items posted on their servers to be either committed to the public domain, i.e. no rights at all are claimed by the creator, or attached a creative commons licence specifying which use is considered acceptable without further notice. My licence reads: BY (attribution; I expect to be acknowledged as creator, i.e. being given credits), NC (I do NOT allow commercial use), SA ("same as": my creations may be altered - for example set to music; the resulting works must be shared in the same manner). 'SA' may look like a novelty, otherwise this is what would be considered allowed in Europe anyway, or what might be seen as 'fair use' in the US. The only real difference being that it is explicit. Well, that's how I use the CC licensing model. Others might allow the commercial use or disallow changes (ND - no derivatives). Thus, this licensing model offers more flexibility in addition to clarity.

I will call my next collection "not quite" because it 'only' will contain about 80 song lyrics instead of my former collections with 100 lyrics each. See also:
not quite - I