Brian Walton
Melodies and Lyrics are copyrighted the moment you record them. The problem is the burden of proof in providing evidence that someone was the first to create them.
This is why people file a copyright, so they have the proof of when it was created/submitted.
In fact you are on shaky ground on two points. The first is that copyright requires that you be the first to create a work. That is not true of copyright, which only says that you are forbidden to copy someone else's work if it is copyrighted. It is certainly conceivable that you could independently create a work that is in part or in whole very similar or identical to a work previously created by someone else without your knowledge. Since copying implies that you must have seen or heard the original from which you are copying, it is the burden of proof in an infringement case to prove that the infringer had access to the earlier created work. Since the burden in a civil case is the preponderance of evidence (more likely than not), and since the injured party can pretty convincingly claim that a published work can be easily found on the internet or inadvertently heard on the radio, you are probably not far off in a practical sense. But for a work that was not published, that burden may be unsurmountable. If you recorded yourself performing a song, put the storage media in a drawer and never shared it, then find that a couple of years later it has been made a hit by another author, you would be hard pressed to convince a court that the hit was an infringement. That is a case in which two authors had valid copyrights to the same work independently.
What US copyright registration provides is that the deposit of the work that you use to register the copyright can be used to provide prima facie evidence of your creation. That evidence can be rebutted, and since the Copyright Office does not investigate the deposit to see if there are already copyrights registered for it, there is the possibility that someone who heard your song could copy and register it before you if he is willing to lie on his application. So registration helps, but does not alone determine the original creation. If you were in the unfortunate situation of being the second registrant for your work, it might actually make your case harder to prove.
In countries that do not provide copyright registration, there are private repositories that will register your work in order to provide evidence of its creation, with most of the same limiting issues. Arguably, the publication of the work by uploading to a sharing site can provide similar evidence of creation (absent the testamentary evidence included in the registration document) and in most cases a date of the upload will probably be available. In addition you will have created a plausible source from which an infringer may be inferred to have heard the work prior to copying it. On the other hand you will have set the clock running on timely registration by publishing it. Yes, uploading to a publicly accessible site constitutes publication for this purpose and also subjects the work to the compulsory licensing provisions of the law. Since the US allows pre-publication registration, your best protection is to register the work prior to uploading it.
The second issue is that people register copyright only to provide a record of the work's creation. In fact, registration is a requirement in the US to file a copyright infringement suit. You can register the copyright at any time prior to filing suit to meet that requirement, even after infringement has occurred. But
timely registration, i. e. within three months of publication of the work, and prior to its infringement, provides you with the option to claim
statutory damages of up to $150,000 at maximum for infringement of a work, and in some cases to have the infringer pay your court costs. Without statutory damages, you will need to prove that the illegal competition posed by the infringement cost you actual money that you would otherwise have received for your work. For a mega-hit, actual damages may well be much more, but the difficulty of proving actual damages for lesser works can be substantial, and the threat of a significant statutory damages award without such proof can be a major deterrent to casual infringement of lesser works, where litigation costs for the successful plaintiff may well outweigh any actual damage award.
Finally, registration of copyright provides a way for potential users of your work to locate the author or his heirs in the event that they want to license the work and pay for it, and to put them on notice that the work is still under a valid copyright.