The changes in the way in which music was produced, circulated, and consumed in Algeria in the first three decades of the twentieth century helped to bring into being two seemingly contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, the rise of amateur musical associations, recordings, theatrical performance, radio, print, and a modernist discourse of revival helped create a strong sense of the collective meaning and nature of musical activity. Indigenous music formed the basis for a vision of an Algerian public, and became a major way in which Algerians organized themselves in the public sphere. These trends were closely connected to the delineation of the sense of an Algerian and Maghribi musical patrimony, held in common, passed down over the generations, and in need of salvage and revival. On the other hand, the new musical technologies, forms of social organization, and venues for listening and performance gave rise to a new sense of the individual mass media star, and created space for novel song forms that emphasized the role of the individual composer and performer over the sense of a collective inheritance. These two contradictory tendencies come together most dramatically in the realm of copyright. The new regime of author’s rights that was introduced in the early decades of the twentieth century was drawn upon not only by composers in new song genres, but also by musicians who worked within the traditional urban musical repertoires that were at that very moment being marked as patrimonial. This paper attempts to make sense of the embrace of copyright within the realm of the musical common. I begin with the 1927 dispute between two key figures in the early twentieth-century revival of Andalusi music in Algeria, Edmond Yafil and Jules Rouanet, over the former’s alleged attempt to copyright vast sections of the Andalusi repertoire in his name. I then touch upon the problem of authorship and copyright in the case of a song recorded by the Oran-based singer Joseph Guennoune in 1938—a song in a genre marked as patrimonial that traditionally involves the invocation of the speaker’s name within the text. These two disputes and their aftermath suggest the ways Maghribi musicians used copyright to both challenge and elaborate traditional notions of musical authority and transmission. I suggest that far from a contradiction, the assertion of author’s rights emerged from within the effort to delineate a notion of a collective musical patrimony.