Original Band Copyright, who owns the music - Legal Help

Thanks a bunch for your reply and that think. I used that link as well as my own research and wanted to ask an additional question, if you have the cycles to answer it.

My understanding of the law as it relates to an original band, with no documented band agreement in place is:

The Copyright Act ?101 defines a ?joint work? as ?work prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of the unitary whole.?

In our case, we have played LIVE with this music and recorded it with the intentions of distributing it. Both guitar players decided to leave the band and create a separate project. They claim that they own all the music since they wrote the guitar parts. Not considering that the rest of us help author those guitar parts and we created the Vocals, Melodies, Drums and Bass lines to create a "Whole Song".

With no documented band agreement in place, and the intentions of playing LIVE and distribution noted above, shouldn't the following statement apply to this situation?

Parts of a unitary whole are ?inseparable? when they have little or no independent meaning standing alone. That would often be true of a work of written text, such as the play, that is the subject of the pending litigation.
By contrast, parts of a unitary whole are ?interdependent? when they have some meaning standing alone but achieve their primary significance because of their combined effect, as in the case of the words and music of a song.

I really appreciate your time and your opinions and I understand that any comments made can not me taken or understood as legal advice. Not an attorney, so I hope that's good enough. LOL :-)

Source: http://legalhelp.org/intellectual-property-law-questions/2018-original-band-copyright-who-owns-music.html

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