Cartersville Songwriters Exchange - 1st Meeting

I had a fun and productive time at the first meeting of the Cartersville Songwriters Exchange.  Hosted by organizer Randy Owens, of the Owens Brothers.  We agreed to meet once a week and to exchange MP3s to help us work out material at home.  Our goal is to create a compilation CD and perhaps to sell it at performances.  One we have some songs down, we will look for paying gigs.  And we'd also like to publish and promote our original material.  We discussed the process of getting material copyrighted.  It sounds expensive - $35 a song through the government website!  We all agreed this seemed ridiculous - people used to mail themselves their original material by certified mail, believing that an unopened envelope with a date on it would be evidence enough that they were indeed the original authors.  For some reason though this no longer stands up in court.  If you know of a cheaper, legal alternative to paying the government $35 to copyright songs, please comment below.