Hi.

This brings us to the issue of cover bands. While playing music on your guitar in your home is one thing going out and playing for a crowd and charging them money is another and I really am not familiar with the laws governing this.

Bands do this every weekend all over the country, yet nobody minds.

This isn't exactly true. Those cover bands (or the clubs they play at) are paying roylaties to the original artist (or some organization that pays the artists/copyright holders).

By the way, I'm in the process of writing the book of The. The only word in it is 'the'. It will soon be copyrighted, and anyone who wishes to use my intellectual property will have to compensate me for it.

This is a non-argument: You can't copyright a basic word of any language (but you can get a trademark for it under certain circumstances). To copyright something, it has to be non-trivial and either scientific or artistic. First, "the" is trivial. Second, "the" is neither scientific nor artistic. You might be able to copyright a specific, artistic representation of the word, like a calligraphic writing of it. If you did that, nobody would be allowed to use exactly that representation without your permission (that's how certain typefaces got copyrighted). Nobody could stop another "artist" to do a different painting of that word though.

cu,
sven