Question about song rights
 

Do song rights apply to other countries or do they exist, but are difficult so enforce? No clue on this just curious if they exist.

The reason I ask is I quickly learned the song The Ballad of the Green Berets for my dad who served as a Green Beret during the Vietnam era. I was looking around the Internet to see Barry Sadler play it on guitar curious about his technique (which I never found), and found several countries including the UN have used the melody for their military units with slight changes to the words. E.g. a Swedish singer uses the words Blue Beret instead of Green Beret.

I didn't find anything about selling the rights to the song, but perhaps that is the case?

Conversely one can listen to a cover version of Hotel California on Youtube if one is not located in the U.S. but in the U.S. as it violates something?

Typically copyrighted material is protected around the world. You couldn't translate the latest English-language best-selling novel into another language, or simply add subtitles in something other than English to the latest Hollywood blockbuster and not suffer legal consequences (unless you're in a country with an adversarial relationship with the US I guess).

Songs are a little different. Most publishers rights organizations (PRO's) like ASCAP and BMI are focused on collecting fees from those that publish music and lyrics in sheet music, venues that host live music and studios that record protected music.

No one (in the US) ever goes after the performer covering, adapting or otherwise using copyrighted music