writes:
Fact#1 : Guthrie wrote the song in 1940. At that time, the term of copyright was twenty-eight years, renewable once for an additional twenty-eight years. Under the relevant law, the copyright term for a song begins when the song is published as sheet music. (Just performing it is not enough to trigger the clock.)
Fact #2 : A search of Copyright Office records shows that the copyright wasn’t registered until 1956, and Ludlow filed for a renewal in 1984.
Fact #3 : Thanks to tips provided by musicologists who heard about this story, we discovered that Guthrie published and sold the sheet music for “This Land Is Your Land” in a pamphlet in 1945. An original copy of this mimeograph was located for us by generous volunteers who visited the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. This means that the copyright in the song expired in 1973, twenty-eight years after Guthrie published the sheet music. Ludlow’s attempted renewal in 1984 was eleven years tardy, which means the classic Guthrie song is in the public domain. (I’ll note that Ludlow disputes this, although I’ve not heard any credible explanation from them.)
So Guthrie’s original joins “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Amazing Grace,” and Beethoven’s Symphonies in the public domain. Come to think of it, now that “This Land Is Your Land” is in the public domain, can we make it our national anthem? That would be the most fitting ending of all.
Because art isn’t made from thin air, the existence of a large and thriving public domain enriches the quality and diversity of creative expression. It’s an important resource used by creative people to make new works, such as the musicals Les Miserables (based on the nineteenth-century novel by Victor Hugo) and West Side Story (based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet).[6] The public domain also promotes artistic freedom of expression®, because it eliminates the rigid control some copyright owners exercise over the context in which their works appear. For instance, Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas were tightly controlled by the D’Oyly Carte Opera, which required that all performances be staged exactly as the originals were. Not a note could change. But when the copyrights were released into the public domain the musicals were freed from the shackles of artistic mummification.[7]
Disney — which strongly lobbied for the Bono Act — made billions of dollars recycling “Snow White,” “Pinocchio,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and many other old stories and fables. Like Guthrie, it would have been much harder for Walt Disney to legally make his fortune if he had to work under the intellectual-property laws his corporate heirs advocate. In his dissenting opinion in the challenge to the Bono Act, which the Supreme Court upheld, Justice Stephen Breyer argued that this law threatens the endangered ecosystem that is our cultural commons. “I cannot find,” wrote Breyer, “any constitutionally legitimate, copyrighted-related way in which the statute will benefit the public. Indeed, in respect to existing works, the serious public harm and the virtually nonexistent public benefit could not be more clear.”
Copyright protectionists defend the Bono Act by pointing out that Congress was only adhering to international copyright standards. However, this assertion ignores the fact that U.S.–based corporations such as Disney had a hugely influential role in setting these standards. In 2003 Illegal Art — a label hosted by Steev Hise’s collage-centric Web site detritus.net and run by the pseudonymously named Philo Farnsworth (after the inventor of the television) — fought back. The label began work on its latest project, a compilation CD named Sonny Bono Is Dead. In its press release soliciting the input of artists, Illegal Art stated, “We encourage artists to liberally sample from works that would have fallen into the Public Domain by the year 2004 had the Sonny Bono Act failed,” adding slyly that “artists are also encouraged to create new works by sampling Sonny Bono’s output.”
This essay originally appeared in the author' s book, Freedom of Expression®
About the Authors
Marcus Kesler is the chairman of the Pirate Party of Oklahoma.
Ryan Moffitt is a free speech and civil liberties activist from Plano, Texas. He is the co- founder and current chairman of the Florida Pirate Party, and is presently heavily engaged in a campaign for a state senate seat from Palm Beach County, Florida. The Florida Pirate Party website can be found at http://fl.pirate.is
Howard Denson worked for several newspapers before spending nearly four decades as a teacher of English and humanities at what is now Florida State College at Jacksonville. He has edited or written for such periodicals as The State Street Review, Penchant (for the Florida First Coast Writers' Festival), The Write Stuff (for the North Florida Writers), theFCCJ Update, and evenThe International Journal of Elvisology and the Elvisian Era. He blogs at http://howarddenson.webs.com/apps/blog/
Reagen Dandridge Desilets resides with her husband and three children in the beautiful South Carolina Lowcountry. She first became interested in politics, beyond just voting, in 2008. She's gone from once being a straight-ticket GOP voter to a free-market libertarian and agorist. Those that have helped her better understand politics and economics include friend, activist, and author, Tarrin P. Lupo as well as Murray Rothbard and Friedrich Hayek.
In her agorist ventures, Reagen has found a niche in the world of publishing and has been working with self-published authors since July of 2010, starting with Tarrin (http://LupoLit.com). She has worked on all of his books, primarily with creative editing as well as print layout and ebook layout, and created and admins his websites. She is currently working with several more authors helping them convert from print to ebook and finding the right places to market them online, and is open to inquiries from anyone interested in publishing their own book. She believes wholeheartedly in the free market and is glad to be able to take part in helping the literary industry become more varied and diverse.
Reagen's other interests include volunteering and reenacting, urban exploration, photography, writing, art (sketching and painting watercolors), and learning to live naturally. She spends time painting and playing with her children and helping them to better understand the world around them, from nature to politics. She has several books of her own in progress and hopes to have at least one complete and available by the end of 2011.
Reagen can be contacted via Twitter @redd4a3 or email at redd4a3 at yahoo dot com.
Andrew “
William Sims Bainbridge earned his doctorate in sociology from Harvard University, taught in universities for twenty years, and then joined the National Science Foundation, where he currently is a program director in Human-Centered Computing. He is author or co-author of 20 scientific books and over 200 shorter publications. Several of his major projects were based on computer software he programmed, most recently the 2006 book God from the Machine: Artificial Intelligence Models of Religious Cognition. Four of his earlier projects were textbook-software packages, and three books focused on the sociology of space exploration. He has also published extensively in the sociology of religion, notably The Sociology of Religious Movements (1997) and Across the Secular Abyss (2007). Most recently he has written about virtual gameworlds in Online Multiplayer Games (2010), The Warcraft Civilization (2010), and The Virtual Future (2011). He edited a pair of two-volume reference works, Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction (2004) and Leadership in Science and Technology
