Boing Boing: A song that became the "unofficial anthem to the civil rights movement" was wrongly placed under copyright, and should be released into the public domain. That's the argument in a lawsuit filed today in federal court over the song "We Shall Overcome."
Who's behind it? The same group of lawyers who fought for years to free "Happy Birthday" from copyright prison.
3 comments:
This article was informative on many different levels. For one, I had no idea that "We shall Overcome" was copyrighted in the first place, or that "Happy birthday" had the same issue. I had no idea that something so iconic could be owned or copyrighted. To me, that's almost like trying to own an experience or feeling. That being said, this article did clear up some of the initial confusion I had over the legal intricacies of this matter. First, the company that holds/ claims to hold the copyright on "We Shall Overcome" has only claimed said copyright since 1960, while the song in question was based on a spiritual ages older than that. In addition, the song has changed arrangement and lyrics in it's many incarnations over time, and the copyright claimed by Ludlow Music Inc./The Richmond organization only covers a specific version of the song, which may or not be the one currently in circulation. In light of all this information, I wish the legal team fighting this battle for the public domain all the best of luck, and hope they can achieve with this transcendent civil rights anthem what they achieved with "Happy Birthday."
When it comes to copyrighting songs that everyone knows and anyone can use to portray a very specific event, or struggle, such as ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘We Shall Overcome’ (both songs definitely have their one use, and using them in any other context wouldn’t only be unorthodox, but would almost definitely be a little weird), I don’t understand why it’s even allowed. These songs are clearly in the public domain, and in fact they embody what my perception of the public domain is. They’re songs that everyone knows, and that are so old almost nobody can remember where they came from. It’s not like everyone uses the Beatles song ‘Birthday’ for people’s birthday, some do, but not everyone. And everyone who does also would sing Happy birthday. It’s just silly to me that the two would be treated under the same laws regarding the distribution and performance of songs, and it is equally baffling that ‘We Shall Overcome’ is treated exactly the same, as if someone in the past century had painstakingly written it alone and without collaboration.
Another example of our broken copyright laws that require the use of an expensive court case in each individual case to change. Designed to protect the rights of creators in order to stimulate innovation copyrights have become the tools of corporations to suppress competition. Or in this case to sit on royalties of a song they never had a right to own. Either way it is clear that copyright laws are a necessary evil, however, it is also clear they should probably be reworked from the ground up for the modern age. In fact I don’t think copyright is the only area where this could help. The recent struggle over encryption and net neutrality show just how outdated and unaware Washington is of technology. I mean there is literally a law introduced this week for congress to vote on that would ban file compression accidentally… Come on…
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