Techdirt: As you're probably aware, on January 1st of this year, we actually had a public domain day in the US for the first time in over two decades. Prior to that Congress (with the help of Hollywood lobbyists) had worked to continually extend copyright law whenever new works were due to go into the public domain.
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It’s fascinating that this article supposes that there is a possibility that Universal just doesn’t have a way to take newly minted public domain material off of it’s list of “Things that belong to us” which then results in the kind of warning that happened on this youtube video. It’s also deeply troubling that they would create a system that couldn’t handle that automatic removal. But then, I suppose it’s not shocking considering they’ve been able to extend copyright for so long that the concept of having things leave that copyright might be a foreign concept to them. I am looking forward to having even more things come into public domain and out of the greedy hands of these entertainment monopolies who haven’t done much to increase their creative use or reinvented them in actually useful ways. Perhaps in the hands of the more diverse and often more creative public some of these works will have new life breathed into them.
I am so excited for public domain day to happen once again. I think copyright protection up to a certain point after a creator’s death is reasonable and as people are living longer there are reasonable arguments for extensions of copyright law but seeing Frank Silver died in 1960 and the piece was written in 1923, I think it is crazy that 60 years later, the piece is still under protection. I think this article points out the complications of copyright law due to the new and different ways of recording materials. This article does a great job of showing the current complications with YouTube. This article also shows how controlling corporations are of copyright and how many hoops they are going to try to jump through in order to protect their pieces. I am confused and upset when the article talks about how you can’t even fight YouTube when they make a pretty blatant copyright mistake. It seems like outward support of large corporations and failing to protect the cool creative works that come out of the site.
This honestly just seems like a major glitch in the system. Technically (I think), Universal used to have the rights to the song, but since they have become part of the public domain, I truly do not see how there could be any claim by Universal Music on this particular song. Especially considering that the video in question in this article is of a man and his family singing the song. There are plenty of other versions on the internet that are the original song as sung by various artists that have been around for years before the song came out from under the copyright laws. It’s been so long since something has come out of copyright (that I could tell you about, anyways) due to copyright extensions on behalf of Hollywood or estates of the artists that perhaps YouTube or Universal has not updated their practices on videos containing newly un-copyrighted material.
The items from 1923 entered public domain on January 1st, 2019. Copyright protection extends to a work for 75 years from the date of initial publication. Congress may (as it has done) extend that protection. If I read this article right, this video was shot at a New Years Eve party (presumably 2018 to 2019). On December 31st at 11:59pm, the song was still protected under copyright. It only entered public domain at midnight. In this case, the video could have been shot before midnight. It doesn’t matter when it went up on YouTube, what matters is when the production was created. It’s nitpicky, but it is also exactly what the courts will think about if the matter ever has to go to litigation. In the creation of an artistic work, timing is everything. Two people can create the same work, file for copyright protection and only one person get it. If the person who lost in the matter wants to win, they have to prove that their work was created before the other person created their work. It’s along the lines of “I thought of it first”. While the article seems silly to be pointing out a dispute by bad corporate parents, it raises a valid point. The time that a work enters the public domain is extremely important in determining who can claim copyright and ownership and when and for how long.
I think this article brings up a very good point about one of the corrupt issues in society today: copyright claims. This is a common issue, not only in small songs such as this, but in ideas as well. Most commonly seen on Youtube or various other media sites, people post original content and then the slip of a particular word, the hum of a familiar tune or the like can cause for a copyright claim on your video. It’s particularly ridiculous, and it drives media creators absolutely insane. For instance, in high school, my friend and I ran the morning announcements, and everytime we did an intro for the day, we added a song behind our standard template intro. Pretty simple break, and it’s for educational purposes as well, where we’re learning how to edit video and audio in a school setting, right? Alas, UMG strucketh down upon us copyright claims after copyright claims, severely limiting what we could do for our intros. Same went for when we did our yearly parody of MTV, playing music videos on the announcements all day on the final day of school. We had to remove any song we would get copyrighted for during our stream, which ultimately eliminated more than half of our song choices. Point is: copyright is corrupt today, and the extensions are monstrous and it is awful for media makers. Stop it governmentttttttt.
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