On Sep 15, 2004, at 7:32 PM, Christopher Smith wrote:
I don't know where you confirmed this list, but I see several Irving Berlin songs, and a few Gershwin songs with lyrics by Ira, so I can't imagine them being in the public domain yet. Ira only died in the mid 80's, and Berlin in the 90's, and both their estates are sharks about rights to their works. Could these songs have slipped through the cracks of their lawyers? (there's a thought for ya!)
At the time these songs were written, US copyright consisted of a single, 28-year term, renewable once, so a song copyrighted in 1923 and duly renewed would have entered the public domain in 1979, the year the copyright law was changed to life + 50.
When the law was changed, all works currently under copyright were switched over to the new system, which almost invariably extended the copyright of each work. Under the old law, however, if you did not go out of your way to renew a copyright, it would expire automatically at the end of the first 28-year term. There were a great many songs that had gone into the public domain in this way, and in the interests of fairness, a later revision of the 1978 law re-established the copyrights of works that had not been renewed, but that would have been still in copyright in 1979 if they had been.
When the current (viciously absurd) term of life+70 was established, the law was further ammended so that anything that was copyright betw. 1923 and (I think) 1978 would remain in copyright for 90 years.
Another serious erosion of the US PD took place in 1983, when the supreme court ruled that an unpublished, uncopyrighted manuscript remained the intellectual property of the author's heirs indefinitely, until congress established otherwise, *and* for twenty-five years after the ruling. Common-law tradition had it that an unpublished MS entered the public domain when its author died, but there was no statute law on the books, and the supremes ruled that the property rights involved were too important to be left to mere common sense. The court gave owners of existing MSS 25 years to register copyrights in them, while congress corrected the gap in the law (the limit for registering any recent MS has been established at, I think, 100 years). Anyway, if you're a descendant of George Washington and have an unpublished letter of his that's been handed down in the family, you can copyright it in *your* name until 2008, wh. means that after that it will *remain* in copyright until 70 years after *you* die.
In the US these days, property rights trump everything, and everything is property.
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