On Sep 16, 2004, at 6:44 PM, John Howell wrote:
The 1909 law was VERY picky about the exact form of the copyright notice. It had to have 3 specific elements: "Copyright" or c-in-a-circle; the name of the author; and the year of first publication. Woody's made-up notice was non-standard, not legal, and therefore the song was PD instantly and permanently.
Actually that's not true. Prior to the 1978 law, there were two different layers of copyright protection, the statutory copyright (whose requirements are accurately described above), and common-law copyright based on legal precedents going back all the way to medieval Britain. Under common-law copyright, a work is protected from knowing misuse; to infringe, the guilty party must have either a) had unauthorized access to the work (by rifling the author's files, for example) or b) good reason to know that the work was not PD. A work published w.o copyright notice had very little protection because it would be very difficult to show in any given instance that either a) or b) obtained, but "instantly and permanently" PD? No.
Under common law, any kind of copyright notice at all would provide some protection because of condition b). However, Guthrie's notice constituted what we would now call a copyleft: the songs were not PD, but blanket approval for just about any use by anybody was granted by the owner of the work.
The 1978 law specifically did away with common-law copyright while embodying many of its principles in the new statute.
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