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.
I wonder how hard it would have been to win a court case based on English common-law traditions. I do know that the Library of Congress has a very interesting list of publications that DID lose their copyright protection instrantly and permanently because they were published without the copyright notice required by the 1909 law. One of those publications was the 1928 edition of the Oxford Book of Carols.
John
-- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
