What would Woody do? Jesse Walker (Reason) suggests that Woody wasn’t that big on private property. Creative Commons also reports the following, though I haven’t checked the facts myself:
Joel Blain recently wrote in with an interesting observation:
“I’ve been reading a bio on Woody Guthrie. It’s pretty interesting. The book reprints one of the “Copyright Warnings” he included on his recordings in the ealry 40’s
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
Such a notation may have in fact explicitly licensed people to reproduce and perform the song or songs to which it’s attached. (Academics sometimes add similar notations to their articles.) It would help if Guthrie actually owned the copyright in the song at the time he published the notation; but even if he didn’t, his actions might bind the then-copyright-owner, if the notation was indeed published by the copyright owner on the recordings.
To the best of my knowledge, though — and I’m not an expert on the old pre-1976-Act rules related to renewals — any such license would have disappeared with the end of the original 28-year-term of protection. Under the 1909 Copyright Act, copyrights endured only for 28 years, but the author or his heirs could renew them after the end of the original term; the new term would also last for 28 years, though that has been extended several times by Congress to the point that pre-1976 copyrights last for 95 years from publication. And the new term would be a fresh, clean copyright, free of any licenses or transfers that the author originally did as to the original term. (The whole point of the renewal was to give the author of a work that had proven its long-term value a chance to recapture some of the value, even if he sold his rights for cheap when he first wrote it, before the value of the work was clear.)
This Land Is Your Land was written and, I infer, published in 1940; presumably the copyright was renewed in 1968 by Guthrie’s heirs (Guthrie died in 1967); and this renewed copyright would, I think, not be governed by any licenses that Guthrie had originally granted (though perhaps if the heirs also republished Guthrie’s notation, that might be seen as a new license).
Also, note that the original notation seems ambiguous on the scope of the rights granted — it could be read as disclaiming any copyright rights (“We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do”), but it could be read as allowing only republication and performance in more or less the original form (“Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it.”) rather than in a distorted or satirical form. Many creators (I don’t know about Guthrie) are indeed quite happy for others to reproduce or perform their works in the original form, but get really annoyed at any serious modifications.
Thus, while this sort of notation can indeed grant a legally valid license, it’s not clear what the scope of the license would have been. And I suspect that the license would in any event not have survived past 1968.
But of course all this is just the legal analysis; perhaps people’s stressing Guthrie’s views (to the extent that they do indeed show a “This Song Isn’t My Song” preference) might persuade the copyright owners to take it easy here.
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