Copyright and the Public Domain Research

ORPHANED WORKS
ooks published before 1923 rest happily in the public domain, awaiting all manner of academic reappropriation. Books printed after 1963, meanwhile, sit quietly under copyright, thanks to a 1976 act that automatically renews the protected status of those works. But works created during the four decades in between live in limbo. Some are still under copyright, but others have become "orphan works" -- books that have exhausted their commercial life spans and have no apparent owners. Tracking down the copyright holders for works over half a century old can be an awfully tedious and inexact process, so it's hard sorting the orphans from the books that still have owners. But it's important to do just that: Librarians who want to digitize titles from their collections usually need to know whether the works they're scanning are, in fact, still under copyright. Enter Stanford University's new Copyright Renewal Database, an online repository that aims to make it easier to identify orphans. Piggybacking on the work of Project Gutenberg, Stanford has collected transcriptions of the U.S. Copyright

Copyright Durations
A flow chart setting forth some general guidelines regarding the duration of United States federal statutory copyright. There are a number of exceptions to these guidelines. In most cases, these exceptions may involve expiration prior to the theoretical date indicated. However, in some cases, copyright protection may continue past the indicated date. In addition, some remnants of state common law copyright protection continue to exist, and may provide protection even when federal copyright does not. See, e.g., Capitol Records, Inc. v. Naxos of Am., Inc. , 4 N.Y.3d 540 (2005) (holding that New York state common law copyright protects sound recordings made before 1972 until February 15, 2067).

Public Domain Music
A reference site to help identify public domain songs and public domain music

ASCAP T o ascertain whether a song is in the public domain, there are some guidelines, based on when the song was written.

2015 #MUSICIANS Learn what % of fractional shares to each copyrighted musical composition is 'controlled by ASCAP .'

According to Mr. Rowell, the Library of Congress will do searches on particular pieces to determine their copyright status. He recalls that the fee is $20/hour, at a rate of about three songs per hour. The report will arrive in about 3 months.
Att. Reference and Bibliography Section
Copyright Office
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C. 20559
(202) 707-3000.

A free resource for anyone who has questions about Copyright Law and Licensing Music for use and distribution over the World Wide Web." The site is at: http://www.kohnmusic.com/

Free Music • Music Law

Copyright Music

Registration is necessary to file an infringement claim in court.

Copyright is established as soon as a piece of music is notated on paper or recorded. You do NOT have to register with the copyright office for a song to be protected, registration is only needed if you want to file an infringement claim in court. If you register your work with the Copyright Office, you can sue in the event your work is infringed and get more money if you win.

Elements of a copyright infringement claim

only the person who owns the copyright can bring a copyright infringement
suit. Once ownership is established, it must be proved that the person infringing had access to the song in question and that their song is substantially similar to the original.

There may be Many Owners

  1. The person who owns the copyright is often the composer of the song. Sometimes a company who employed the songwriter owns the copyright.
  2. Sometimes there is more than one owner, or different owners own different sorts of rights to the same music.
  3. Owning publishing rights is different than owning the copyright to the sound recording.
  4. Owning the sound recording means owning the right to sell the actual recordings
  5. Owning the publishing rights allows you to rerecord the songs
    themselves and sell them for other purposes.