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Public domain music is music to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. [1]
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Public domain music is music to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. [1]
The length of copyright protection varies from country to country, but music, along with most other creative works, generally enters the public domain 50 to 75 years after the death of the creator.[ citation needed ] Generally, copyright separately protects "musical compositions" (melodies, rhythms, lyrics, etc. as written in sheet music) and "sound recordings" (performances as recorded in audio files, CDs, and records). [2]
In the United States, although case law regarding copyright abandonment is inconsistent, the law has generally assumed that copyright owners may dedicate their works to the public domain; however, this practice remains exceedingly rare. [3] The most common way for a work to enter the public domain is for its copyright term to expire—this is the case for musical compositions published prior to 1 January 1929. [4] Sound recordings, on the other hand, were generally protected until at least 2022. [4] Before 1976, sound recordings were not protected by national copyright law in the United States; instead, the protection of these works was under the jurisdiction of the state and local governments. This resulted in great variation in laws across the country, with some jurisdictions extending perpetual protection to sound recordings. Although the Copyright Act of 1976 provided federal copyright protection to sound recordings created after 1972, it otherwise left state protections in place until at least 2067. [5] The 2018 Music Modernization Act further nationalized the system by extending federal copyright protection to pre-1972 sound recordings while also shortening their term of protection. [6] Sound recordings made before 1923 entered the public domain on 1 January 2022; recordings made between 1923 and 1946 will be protected for 100 years after publication; recordings made between 1947 and 1956 will be protected for 110 years; and all recordings made from 1957 to 15 February 1972 will have their protection terminate on 15 February 2067. [4]
In the European Union and Canada, sound recordings were copyrighted for 50 years until 2013. On 1 January 2013, the Beatles' single "Love Me Do" entered the public domain. [7] As of November 2013, European sound recordings are now protected for 70 years, which is not retroactive. [8] In 2015, Canada changed the copyright length to 70 years. [9]
On 8 February 2016, a court ruled that the children's song "Happy Birthday to You" was in the public domain and Warner/Chappell Music was required to pay $14 million to the song's licensees. [10]
In October 2020, American humorist Tom Lehrer released his entire catalogue, dating back to the 1950s, into the public domain. [11]
For music, the involved rights are:
There are several ways that a piece of music can be in the public domain:
If a piece of music does not fall within the public domain and is instead under copyright protection, most countries' laws forbid the reproduction, public performance, distribution, and creation of derivative works without the permission of the copyright holder. [16] [17] Under compulsory licensing laws, some of these actions may in fact be lawful, but the infringing party would then be liable to pay royalties to the copyright holder for the use of their work. [18]
Inherently, all historical musical works (pre-1929) are public domain. [16] Classical[ vague ] sheet music, for example, is widely available for free use and reproduction. Some more current works are also available for free use through public works projects such as Internet Archive. This and similar projects aim to preserve and make readily available thousands of public domain music files, many of which have been recorded by projects dedicated to recording music for public use.
Music on the Creative Commons:
The Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization created for the purpose of housing the public domain. The Commons allows copyright owners to dedicate their works to the public domain either immediately or, with the "Founders' Copyright" (originally created in the first American copyright law in 1790), can obtain an exclusive license for 14 or 28 years (if renewed) of copyright protection in exchange for selling their work to the Commons for one dollar after that protection has expired. Copyright owners can fill out an online application at https://creativecommons.org/ in order to apply. [19]
Public domain musical works and recordings can be uploaded onto the Wikimedia Commons website.
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives the creator of an original work, or another right holder, the exclusive and legally secured right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative works. Free and open-source licenses use these existing legal structures for an inverse purpose. They grant the recipient the rights to use the software, examine the source code, modify it, and distribute the modifications. These criteria are outlined in the Open Source Definition.
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
The copyright law of Canada governs the legally enforceable rights to creative and artistic works under the laws of Canada. Canada passed its first colonial copyright statute in 1832 but was subject to imperial copyright law established by Britain until 1921. Current copyright law was established by the Copyright Act of Canada which was first passed in 1921 and substantially amended in 1988, 1997, and 2012. All powers to legislate copyright law are in the jurisdiction of the Parliament of Canada by virtue of section 91(23) of the Constitution Act, 1867.
The Copyright Act is the federal statute governing copyright law in Canada. It is jointly administered by the Department of Industry Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage. The Copyright Act was first passed in 1921 and substantially amended in 1988 and 1997. Several attempts were made between 2005 and 2011 to amend the Act, but each of the bills failed to pass due to political opposition. In 2011, with a majority in the House of Commons, the Conservative Party introduced Bill C-11, titled the Copyright Modernization Act. Bill C-11 was passed and received Royal Assent on June 29, 2012.
APRA AMCOS consists of Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (AMCOS), both copyright management organisations or copyright collectives which jointly represent over 100,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers in Australia and New Zealand. The two organisations work together to license public performances and administer performance, communication and reproduction rights on behalf of their members, who are creators of musical works, aiming to ensure fair payments to members and to defend their rights under the Australian Copyright Act (1968).
Music on hold (MOH) is the business practice of playing recorded music to fill the silence that would be heard by telephone callers who have been placed on hold. It is especially common in situations involving customer service.
The threshold of originality is a concept in copyright law that is used to assess whether a particular work can be copyrighted. It is used to distinguish works that are sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection from those that are not. In this context, "originality" refers to "coming from someone as the originator/author", rather than "never having occurred or existed before".
In copyright law, a mechanical license is a license from the holder of a copyright of a composition or musical work, to another party to create a "cover song", reproduce, or sample a portion of the original composition. It applies to copyrighted work that is neither a free/open source item nor in the public domain.
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, also known as the CDPA, is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that received royal assent on 15 November 1988. It reformulates almost completely the statutory basis of copyright law in the United Kingdom, which had, until then, been governed by the Copyright Act 1956 (c. 74). It also creates an unregistered design right, and contains a number of modifications to the law of the United Kingdom on Registered Designs and patents.
In copyright law, related rights are the rights of a creative work not connected with the work's actual author. It is used in opposition to the term "authors' rights". Neighbouring rights is a more literal translation of the original French droits voisins. Both authors' rights and related rights are copyrights in the sense of English or U.S. law.
In law, abandonment is the relinquishment, giving up, or renunciation of an interest, claim, privilege, possession, civil proceedings, appeal, or right, especially with the intent of never again resuming or reasserting it. Such intentional action may take the form of a discontinuance or a waiver. This broad meaning has a number of applications in different branches of law. In common law jurisdictions, both common law abandonment and statutory abandonment of property may be recognized.
The copyright law of Australia defines the legally enforceable rights of creators of creative and artistic works under Australian law. The scope of copyright in Australia is defined in the Copyright Act 1968, which applies the national law throughout Australia. Designs may be covered by the Copyright Act as well as by the Design Act. Since 2007, performers have moral rights in recordings of their work.
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds the exclusive rights, anyone can legally use or reference those works without permission.
The Copyright Act of 1976 is a United States copyright law and remains the primary basis of copyright law in the United States, as amended by several later enacted copyright provisions. The Act spells out the basic rights of copyright holders, codified the doctrine of "fair use", and for most new copyrights adopted a unitary term based on the date of the author's death rather than the prior scheme of fixed initial and renewal terms. It became Public Law number 94-553 on October 19, 1976, and went into effect on January 1, 1978.
The copyright law of the United States grants monopoly protection for "original works of authorship". With the stated purpose to promote art and culture, copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly. These exclusive rights are subject to a time and generally expire 70 years after the author's death or 95 years after publication. In the United States, works published before January 1, 1929, are in the public domain.
The copyright law of New Zealand is covered by the Copyright Act 1994 and subsequent amendments. It is administered by Business Law Policy Unit of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). In June 2017, a review of the existing legislation was announced.
Works are in the public domain if they are not covered by the intellectual property right known as copyright, or if the intellectual property rights to the works have expired. Works automatically enter the public domain when their copyright has expired. The United States Copyright Office is a federal agency tasked with maintaining copyright records.
The Orrin G. Hatch–Bob Goodlatte Music Modernization Act, or Music Modernization Act or MMA is United States legislation signed into law on October 11, 2018, aimed to modernize copyright-related issues for music and audio recordings due to new forms of technology such as digital streaming. It is a consolidation of three separate bills introduced during the 115th United States Congress.
