I thought after 25 years, a song becomes part of the “public domain”.
More like 78 years. That's why the Beatles catalog is worth so much.
Where did you hear that?! The music is owned by whoever owns the license. People can purchase permission from the license owner to use the music for specific events or license a large catalog of music for various uses, such as a TV station playing popular music as a bumper. Truthfully, if Ann and Nancy no longer own the license to their lyrics, they really have no say in who plays it, if that party paid the license fee to ASCAP or whomever owns the music.
Long ago, it did. But now, copyrights have been extended every time that Disney is in danger of losing their copyright on Mickey Mouse.
If that were true then we should be able to download Beatles and Rolling Stones from free web sites.
I don’t know the timetable from a legal point a view, but there’s also a difference between the song and the performance.
20 difference singers/groups can record the same song, and each version has it’s own protections aside from the copyright on the original song. So Heart’s rendition would be distinct from the song (even though the writer and the group are the same).
I know for books in certain countries, the copyright lasts for 50 years after the authors death. My favorite author started writing in 1900 and died in 1975, so his original published works will enjoy copyright protection in some jurisdictions until 2025 — 125 years after publication!
50 years after the author is dead I think.
I don't think so. My understanding is that the owners of music published after 1922 own the rights indefinitely. You have to buy the rights or ask (and receive) permission to use a song for anything commercial.
Think again. Intellectual property law has been corrupted on behalf of software houses and publishers so that things don’t pass into the public domain even 30 plus years after the death of the author and 70 plus year after publication: rights to Robert Frost’s (d. 1968) “Fire and Ice”, published in 1928, is still controlled by Henry Holt & Co. so that the goth band Unto Ashes couldn’t get the rights to record it as song lyrics.
Copyright and patent law have become impediments to artistic and scientific creativity, rather than supports: they no longer reserve exclusive rights to authors and inventors for a limited term. Instead the reserve exclusive rights to companies that buy the rights from the actual creative individuals for functionally unlimited terms (anything important has a copyright or patent about the expire, if the holder has a fat enough lobbying budget, Congress will oblige and create a means for the copyright or patent to be extended).