Copyright – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week, a discussion of copyright expiration and what that means for this publication.
I’m a relatively cautious writer when it comes to many of my friends. The Wednesday Blog reflects this caution in its simplicity and dearth of music or asides. Since day 1, I’ve been concerned about avoiding copyright infringements that could sink this entire project. This fear may not be justified, as some of you my audience have told me, because of how small an audience I have; I could well get away with using audio clips from songs that are still copyrighted interspersed in my work so long as the owners of those clips don’t notice. I gape at this perspective with an astonishment that characterizes the litigious world in which we live today.
So, it was a delight to read several weeks ago that a great deal of music, film, and stories would be entering the public domain on New Year’s Day, just earlier this week. Films like Mickey Mouse’s first appearance in Steamboat Willie, characters like Peter Pan and Tigger, and the Marx Brothers musical Animal Crackers saw their copyright expire at the end of 2023 and start of 2024. What this means for me is complicated. I could use song recordings that were created before 1928 here in the Wednesday Blog, especially in episodes that deal with timely topics to those tunes, though so many of those older recordings have fared so poorly that I’ve chosen to avoid including them.
I did consider writing this week about Walt Disney’s influence on Kansas City––the place where he got his start, and his old Laugh-o-Gram Studio which is today being slowly renovated––and building that story around the audio track from Steamboat Willie, yet by my best understanding while the silent film itself is now in the public domain, the music and sound effects that go along with it were copyrighted by Disney in 1930 and remain so until that copyright expires in 2026. That’s a story for another day, then.
For at least two years now I’ve planned a story that would express my appreciation for the music of George Gershwin, the great American composer of a century ago whose work blended the classical orchestra with jazz in clever ways that created a certain American voice. Yet again, while many of Gershwin’s works are now in the public domain their recordings aren’t. A good solution to all of this would be for me to reach out to my musician friends and see if we can make new recordings of these public domain scores.
Copyright is a tricky issue for me. On the one hand, I want all of my work to remain my own. I’ve had moments in the past where others have taken credit for things I’ve done, and that really doesn’t feel good. Still, it makes things difficult for me in this instance of crafting a podcast each week because my best solution is to do everything myself, text and score, and record all of it by myself so that I own all of my own copyrights. This problem is less pronounced when it comes to the text of the Wednesday Blog itself. There I know exactly what to do, after all in my day job I spend a good deal of time citing sources and filling out footnotes in my historical research, something that I do actually enjoy in spite of how time-consuming it can be. Yet plagiarism is a different matter from violating someone’s copyright, and the two only overlap in that I know better than to try and use audio in the podcast without permission.
My friends are right when they say I’m a small enough fish that if I skirt along the hem of copyright law by using the odd audio-clip here or there it won’t be much of a problem. Yet I don’t want my work to remain that of a small fish in a big pond forever, I want what I write to make an impact on our world. As boastful as it may sound, I want to help, and this is the best way I know how. I want to help advise and inspire our world with the stories I tell whether through my non-fiction writing in this outlet or in my research, or through the occasional stories that I tell. To do this well, I need to cover all of my bases so that if I am fortunate enough to be in a position of impact, I won’t have any early-career problems that could harm my credibility.
I hope this new year 2024 brings a brighter future than the present we find ourselves in. For now, I’ll leave you with the Victor Mixed Chorus’s 1928 performance of “Auld Lang Syne” from their record Songs of Scotland. Happy New Year everyone!
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 