What’s In A Name?

Understanding The Public Domain

What do composers Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, George M. Cohan, Jerome Kern and Gus Kahn have in common? You might say they’re masters of the great American Songbook. But the answer relevant to this blog is: they all have songs in the Public Domain. Your next question may be, “What doesn’t CSS Music have their great songs in their library!?”

If we were simply serving the U.S. market we’d have many more PD tunes. (You’ll find a number of familiar Public Domain songs in our 3 volume Digital Ditties library.) But the problem is this: while anything before 1922 is in the public domain in America, other countries can sill hold copyright on these songs. In many of the European countries, the copyright stays in effect 50-70 years after the composer’s death. So in the case of the great Irving Berlin who lived to be 101, his works won’t be available until September 22, 2059—yikes! In the case of George M. Cohan, who passed in November of 1942, his compositions became public domain in 2012 in most countries of the world.

So why don’t we have Cohan’s rousing “Yankee Doodle Dandy, Over There, She’s A Grand Old Flag and Give My Regards to Broadway” in the CSS Music library? As mentioned earlier, the “ life +70 years” rule isn’t universal. First, the Bern Convention of 1989 tried to standardize the rule but not all nations on signed on. And re-registration of songs became a murky mess. Not that we give a flip what Afghanistan thinks, but in 2003 our neighbors to the south—Mexico--decided they’d change the rules to “life + 100 years.” Maybe they wanted to resurrect a copyright on “La Cucaracha.” J

If you guys had shows only running in United States, we’d fill your hearts with “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows, Smiles, and Look For The Silver Lining.” But CSS Music is a royalty-free library and we won’t risk having one of your internationally broadcast programs levied with a royalty fee from some publisher in Mongolia. Even if we wanted to specify excluded countries, the metadata would truly be a nightmare to create. So enjoy the Classical and the Public Domain music we do have in our library. Perhaps by the time we have colonies on Mars, you’ll have “ I Love A Piano” available for your shows!