[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. The Best Things in Life Are Free is a classic of the American songbook that gained a whole new meaning when it entered to the public domain at the beginning of this year, as demonstrated by one of our Public Song Project submitters, John Kuyat.

On January 1st, aka Public Domain Day, the copyright for that 1927 composition expired, meaning anybody, including John or you, could freely use, copy, share, build on, and adapt the work, and that's now true for plenty other 1927 works.

With the complete stories of Sherlock Holmes finally entering the public domain, anyone can write or film their own spin on the detective. We didn't receive any Sherlock Holmes for the Public Song Project, but we did get a song inspired by another fictional detective, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. Here's Nathaniel Bellows' Four Knaves inspired by Christie's novel The Big Four, which entered the public domain this year.

[Four Knaves - music]

Alison Stewart: Ernest Hemingway short story collection Men Without Women also entered the public domain this year, a fact that Louise Brum-Suchmacher took advantage of for her song A Simple Enquiry.

[A Simple Enquiry - music]

Alison Stewart: Other additions to the public domain this year included the influential science fiction film Metropolis and The Jazz Singer, often credited as the first feature film with synchronized dialogue, and there were other songs, too, like Puttin' On The Ritz, which a few different public song submitters put their spin on, including Jane Cohen.

[Puttin' On The Ritz - music]

Alison Stewart: As a reminder, you can find all of these and more in a playlist on our website at wnyc.org/publicsongproject. To round out our recap of the Public Songbook, we decided to revisit our conversation with Jennifer Jenkins, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University. Jenkins joined us in January when we launched the Public Song Project to discuss the public domain and why copyright and its term limits matter. Here are some of that conversation.

[Puttin' On The Ritz - music]

Alison Stewart: Why does it exist? Why does the public domain exist?

Jennifer Jenkins: It is the yin to the yang of copyright protection. It's actually built in deliberately into our copyright law. There's a provision in the US Constitution that authorizes Congress to grant copyrights, and it specifies that rights should last for limited times. It's two important parts of our copyright system. The first is we give authors important rights that give them incentives to create in the first place, but after a certain period of time, works enter the public domain so future authors, the public, and everyone else can have unfettered access to them.

Alison Stewart: How are copyrights and the public domain monitored or governed?

Jennifer Jenkins: Well, the public domain has been shrinking over time. The way that they're governed, at least with copyright law, is by how long the copyright terms last. Until 1978, the copyright term was much shorter than it is now. It was an initial term of 28 years with an optional renewal term of 28 years, total of 56 years. Now, what you're creating, what WNYC owns the term for people like us is life plus 70 years, so much longer, and then for works of corporate authorship, the term is 95 years after publication. That's how it's governed, is copyright lasts for X amount of time, and then after that time ends, these works enter the public domain, where they become part of our cultural heritage.

Alison Stewart: When you think about the written word, the obvious leap would be, "Oh, you could adapt it for film or for TV," but what are some of the other ways that these works can be built upon that doesn't involve film or television adaptation?

Jennifer Jenkins: Well, your prior guest gave a great example, if I heard correctly. I think she was talking about how her really compelling work was inspired in part by Dickens. Well, Dickens is in the public domain, and so anywhere working in writing a book can be inspired by these works going to the public domain to write their own adaptation. Some of these works from 1977, it was a time of legally enforced segregation. Some of these works have racial slurs in them and some troubling demeaning stereotypes.

One of the things you can do now that these works are in the public domain is you can reimagine them for today, including in a corrective way. To give you just one concrete example, The Great Gatsby went into the public domain in two years ago, the books from 1925, and after it went into the public domain, we saw all sorts of exciting reuses of it. There was a book called Nick, which was a prequel about Nick Carraway before he meets Gatsby, but there were many, many new editions of The Great Gatsby that were published with fresh perspectives informed by the intervening century.

Then you were talking about movies and that thing, but there was The Great Gatsby Undead, a zombie edition, because apparently people like to add zombies to public domain works [unintelligible 00:07:27], and apparently, there are stories that Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine is going to make a Gatsby musical and a new movie is coming out. You can just look at one work of The Great Gatsby from a couple of years ago, and see the wealth of reuses that work has inspired.

Alison Stewart: Once something is in the public domain? Can it be recalled or is that it? You're in the public domain. That's the deal.

Jennifer Jenkins: That's supposed to be it. There was a wrinkle where certain foreign works, including the movie Metropolis that you mentioned. Actually it had gone into the public domain in the '50s when its original copyright was not renewed, and in 1996, Congress actually gave copyright back to qualifying foreign works. That has happened once, but it's a basic tenet of copyright law that once things go into the public domain, they stay there. All of these wonderful works published in 1927, at least in the United States, should be in the public domain now and hopefully forever.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned Metropolis. The other film that a lot of people are talking about entering the public domain is The Jazz Singer, a musical movie, the first feature film to use synchronized dialogue, sometimes called the first talkie. What is significant to you about this film entering the public domain specifically under the idea of the public domain?

Jennifer Jenkins: Well, what's significant about this film for me, what it prompted me to think about is 1927, the year that we're focused on. It was a transitional year for cinema because it marks the beginning of the end of the silent film era. The public domain related story is that, unfortunately, the studios thought, wrongly, as it turns out, that the silent films that they had made no longer had value, commercial or cultural value, and so in many cases, they neglected those films, discarded those old reels to make storage space in their vaults, or even melted down the nitrate base of the silent films for their silver content. What this means is that now, this is a stunning statistic but the Library of Congress has estimated that 75% of American silent films are lost, at least in their complete form, forever. We'll never see them again.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's heartbreaking.

Jennifer Jenkins: Because not only the films that were not deliberately destroyed were on a nitrate base that was very vulnerable, flammable, prone to outgassing, shrinkage, even spontaneous combustion. We'll never see those films again. The public domain angle for me, Alison, is that 1927 was a long time ago. One of the sad things is we're celebrating works that are going into public domain after a 95-year term. Towards the end of that term, a lot of these works were sometimes lost forever, like with these silent films. That's just a stunning thing to think about that. This amazing art form, we're not going to see most of the output.

Alison Stewart: That was an excerpt from my conversation with Jennifer Jenkins, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University. That is All Of It for today. If you enjoyed hearing our public song submissions, a reminder, you can find them all in a playlist on our website at wnyc.org/publicsongproject. I'm Alison Stewart. I will meet you back here next time.

[music]

 

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