HA! And Again....HA!
From www.silicaonvalley.com comes this lovely tail of "stick it in your ear, you evil people who want to squish the First Amendment right to parody. So THERE
This song's not your song, this song's not my song ... If you're going to threaten to sue someone for copyright infringement, you'd best be certain that the copyright you're protecting is still valid (see "Quoted, Tue., July 27, 2004"). If it's not, you may find yourself in a position similar to that of Ludlow Music, which threatened to sue the animators behind a wildly popular piece of political satire based on Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," only to learn that their copyright on the song expired more than 30 years ago. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented the animators in their run-in with Ludlow, Guthrie wrote the song in 1940, when the copyright laws granted a copyright term of 28 years, renewable once for an additional 28. When Guthrie sold the song in 1945, he triggered the first copyright term, which expired without being renewed in 1973. Ludlow filed its own copyright on the song in 1956 and renewed it in 1984, but EFF attorneys say it is superceded by Guthrie's, which when it expired put the song in the public domain. "We believe that Guthrie's classic tune, 'This Land Is Your Land,' belongs to all of us now, just like 'Amazing Grace' and Beethoven's symphonies," said Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney with the EFF. "The idea of copyright law is that, after a time, every work comes back into the hands of the public, where it can be reused, recycled, made part of new creativity without having to pay a fee or call in the lawyers. That's a great thing, the real genius of copyright."