On January 1, 2019, the 1923 song, “Yes! We Have No Bananas” entered the public domain after a long wait. Due to congressional maneuvering, Disney’s greed, and other factors, nothing “new” had entered the public domain between January 1, 1998, and January 1, 2019. Every year for the next several decades, another year of material published in the U.S. 95 years ago enters the public domain. I wrote a lengthy article in the Smithsonian magazine last December on the topic.

To celebrate the re-opening of the public domain, I had guests at our New Year’s Eve party sing, “Yes! We Have No Bananas” and then uploaded the performance on YouTube.

I literally titled the video, “Yes! We Have No Bananas, now in the public domain.”

A few days ago, I received this notice from YouTube.

Now, this wasn’t a takedown, in which the video was removed. It wasn’t a “strike,” or a violation of YouTube policies, which can add up eventually to a suspension or ban. Rather, it was a weird conditional claim of potential ownership that might lead to ads placed on the video from which I could potentially receive some income.

There was no way to respond to this that I could find. While entirely inaccurate, it didn’t seem to affect me, except that a third-party with no interest could potentially earn income from views of ads placed on my personally owned video that contained a performance of a public-domain composition.

I notified the usual suspects (Cory Doctorow, Mike Masnick, and the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain) on Twitter. Mike, who runs TechDirt, a site devoted to the examination of online freedom of expression and the expression of digital property rights, published an article examining some of the underlying issues.

I’m not sure if someone at YouTube read it or another process that was opaque to me was followed, but today I was informed that my long nightmare was over.

As they say, there’s always money in the “Yes! We Have No Bananas” stand. By which I mean, companies will always try to push copyright maximalism, the ownership of material that they don’t have rights to, because of the asymmetry in the cost of defending against the erosion of the public domain, fair use, and other aspects of public ownership and critical examination.