Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

Bambi: the Forest and Copyright Are Both Cruel

Over at Meh, a site that offers implausibly great bargains on overstocked and discontinued items that are perfectly good and didn’t find their original market, I wrote about Bambi. This might seem an odd connection! But the folks at Meh have quite active forums and asked me a few years ago and then again recently to write some provocative researched articles about quirky points of interest.

I’m restarting these articles with a serialized four-parter about Bambi, which has a complicated backstory. The book was written by the Austrian newspaper journalist, playwright, and novelist Felix Salten (not his original name) and its history ties in underpayment, the Alger Hiss trial, Nazis, Walt Disney, and alleged copyright misdeeds.

In the first part published today, I look at Bambi’s early publication history and reception, and how Walt Disney got his hands on the rights to make an animated movie. In

Public Domain

Yes, We Have Some Bananas!

Updated: We sang it!

Celebrate the entry of everything first published in the U.S. in 1923 into the public domain this January 1st by singing, “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” a 1923 novelty song that is no longer protected by copyright as of midnight on New Year’s Day! The tune is a send-up of a greengrocer one of the songwriters met, who started every sentence with “yes,” even when the answer was “no.”

With the January 1, 2019, expiration of 1923 copyrights in the U.S., anyone can perform that song without license or fee (and even release a recording for free or charge for it), along with thousands of other tunes (mostly forgotten) from that year.

I’ll be leading at least one chorus among New Year’s celebrants at my house at a midnight past midnight Eastern, and then post it to social media.

Here’s

Publishing

Whose Words These Are

I have an article in the January 2019 issue of Smithsonian magazine about the potential cultural impact of the expiration of copyright on nearly everything published in the U.S. in 1923. With few exceptions, everything that had proper initial notice and filed for copyright renewal from that year in 1951 (renewal was once required) will enter the public domain on January 1. It’s exciting, as it starts a 54-year cycle of annual releases of each year from 95 years prior into the public domain.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is a prominent bit of literature from 1923. Robert Frost’s poems have had zealous copyright enforcement. It even featured in a landmark Supreme Court case, Eldred v. Ashcroft, in which the Supreme Court decided that the “limited terms” of exclusive ownership defined in the Constitution meant any duration that Congress picked.

In honor of “Stopping by