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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 8651341" data-attributes="member: 19675">Personally, I disagree with your opinion.Excluding own creations from the discussion, most of my copyright clients have been solidly middle class or lower.  Several were below the poverty line.  And those creations didn’t spring from a vacuum- they almost all had some kind of financial support in their endeavors from family.If it so happened that one of the songs or poems found a new audience and gained commercial value 30, 40 years down the road, IMHO, their survivors deserve to see some return on that loyalty, even if the artist has passed on.How often does it happen?Old songs find new life all the time.  Old poems and stories get set to music.  Or film.  Or TV.Stranger Things has Kate Bush’s 80’s hit “Running Up That Hill” hitting #1 on iTunes.  “Dancing with myself” has inspired a game show.  I hear old music in commercials all the damn time, like Billy Cobham “Stratus”, ”Fractal Zoom by Brian Eno, Biggie Smalls’ “Hypnotize”, Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight”, etc.  (I know several of those were major hits; not all.)The Verve famously ripped off a lesser tune by The Rolling Stones to make “Bittersweet Symphony”- incorporating segments without crediting them to avoid payi mechanical royalties.  (They also ripped off Aphrodite’s Child- Vangelis’ family’s band on another song on that same album, but it was never released as a single,)  If they had paid the fee, they might have had a longer career.Just a reminder, too: copyrights exist in the recording AND the composition.  Just because you’ve never heard the song before doesn’t mean it won’t be recorded in the future.Actually, abandoning copyright is recognized in American law.  There just isn’t a clear codification of how to do it.  Abandonment notices are recorded by the Copyright Office, but there’s no response given that it is effective.The law of abandonment, such as it is, is hidden in court decisions, not legal codes.  The methodology the courts provide: the copyright owner must intend to abandon the copyright, and must perform an overt act to manifest that intent,  That’s it.[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.lawcatalog.com/media/productattach/l/j/ljp_694publicdomain.pdf[/URL]</blockquote>

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