Some time ago I read that the oldest Elvis songs turned over to public domain, because they passed the 50 year copyright limit.
I presume that means that I can legally share them on a p2p network.
What else can I share then?
-Other music that is more than 50 years old? What about classical? Or does the particular recording have to be more than 50 years old?
-Movies from 1955 or earlier?
-What about series such as south park? I dont understand why this should be legal. On the other hand, sites such as this www.lando.co.uk feature free downloads.
Many text, image, audio and video have been released under one of the Creative Commons licences, which permit varying degrees of redistribution. The Creative Commons site has a search engine for freely-available files.
Not so. The limit is 70 years after the death of the writer (and Elvis did not write most of his songs). The copyrights were almost certainly renewed before the change in law in 1978, so they’re still protected.
I presume that means that I can legally share them on a p2p network.
Anything written or filmed before 1922 is public domain in the US and can be copied freely. Anything published from 1923-1963 may or may not be in public domain, depending on whether the copyright was renewed. Anything from 1963 onward is protected. See this chart.
Classical music generally dates from 1922 or earlier, so is public domain. However, an individual recording of classical music is most likely protected (I’m not sure of the date of when music recordings were first protected, but it was around 1970 that the P for protected symbol appeared on albums).
Movies are PD only if they were copyrighted prior to 1922. Some later films have fallen into PD and are fair game (see http://www.archive.org for some of them that can be downloaded).
South Park is definitely copyright protected.
Lando looks like they’re showing copyright works. There are several reasons they can do this:
[ol]
[li]They have been granted permissions to do so, either specific permission, or a blanket permission (i.e., “anyone who wants to copy this can do so.”). The blanket permission is what the creative commons license is: the copyright exists, but the owner specifies that the work can be distributed under certain conditions.[/li][li]The creator placed the work in public domain[/li][li]They are ignoring copyright. Since copyright infringement is a civil crime, not a criminal one, it merely means that the copyright holder did not take them to court or did not know about it.[/li][/ol]
I notice that the OP’s location is Denmark. Pretty much the same rules apply there as in the U.S. because the U.S. revised its copyright laws to conform with those of the EU.
The 50-year date is simply wrong. There is no place in the western world that this applies.