Attn. Stevie Wonder: Release those 200 unused songs you produced for "Songs in the Key of Life" or lose their EU copyright

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Originally published at: Attn. Stevie Wonder: Release those 200 unused songs you produced for "Songs in the Key of Life" or lose their EU copyright | Boing Boing

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As long as you’re fantasizing, what if he really gave them to the world by putting up a big archive of all of them, with a Creative Commons license? “Commercial use OK, give me credit” would pretty much force everyone who did a track with it to give him a cut, maybe dream of him attaching a note that says “you are not required to worry about giving me any money for sampling this unless your track makes more than $lots and/or goes platinum” too. Now that’s a gift.

The fact that you did not dream of this probably means that Cory Doctorow feels a little sad and doesn’t really know why.

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It’s not like the EU can break into his storage and forcefully put the music in the public domain. The threat only works if Stevie Wonder intends to profit off the songs in some way, but he could be like Prince and let his estate decide what to do with his unreleased material after he passes.

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… recordings from the 1970s should really be in the public domain by now anyway

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Mr Wonder and Motown’s music are in some of my earliest and best loved memories.

One of the Detroit Tigers used Superstition as his walk-up music, which always made the home crowd go wild.

I was heartbroken to hear Higher Ground in an ad for enbridge, an oil company seeking to expand its pipelines under the Great Lakes. Michigan gov Gretchen Whitmer ordered them to stop using the existing ones and forbid them any expansion or new lines. They immediately began a gaslighting cum greenwashing ad campaign and have threatened to sue.

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Non-European here. Can someone explain to me how a song can become public domain if it was never released to the public? Does this apply to famous artists only or are the ribald parody songs my friends and I produced when we were 10 years old now in the public domain? There was this one called “Stranded” sung to the theme of the 1965-1966 TV series “Branded” that we thought was particularly hilarious.

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