A Letter from Tom Lehrer

While looking through the blog archives to see what we'd written about Tom Lehrer, I came across this post from the excellent site TechDirt that I had meant to write about before my goldfish-level attention span saw something else bright and shiny. 

I had intended it to be part of our ongoing IP thread, but it's also a nice memorial reminder that professor Lehrer was pretty cool in general. 

Then, in 2020, we wrote about him again, noting that he had put up a website where he had announced that all of his lyrics had been officially dedicated to the public domain, and he encouraged people to do what they wanted with them. At the time, we noted that this did not cover the actual music, but Lehrer had suggested he would add that at a future time.

Apparently, that future time has come. Lehrer has expanded the letter on his website, now dated to November of 2022, even if much of it is identical to what we wrote about two years ago. But the big difference is that he’s now including all of the music in the public domain dedication:

I, Tom Lehrer, and the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007, hereby grant the following permissions:

All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain. All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain.

The latter includes all lyrics which I have written to music by others, although the music to such parodies, if copyrighted by their composers, are of course not included without permission of their copyright owners. The translated songs on this website may be found on YouTube in their original languages.

Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included.

In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.

Some recording, movie, and television rights to songs written by me are merely licensed non-exclusively by me to recording, movie, or TV companies. All such rights are now released herewith and therefore do not require any permission from me or from Maelstrom Music, which is merely me in another hat, nor from the recording, movie, or TV companies involved.

In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.

So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.

 

The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel is still out there.

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