Of Public Domain, Freedom, and Ragtime

Ragtime is the music of the 1900's, 1910's, and 1920's, the precursor to jazz. It is (I believe) an unjustifiably obscure musical form that deserves to be much better known. Most people have heard of "The Maple Leaf Rag" and "The Entertainer", but not more than that; there is much, much more, and it is glorious.

Relevance to copyright law? All "classic" ragtime is in the public domain. Which means that the community of ragtime enthusiasts (and there are quite a few, myself included) is blessedly free of worries about copyright infringement. Not just weakly hoping that we would fall into the fair-use exemption, or lining up good lawyers to take our case all the way to the Supreme Court - completely and totally free from worry.

What does this mean? Well, first of all, quite obviously, ragtime sheetmusic can be distributed on the Internet with no penalty. I can have a website devoted to distributing such sheetmusic, and not have a potential $25,000 statutory fine hanging over my head. If I wanted to arrange a rag for guitar, I could put the tablature online and not worry about a thing. I can perform those rags anywhere and not worry about getting licenses (and about the extortionate fees that some of those licenses entail). I can create an arrangement of two rags melded together in an interesting way and not worry about what the Supreme Court will say. I can compose my own rag and not worry that it has a sequence of three notes that sounds just like three notes in the Maple Leaf Rag (in one case, three notes was found to be enough for copyright infringement). As long as I stay in 1922 or before, I am free.

There are several points to be made about this. First of all, the obvious point - this is music from a long-gone time. This is not even my grandparents' music; it's my great-grandparents' music (the Maple Leaf Rag was written before any of my grandparents were born). Like most of the other works from 1922, ragtime has largely been forgotten, except by enthusiasts. One can hardly talk about promoting a living tradition by use of the public domain in this case; there is not really a living tradition - more of a dead tradition that has been revived. One can hardly argue that the public domain exists "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" if the only useful arts one can use in one's own creative work are the arts of our great-grandparents that have been forgotten by the general public. Quick: how many popular songs, important cultural figures, fads, popular books, and popular entertainments of the 1910's can you name?

Second of all, note the timing of the ragtime revival - the 1970's. What happened in the 1970's to make people so interested in ragtime? "The Maple Leaf Rag" entered the public domain. People were suddenly free to play around with this piece (and others), to modify it, to orchestrate and record it without worry. Because even fair use of a copyright-protected work still comes with worry. Fair use is so vaguely defined that no one really knows what a court will say in each individual case. Moreover, copyright lawyers are expensive, and your average musician cannot afford one - send him a threatening letter, no matter how unjustified, and he will silence himself rather than risk bankruptcy. It is nice to know for sure that you are immune from prosecution - and this immunity is what spawned dozens of ragtime festivals throughout the country, lots of composers creating new ragtime pieces, lots of website distributing MIDI files and scanned sheetmusic - all this lovely freedom. Until that freedom came about, ragtime was a largely-forgotten art form; the composers were long dead (with a few exceptions - Eubie Blake and Joseph Lamb lived to see the "ragtime revival"), and the music was not being played. It stayed like that - silent and forgotten - until it came into the public domain.

I suppose the upshot of all that is that we all ought to explore the culture, music, books, fads, and trends of the 1910's and 1920's (and before). There is a lot of fascinating stuff out there. And it's all free - free as in cost, and free as in worry-free. Next time you want to make a mashup, a rap, or any other "derivative" work - why not pick something from the 1910's as your base material?