A federal judge declared that a famous song about public property is still private property

Woody Guthrie originally wrote "This Land Is Your Land" as a kind of screed against the exploitations of private property ownership. When he submitted the song for copyright, Guthrie allegedly wrote that it was, "Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we dont give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, thats all we wanted to do." Although the copyright should have expired in 1973, the actual ownership of the rights has long been contested.

More recently, the lawyers who successfully returned "Happy Birthday" and "We Shall Overcome" into the the Public Domain tried to take a similar approach to win back "This Land Is Your Land" for the people. Unfortunately, it didn't go as well. FromThe New York Times:

In the case, a young musical group calledSatoriisued the songs publishers, Ludlow Music and the Richmond Organization, after paying $45.50 for a license to release a cover version of This Land Is Your Land, which Guthrie wrote in 1940.In their complaint filed by the same lawyers behind the Happy Birthday and We Shall Overcome suits the group used a detailed timeline of decades-old paperwork and Guthries own hand-decorated songbooks to argue that Guthrie had essentially forfeited his copyright to the song decades ago by failing to renew it properly.