Communist hymn is in copyright - filmmaker fined

By Cory Doctorow at 1:48 am Saturday, Apr 9

The Internationale is the hymn of the Fourth International Communist Party. My parents, being good reds, used to sing it every New Year's Eve at the stroke of midnight, with all the comrades at the socialist New Year's gathered round the record player to sing along with the soundtrack from Reds. It is quite a stirring anthem, and has been translated into dozens of languages, and is sung the world 'round.

Weirdly, this 19th century song is still in copyright in France, and a French filmmaker has just been fined about $1300 for letting a character in one of his films whistle the tune (you can hear a very modern synth-pop take on the tune courtesy of Maxx Klaxon here).

The irony factor here is much deeper than, say, the irony surrounded JibJab's appropriation of Woody Guthrie's This Land. Guthrie was a socialist, sure, but the Internationale is a call to arms to abolish private property, eliminate international borders, and throw off your chains and rise up to smash the state. Hard to imagine that the long-dead creator of that song is having his wishes honored by French collecting societies shaking down people who make use of it for cash.

The 19th-century revolutionary hymn was written by Eugene Pottier in 1871 and set to music by another Frenchman, Pierre Degeyter, in 1888...

Under French law, "The Internationale" won't fall into the public domain until 2014 – 70 years of post-mortem protection plus extra time to cover the world war. Degeyter died in 1932....

[The film] hardly paid its own way, opening briefly in a single Paris theater and selling just 203 tickets, Le Monde reported.

Link (Thanks, Maximus!)