Meyn originally posted content to the channel without Lehrer’s permission and called him from overseas in December 2008 to apologize, a conversation he later posted on the “Tom Lehrer!” Facebook page. An excerpt:
TL: Well, you see, I'm fine with that channel.
EM: You're very kind. But my question is: Who in your family will take care of your copyright and your songs in the distant future?
TL: I don't have a family.
EM: OK, but what do you think will happen to the channel and your songs? And if you have someone who will act on your behalf, could you give them my name in case they'd want the channel taken down?
TL: Yes, but there's no need to remove that channel.
EM: I was just wondering what will happen in the future, because you're certainly going to continue to sell records.
TL: Well, I don't need to make money after I'm dead. These things will be taken care of.
EM: I feel like I gave away some of your songs to public domain without even asking you, and that wasn't very nice of me.
TL: But I'm fine with that, you know.
EM: Will you establish any kind of foundation or charity or something like that?
> EM: Will you establish any kind of foundation or charity or something like that?
> TL: No, I won't. They're mostly rip-offs.
Having interned/worked in three INGOs (Save the Children, World Concern and UNICEF) for a total of ~2 years, and having a family member who have worked in a well-known French NGO (ACF International)for 3+ years, I have to agree with this assessment.
That's why when I donate money to charities, I'm very selective and make sure the charities I donate are NOT affiliated with religion (ahem, Save the Children and World Concern) or any political agenda (UNICEF). The truth in INGOs is that they need constant stream of funding and sometimes, they make up/exaggerate stuff to help drive the donations.
Worse is, when you actually work with people in NGOs, you'll find there is a stark difference in pay and benefits between foreigner (usually white or English speaking) and the local/native employees although the latter are the ones who know much more about the actual problems. Regional directors in UNICEF come and go every two years or less and they always can't wait to get out of the shithole third world country that they are supposed to be helping about. They and their fellow (foreign) workers are also paid very well with car, housing and children education benefits (all of which I'm not opposed to, but I'm sure as hell that they cannot find an equally well-paying job with their degrees and credentials in their home countries). Plus you never find these regional directors and management people at work (meaning, they show up to work like maybe once a week if we are lucky; no, they are not in the field working, which is left to the native employees of said INGO).
NGO’s are in a tough position with endemic corruption common in most poor countries. Having a 100% native workforce ends up being extremely high risk, which results in all sorts of seemingly inefficient strategies becoming common. For example leaving anyone in charge for very long tends to be a surprisingly bad idea.
> Having interned/worked in three INGOs (Save the Children, World Concern and UNICEF) for a total of ~2 years, and having a family member who have worked in a well-known French NGO (ACF International)for 3+ years, I have to agree with this assessment.
Those bear no relationship to the sort of charity Lehrer would establish with an estate generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
But it does relate to Lehrer's comment that "They're mostly rip-offs." Who knows the scope of his comment, but the anecdotes shared regarding StC WC and UNICEF seem germane to me, given the ambiguity.
Oh man, THANK YOU for this. What an amazing article!
>He grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the son of a pioneering necktie manufacturer, James Lehrer
That's just hilarious. I can't think of anything more appropriate than a necktie manufacturer family.
In any case, if anyone is unfamiliar with Tom Lehrer, I encourage you to take a wiki dive and then listen to his music. This guy taught mathematics at Harvard, then accidentally sold 10,000 copies of a vinyl of his songs in a few weeks, then went on to tour the US and the world.
His works remain some of the brightest, most convivial, most haunting and poignant works of song to date. He sings clever happy songs of things like pollution, patricide, nuclear holocaust, arson, murder, racism, plagiarism, criminal boy scouts, disease and crime in Mexico and, of course, the eternal desire of the common man to poison pigeons in the park.
Like "Weird Al" Yankovic says in that article, Tom Lehrer remains the modern Tom Lehrer today. There's just no one like him and the way his songs have remained so relevant up to this day is something I find myself in awe of. He just... took a look at society, grokked it on a primordial level and wrote songs that I will end up teaching my kids and they'll go "Wait, they had these things 80 years ago?"
EDIT: Also, OP title is wrong, Lehrer simply released his LYRICS to the public domain. My copy of "Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer" with musical notation remains relevant, yay!
Don't forget the brilliant introductions and epilogues that accompany his songs. They're just as smart and funny as the songs themselves, with not an ounce of fat on them.
> There's just no one like him and the way his songs have remained so relevant up to this day is something I find myself in awe of.
Much of Bob Newhart's comedy holds up very well today, but of course it's not music.
"...This year, for example, on the first day of the week Malcolm X was killed which gives you an idea of how effective the whole thing is.
I'm sure we all agree that we ought to love one another and I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that."
This was an opengl programming class for graduate students or senior compsci majors. He was really just saying make sure to build on other people's work and don't always just reinvent the wheel.
One of the other comments mentioned how Tom Lehrer's song have remained relevant. This song is a gem, but I'd forgotten the last lines (from the video in sibling comment):
"In German oder Englisch, I know how to count down
And I'm learning Chinese, says Wernher von Braun."
Reminds me of The Good Old Bad Old Days of the South African arms industry.....
...built entirely to circumvent sanctions and fight "Die Swart Gevaar/Rooi Gevaar"... ("Black Danger" / "Red (Communist) Danger")
When the changes came they continued on without missing a beat except their number one problem now was to convince someone to continue paying them to carry on making munitions.
This man had a huge impact on my outlook to life as a youth and helped create a framework for me to disassemble difficult issues in the world around me. Picking through arguments and finding the absurdities is an artform, turning them into compositions is pure genius. I learned that scary things could, and should be defanged, dried and hung for public display rather than feared in the shadows.
I love you Tom, I always have. This move is one more song, one more satirical poke at the music industrial complex
The "Tom Lehrer Trust" probably has a budget, and they've probably already paid the server/domain fees until then but have no plans for the trust to cover renewal.
Oh man. I posted here about this before, but almost exactly four years ago a friend and I put on a concert of our own favorite Tom Lehrer songs to great enthusiasm. By what must be total coincidence, just a few days ago I had posted some videos of that concert to youtube, keeping my fingers crossed they wouldn't get copystriked... and now I wake up to this. I knew of his permissive attitude toward copyright, but I wasn't expecting him to make it official.
When I was in college, I noticed that Tom Lehrer was teaching a math course "Nature of Math" and took it. Great intro to all sorts of historical details like how people competed to solve quartic equations in the 1500s, etc, all delivered with that special Tom Lehrer joking attitude. It was also my introduction to the birthday paradox, which was presented entirely without reference to hash tables.
After I finished, I had to decide between TAing that course, or working on an undergraduate thesis; I did the latter, which helped launch my career, but I regret not working with Tom.
A question for the lawyers among us: is there any effective difference between granting all these permissions vs actually putting them into public domain?
Tom says “In other words, all the lyrics herein should be treated as though they were in the public domain”, emphasis mine. That’s what got me curious.
Does Tom effectively still hold some rights that are not afforded by “true” public domain?
In the United States, copyright is automatic and exists until expired. Nothing in the federal statute allows an entity to terminate copyright, effectively putting works in the public domain.
The United States also allows authors (and heirs), except work-for-hires, to clawback copyright transfers and terminate licenses after 35 years. This is an inalienable statutory right, which means it cannot be waived even with a contract.
That is not a citation. A citation provides enough specific information to independently verify that a claim comes from some authority. A citation would include (at the very least) some kind of statute or clause number.
The ability to terminate transfers and licenses is covered by 17 USC 203 (plus some other sections with different timetables and rules for transfers/licenses that occurred before 1978).
There's an interesting and formally unresolved (because the applicable window for the earliest "copyleft" works hasn't yet arrived, for one thing) question about how this interacts with things like CC0, GPL, and more informal licenses to the public at large. The law requires the termination to fall into a specific 5-year window, with advance notice in writing (and it must be multiple years in advance), served specifically to the person whose rights are being terminated.
The sheer logistics of trying to terminate a license granted to the world are therefore pretty difficult, but you could imagine termination targeting just a handful of lucrative targets. (Even then, when does a generally-available license "start"? When it's first offered? When the specific user first accesses the work? Is the timeframe "refreshed" every day the license is still on offer? This provision really wasn't written with these kinds of licenses in mind.)
It would be amusing to formally terminate the rights of a few specific individuals to some piece of GPL code, as a sort of formal protest against whatever they're doing, requiring them to go and get the rights passed along to them again (... I assume that's how it'd work out?) from someone who still has license.
You didn't specify which parts of my comment you wanted a citation, therefore I directed you to the entire code on copyrights. These are federal statutes. The document has chapters and is easily read.
Alright, since linking the entirety of title 17 isn't exactly easy to refer to as a source, the relevant part is 17 USC 203.^1
It's probably one of the more complex parts of copyright law. There's a few well-known cases of section 203 being used to claw back copyright decades down the line. (Note: I'm am very much not a lawyer)
In 1938, John Steinbeck granted Viking Press rights to publish 13 of his works, including Of Mice And Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and Tortilla Flats, as long as they were kept in print and for sale. In 2005, John Steinbeck's son and granddaughter served notice to Penguin Publishing, who were the interested party at the time, that they were terminating the agreement.^2
This section was originally designed to give artists who may have essentially (or even literally) given away their rights due to inequitable bargaining power a chance to recoup their property down the line with at least several years notice that they are planning on terminating the agreement.^3 In practice, however, it's kind of a mess, and to say that it would allow an artist or their heirs to terminate a grant to the public domain is dubious. It's something that would likely see its way to the supreme court should it ever come to pass.
I've included a couple other articles here just in the general interest of providing more info.^4^5
In some EU countries (for example Poland) copyright is separated into "personal" and "economic" rights.
You can give up the economic rights and these are inherited and you can trade them.
Personal rights cannot be traded or inherited and remain with the author till their death. So you cannot change the text without author's permission, you cannot lie about who wrote something, and author can prevent you from using his art for a different purpose (for example if you wrote a song and somebody used it as a military recruitment ad and you're a pacifist - that sort of thing).
Interesting. Does this mean that a resident of Poland needs to explicitly give both personal and economic permissions when for example releasing free software? Can a Pole holding copyright over a GPLed piece of software mandate that it not be used by the military for example?
IANAL, but it seems to me a problem only within Poland. Foreigners probably do not have personal rights, that citizens of Poland are granted. And Polish citizens cannot enforce their personal rights outside of Poland.
So it seems, only Polish coders need to be careful that when they use FOSS software, that they don't impinge upon the personal rights of any other Polish citizen who contributed code. I guess, to be on the safe side, they can decide to never impinge upon anyone's personal rights.
That's the point you cannot give up personal copyrights even if you want to. It's supposed to prevent big companies forcing authors to sign deals bad for them when they have all the power.
I'm not sure how this apply for software, I think it's less restrictive than for art (and it almost never comes up because Poland isn't a litigious country unlike US).
Hmm, so does that mean that a GPL'ed software project targetting the whole world and with a variety of international developers should reject contributions from Polish residents?
Or, if we want to avoid software: what's the status of a Wikipedia contribution (CC-BY-SA-3.0) made by a Polish resident? Can I not safely assume that the content is CC-BY-SA-3.0? Must I assume that a Polish author can come after me if I follow the letter of CC-BY-SA-3.0, but not in a way that he or she likes?
Sorry, IANAL. Open Source software is written in Poland with all the usual open source licences and it works so I'm sure at least in practice it's not a problem.
A lot of it is thanks to the fact that suing people is much less common here, so it never gets challanged. Also the person who lost the case pays the costs here unlike in the US so that's a deterrent.
I've looked into it now and it seems for software the personal copyrights are restricted compared to art. So for example you can't veto changes made to your software after you sold economic rights to it or using it for stuff you disagree with.
> Must I assume that a Polish author can come after me if I follow the letter of CC-BY-SA-3.0, but not in a way that he or she likes?
I think they'd have to prove that the way it's used harms them. It's not enough to say "I don't like it". But again IANAL.
There has been some cases for example about using Solidarity movement logo from 80s by various now-conflicted post-solidarity political parties and their supporters. I don't know who won, but I know that the author of the original logo was involved despite giving the rights to that logo to anti-communist opposition decades ago.
Just to be clear: I'm not trying to fight or argue with you here, I'm just trying to understand :-)
> Sorry, IANAL. Open Source software is written in Poland with all the usual open source licences and it works so I'm sure at least in practice it's not a problem.
But "in practice" is hardly sufficient :P
> A lot of it is thanks to the fact that suing people is much less common here, so it never gets challanged. Also the person who lost the case pays the costs here unlike in the US so that's a deterrent.
I'm a European too, and live in a very non-litiguous country, so I have no problem understanding the mindset of not suing over everything. But it still seems really weird for a country's copyright system to rely on this (sane) behavior.
> I think they'd have to prove that the way it's used harms them. It's not enough to say "I don't like it". But again IANAL.
So if a Polish resident contributes an original photograph to a Wikipedia article under CC-BY-SA-3.0, and I (or a Polish entity) use that photograph under the terms of the CC-BY-SA-3.0 in a way that "harms" the copyright holder, he can sue me (or the Polish entity in question) under Polish law? This seems absolutely insane to me, and surely can't be the case!
This sounds a lot like the license that Berkeley SPICE was under a long time ago [1], whereby it was essentially open source, but specifically the South African police were not allowed to use it. This kind of stuff – even when well-intended – causes massive headaches.
I would argue "in practice" is all that matters. No matter what you do if someone with enough power wants to fuck you up legally - he will. As true in USA as in Germany, Poland, Russia or North Korea. Only the probability is different. It's sad, but it's the reality we live in.
I prefer a system with obvious loopholes and low "getting fucked probability" (GFP) to a system with no loopholes and high GFP.
Government of my country in last 5 years broke constitution dozens of times, including unlawfully changing the election date, changing how judges are chooosen (making them dependant on the politicians), restricting many kinds of personal liberties like freedom of assembly without going through the proper process and many others. And nobody can do anything because they have political support because they gave away a big portion of yearly GDP to poor people.
Constutitional Tribunal said the government is breaking the law. Government ignored it and changed the judges (breaking the law again). Some people protested, most people ignored it. Now a PM that admited "our law breaks the constitution but I will vote for it" became the chairman of that Tribunal as a big "fuck you" to the opposition.
So what that our system of checks and balances was pretty good (I'd argue better than the one in Germany and USA) if the government just decides to ignore it and people don't care?
So I much prefer practice to theory. Good system doesn't work if people don't care. Bad system still works if people care enough.
> So if a Polish resident contributes an original photograph to a Wikipedia article under CC-BY-SA-3.0, and I (or a Polish entity) use that photograph under the terms of the CC-BY-SA-3.0 in a way that "harms" the copyright holder, he can sue me (or the Polish entity in question) under Polish law? This seems absolutely insane to me, and surely can't be the case!
and it mentions "autorskie prawa osobowe" (personal copyright rights) as one example of additional restrictions.
> Licencja może nie zapewniać wszystkich niezbędnych zgód dla niektórych użyć utworu. Dotyczy to w szczególności innych praw, takich jak ochrona wizerunku, prywatności czy autorskie prawa osobiste. Mogą one ograniczać możliwości wykorzystania utworu.
Paraphrased (sorry IANAL and translating legalese is not my strong point): The licence might not ensure all required permissions for some uses of the art. It's possible especially in cases of other rights being violated, like the right to protect identity, privacy or personal copyright which might further restrict possible uses of the art.
I'm pretty sure Poland isn't the only country where there are additional restrictions, I don't know why you think it's insane honestly.
The thing that gets me is when he goes "I don't have a family" because I guarantee that some long lost "relatives" will suddenly appear after he dies. Many copyrighted works are held by distant relatives hoping to cash in on them somehow, even decades after they've faded from public memory.
The funny thing is how much of the 1960s "new math" that was derided at the time for being irrelevant is now super applicable in computing as soon as you scratch the surface just a little bit more than average. From your link: "abstract algebra, modular arithmetic, matrices, symbolic logic, Boolean algebra, and other super-mathy stuff they might never need"
Even in Lehrer's song, the textbook wants us to do the calculation in base 8, and that's amusing and surprising and... being familiar with octal helps me in minor ways on probably a weekly basis. Being familiar with other bases more generally, even more frequently.
i did this one (independently) as "There's water, fire, air, and earth <stop abruptly>" following the cadence of the original more closely. interesting to see lehrer make the opposite decision, to break with the tune and space out and emphasise each element a little more; i think i prefer my version because it ends just as the audience is catching on, which makes the punchline funnier.
Not to mention a whole lot of intermediate-level piano sheet music! At 92, a fine gift to those younger generations who want to get in on some irreverent fun.
I remember reading about an ELI5: The "Old Math" in Tom Lehrer's New Math. That post was funny.
If you haven't heard the song, he describes the way they used to do math as follows:
Consider the following subtraction problem, which I will put up here: 342 minus 173. Now, remember how we used to do that:
Three from two is nine, carry the one, and if you're under 35 or went to a private school, you say seven from three is six, but if you're over 35 and went to a public school, you say eight from four is six ...and carry the one, so we have 169.
Hearing Tom Lehrer perform live from some of his albums is also a revelation. There are times when some of his on-stage jokes fall flat, yet he recovers with aplomb and gets the audience on his side again.
You see there used to be this thing called common sense back in the day ;)
We tried to do a song parody version of The Elements, but using only Pokemon names. It was enormous fun, until you realize nothing rhymes with Pickachu, or Charmander, or Bulbasaur, or any of them for that matter. That lead to a discussion of how to write a Python script to test for like word endings on combinations of 888 pairs, etc. These songs have an almost mystical power to open minds. And observe there is this property to the universe known as "intelligence"
Note: "Satoshi", which is Ash's name in the original Japanese, rhymes with "Pika-Pi", which is why Pikachu says "Pika-Pi" so much.
Each time "Pika-Pi" pops out in the anime, its Pikachu calling out Satoshi / Ash's name. (Sa-To-Shi).
---------
Some things are lost in translation. Calling Satoshi "Ash" in the American version, but keeping Pikachu's original dub, prevents the American Audience from seeing the level of thought put into this.
-------
I think you can similarly force rhymes and/or common syllables and/or intonations between Pokemon. There's over 900 of them now, surely there's a song to make some rhymes out of. (IE: Pokerap style)
> nothing rhymes with Pickachu, or Charmander, or Bulbasaur
Were you only rhyming pokemon names with other pokemon names, or could you use other words?
If you can use other words, the trick to rhyming made-up words is to find any word that ends with the same sound, and look that word up in a rhyming dictionary.
Pickachu -> You -> zoo, IQ, caribou, misconstrue etc
The song he's trying to parody consists almost exclusively of the actual names of the elements. There are a few filler words added to make the meter work out ("There's strontium and silicon and silver and samarium"), and a couplet in English at the end, but otherwise it's just the elements.
The rhyme is trivial, since every line ends with "ium". To do it with anything else you'd need to work a lot harder.
As noted by a sibling comment, he's not rhyming the -iums, he's rhyming the antepenultimate syllable (selenium/rhenium, germanium/uranium, vanadium/radium, gallium/thallium, rubidium/iridium, samarium/barium). But the other thing he leans heavily into is alliteration. The third verse is chock full of this:
Holmium, helium, hafnium, erbium (all h, save the rhyme)
Phosphorous, francium, fluorine, terbium (all f, save rhyme)
Manganese, mercury, molybdenum, magnesium (all m)
Dysprosium, scandium, cerium, cesium (all s sounds, save the first)
Lead, praseodymium, platinum, plutonium (most p sounds)
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium (continue p sounds)
There's also the point to make that most element names are 3-4 syllables long, so the verses are structured with 4 elements per line. The extra-long praseodymium and neodymium are paired with the very short lead and nickel respectively, for example. In fact, prior to the last verse, the 4 elements per line is violated just once (last line before the intermezzo crams in "bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, barium"). The last verse goes a regular 4 elements, then 3, and then launches into this:
The first of these lines rhymes all the -ons at the end, and the second goes for alliteration instead.
Of course, there are a few failures to align all the elements by alliteration or rhyme. The ones in the last verse align instead by other means (first you have californium, fermium, berkelium--all named after the same place; then you have mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium--all named after scientists). Now that's clever!
>"Lead, praseodymium, platinum, plutonium (most p sounds)"
The mildly subtle humor herein since "Lead" has the symbol "Pb", as it comes from the Latin 'plumbum'.
Thank you, Mr Lehrer.
It's not quite that trivial, since rhymes are based on the last stressed syllable in a word (e.g. he rhymes "samarium" with "barium", but not "lithium").
But isn't the elements song itself a parody of "Modern Major-General" which has plenty of non-rhyming words (although of course with a lot of rhyming words too)?
Sure. It's just that if what you want is to do a Pokemon-based version of this song, your ideal would be to cram it as full as possible with Pokemon names. You could step back and do a Pokemon-based G&S parody, rather than a parody-of-a-parody, but it doesn't have quite the same panache.
Good on Tom Lehrer for releasing his songs to the public domain. I hope this magnanimous gesture by such a high profile person sets an example and starts a trend.
I've always been a fan of Lehrer's from the days when he was a household name, it's good he's in the spotlight yet again.
Somewhat off topic, but he did a concert in Copenhagen of which there's a full recording on Youtube [1]
For something filmed in 1967 the audio quality is absolutely stunning. I wonder what equipment they used? My suspicion is that it's a piezoelectric microphone which had fantastic reputation for picking up a wide range of sound (especially for things like multiple people around a table) but fell out of favour as they worked best with valve amplifiers.
Plagiarize!
Let no one else's work evade your eyes.
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize ---
Don't just hope. Help to put it there. Either paste urls into the Wayback Machine [1] or use the Firefox extension to add the pages to the Wayback Machine. I've added some. Don't forget to add the actual pdfs.
Thank you. There is also a small Python app to kick off archival requests if the CLI is more your thing (I find it helpful when I need to generate a list of URLs and then pipe that list to savepagenow with a sleep in between runs to be gentle on the Wayback API).
I think I prefer to use the savepagenow@archive.org email address, best leave it up to archive.org to schedule the archivals. Its also more convenient to paste some HTML into an email and have all the links archived.
An author (or heirs) cannot put creative works in the public domain. There is nothing in the statute that allows this. Only after the expiration of the copyright does the work go into public domain.
Copyright stays with the author (or heirs) and is subject to license termination after 35 years. This would mean the declaration of "use freely" can be revoked. Which is why these works cannot treated as if they are in the public domain.
I am aware of a written work on which the author inscribed "Copyright (C) <year> <organization>" and as best I can tell <organization> was fictional, and thus incapable of enforcing any terms of the copyright. What is your opinion as to what would happen if someone attempted to claim that copyright?
Irrespective of what is printed on the artistic work, the copyright is automatic (from 1976 onward) and belongs to the author(s) or their heirs. If there is a question of ownership, a court would need to decide.
Organizations own work-for-hire, and to establish ownership, you would need to prove the non-existence of the organization (reverting the copyright to the author/heirs) or determine the beneficiaries of a possibly ephemeral organization.
Meyn originally posted content to the channel without Lehrer’s permission and called him from overseas in December 2008 to apologize, a conversation he later posted on the “Tom Lehrer!” Facebook page. An excerpt:
TL: Well, you see, I'm fine with that channel.
EM: You're very kind. But my question is: Who in your family will take care of your copyright and your songs in the distant future?
TL: I don't have a family.
EM: OK, but what do you think will happen to the channel and your songs? And if you have someone who will act on your behalf, could you give them my name in case they'd want the channel taken down?
TL: Yes, but there's no need to remove that channel.
EM: I was just wondering what will happen in the future, because you're certainly going to continue to sell records.
TL: Well, I don't need to make money after I'm dead. These things will be taken care of.
EM: I feel like I gave away some of your songs to public domain without even asking you, and that wasn't very nice of me.
TL: But I'm fine with that, you know.
EM: Will you establish any kind of foundation or charity or something like that?
TL: No, I won't. They're mostly rip-offs.