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Ludlow Music, the alleged rights-holder of Woodie Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" has resolved their legal action against JibJab Media for releasing a satirical version of the song lampooning President Bush and his political rival, Senator John Kerry.

Ludlow Music representatives claim to hold the copyright to "This Land is Your Land" and registered it with the Copyright Office in 1956. Their threats against JibJab have been accompanied by public statements that the satire damaged the patriotic value of the work and failed to satisfy the doctrine of fair use because it was not a parody. These statements did not appear to be based on a sound legal footing as the vague allegations of damage resemble claims more appropriate to trademark dilution law and fair use -- an equitable principle raised as an affirmative defense in a lawsuit -- is often construed in favor of political and satirical speech whether parodical or not.

Guthrie's son Arlo and granddaughter Cathy have demonstrated support for JibJab's freedom of expression. Guthrie's political leanings were toward communism and socialism and his intent may have been to put the song in the public domain. Guthrie's early self-published music pamphlets contained this quote:

"This song is 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 don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

JibJab engaged the Electronic Frontier Foundation to represent them, filing a request for declaratory judgment and asserting that Ludlow misused their copyright. EFF lawyers insist that the song is in the public domain, having been published by Guthrie in a pamphlet [PDF] in 1945. If Guthrie's publication was broad enough then the formalities of copyright law at the time would have protected the work until 1973, invalidating Ludlow's attempt to renew the copyright in 1984. Whether the early pamphlet represented a sufficient "general publication" to establish the term of copyright on the song remains unclear.

The debate surrounding Guthrie's song broached many questions about modern limits of copyright protection, including the scope of a relatively new concept of copyright misuse and the limits of satirical fair use. The settlement leaves those questions unresolved.