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Copyright Breakdown: The Music Modernization Act

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Copyright Office, 1920. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
The Copyright Office in 1920. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.

Reference librarians in the Recorded Sound and Moving Image Research Centers get hundreds of questions each year about materials in the public domain. For films, which follow the current 95-year restrictions along with many other types of publications, the answer is fairly straightforward: if it was published before January 1, 1924 (as of January 1, 2019), it’s in the public domain. This doesn’t mean that