Shock news: there is no copyright for the famous Desiderata! Anyone can make a poster or song of it and keep the profits. See the hundreds of YouTube videos now. And Les Crane was sued in 1970s for making CD, will he get money back now? Legal eagles want to know. Who knew?
To wit: The copyright concerns are no longer an issue, according to Jo Kline Cebuhar, an Iowa attorney who uses “Desiderata” in a soon-to-be-released book, “So Grows the Tree: Creating an Ethical Will.”
During World War II, Max Ehrmann (1872-1945), author of the Desiderata of 1927 allowed a friend – Army psychiatrist Dr. Merrill Moore – to hand out more than 1,000 copies of the poem to his soldier-patients, free of charge and without any stamp of the copyright Ehrmann had rightfully secured in 1927. In 1976, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Ehrmann had basically forfeited the copyright by allowing Dr. Moore to freely distribute “Desiderata” without copyright notations.
“It’s absolutely public domain,” Cebuhar said.


Salon.com
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