Brian Lair on WNYC and our colleagues at all of it are back with another annual

installment of WNYC's Public Song Project now in its fourth year.

Do you know about this?

Each year, all of it has been inviting musicians to incorporate works of art that have entered the public domain into new compositions and new recordings.

This year with a twist, a new partner, and a timely bonus prompt.

So joining us now to share more about the project

and how they are hoping that musicians may be including you, even if you're not a professional

musician, will participate, is Simon Close, one of the all of it with Allison Stewart producers.

Hey, Simon. Hey, Brian. So remind people, what is the public domain and what works of music or literature are in it?

So the public domain, in short, is this conceptual legal place that captures anything not

protected by copyright.

And to go a little bit deeper into that, when you make a song or a book or any creative

work, it gets a copyright in the

United States, and that means nobody else can copy it or share it or cover it or adapt it without

getting your permission or paying a royalty. But after a certain amount of time, under the law,

those copyrights expire, and then that book or that song or whatever it is that you made is free

game for anybody to

adapt or share or do what they want with. And what I love about that idea of the public domain

is that it creates this commons for anybody to take a piece of art and kind of put their own

voice into and engage with the history of that art or just use it as inspiration to come up with something new.

Right. And so you have brought us some of the songs that have entered the public domain this year,

meaning that our listeners are free to play with these songs and do their own little versions of them

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