Published at LXer:

The reason I'm bringing up this bit of Christmas music copyright fighting is just to note that the song was written in 1934, at which time the maximum copyright that Coots and Gillespie could have hoped for was 56 years (28 years upon registration, with another 28 years if they renewed). That means that for the two of them, the incentive of having that copyright (which they then assigned away to Leo Feist, Inc.) last until 1990, was clearly all the incentive they needed to write and release that song. Under the basic terms of the deal that the public granted to the copyright holder, in 1990, that song belonged in the public domain.

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