This song is our song, this song’s not your song …

The copyright holders to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Was Made for You and Me” is threatening to sue the creators of this hilarious Flash film that sends up both Bush and Kerry.

“This puts a completely different spin on the song,” said Kathryn Ostien, director of copyright licensing for the publisher. “The damage to the song is huge.”
TRO believes that the Jibjab creation threatens to corrupt Guthrie’s classic — an icon of Americana — by tying it to a political joke; upon hearing the music people would think about the yucks, not Guthrie’s unifying message. The publisher wants Jibjab to stop distribution of the flash movie.

Can you say, “pa-ro-dy”? Yeesh.

One irony here is that Guthrie himself used to use copyright notices like:

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.

Enjoy the tune while you can.

(via BoingBoing)