Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain
tomlehrersongs.com
tomlehrersongs.com
Meyn originally posted content to the channel without Lehrer’s permission and called him from overseas in December 2008 to apologize, a conversation he later posted on the “Tom Lehrer!” Facebook page. An excerpt:
TL: Well, you see, I'm fine with that channel.
EM: You're very kind. But my question is: Who in your family will take care of your copyright and your songs in the distant future?
TL: I don't have a family.
EM: OK, but what do you think will happen to the channel and your songs? And if you have someone who will act on your behalf, could you give them my name in case they'd want the channel taken down?
TL: Yes, but there's no need to remove that channel.
EM: I was just wondering what will happen in the future, because you're certainly going to continue to sell records.
TL: Well, I don't need to make money after I'm dead. These things will be taken care of.
EM: I feel like I gave away some of your songs to public domain without even asking you, and that wasn't very nice of me.
TL: But I'm fine with that, you know.
EM: Will you establish any kind of foundation or charity or something like that?
TL: No, I won't. They're mostly rip-offs.
>He grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the son of a pioneering necktie manufacturer, James Lehrer
That's just hilarious. I can't think of anything more appropriate than a necktie manufacturer family.
In any case, if anyone is unfamiliar with Tom Lehrer, I encourage you to take a wiki dive and then listen to his music. This guy taught mathematics at Harvard, then accidentally sold 10,000 copies of a vinyl of his songs in a few weeks, then went on to tour the US and the world.
His works remain some of the brightest, most convivial, most haunting and poignant works of song to date. He sings clever happy songs of things like pollution, patricide, nuclear holocaust, arson, murder, racism, plagiarism, criminal boy scouts, disease and crime in Mexico and, of course, the eternal desire of the common man to poison pigeons in the park.
Like "Weird Al" Yankovic says in that article, Tom Lehrer remains the modern Tom Lehrer today. There's just no one like him and the way his songs have remained so relevant up to this day is something I find myself in awe of. He just... took a look at society, grokked it on a primordial level and wrote songs that I will end up teaching my kids and they'll go "Wait, they had these things 80 years ago?"
EDIT: Also, OP title is wrong, Lehrer simply released his LYRICS to the public domain. My copy of "Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer" with musical notation remains relevant, yay!
> There's just no one like him and the way his songs have remained so relevant up to this day is something I find myself in awe of.
Much of Bob Newhart's comedy holds up very well today, but of course it's not music.
Like my all-time favorite line:
> His education began in agricultural school, where he majored in animal husbandry.. (beat) ..until they caught him at it one day..
> I particularly remember a heart-warming novel of his about a young necropheliac who finally achieved his boy-hood ambition by becoming coroner.
and there's a smattering of laughter and some awkward silence, and he says
> The rest of you can look it up when you get home.
"...This year, for example, on the first day of the week Malcolm X was killed which gives you an idea of how effective the whole thing is.
I'm sure we all agree that we ought to love one another and I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that."
I still would like a .20 caliber sword.
Checkout the lyrics for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jARdWfJulo around 1:35 :-)
Or https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/smut.p... , 4th paragraph
> TL: No, I won't. They're mostly rip-offs.
Having interned/worked in three INGOs (Save the Children, World Concern and UNICEF) for a total of ~2 years, and having a family member who have worked in a well-known French NGO (ACF International)for 3+ years, I have to agree with this assessment.
That's why when I donate money to charities, I'm very selective and make sure the charities I donate are NOT affiliated with religion (ahem, Save the Children and World Concern) or any political agenda (UNICEF). The truth in INGOs is that they need constant stream of funding and sometimes, they make up/exaggerate stuff to help drive the donations.
Worse is, when you actually work with people in NGOs, you'll find there is a stark difference in pay and benefits between foreigner (usually white or English speaking) and the local/native employees although the latter are the ones who know much more about the actual problems. Regional directors in UNICEF come and go every two years or less and they always can't wait to get out of the shithole third world country that they are supposed to be helping about. They and their fellow (foreign) workers are also paid very well with car, housing and children education benefits (all of which I'm not opposed to, but I'm sure as hell that they cannot find an equally well-paying job with their degrees and credentials in their home countries). Plus you never find these regional directors and management people at work (meaning, they show up to work like maybe once a week if we are lucky; no, they are not in the field working, which is left to the native employees of said INGO).
Those bear no relationship to the sort of charity Lehrer would establish with an estate generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
The song: https://youtu.be/gXlfXirQF3A
"Don't shade your eyes, plagiarize."
This was an opengl programming class for graduate students or senior compsci majors. He was really just saying make sure to build on other people's work and don't always just reinvent the wheel.
When rockets are up,
Who cares where they come down,
It's not my department
Says Wernher von Braun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTKn1aSOyOs&t=63
He is amazingly talented across many different axes.
I know how to count down...
Und I'm learning Chinese",
Says Werner von Braun
---
Pretty prophetic for 1962, pre-moon-landing.
"In German oder Englisch, I know how to count down And I'm learning Chinese, says Wernher von Braun."
but some feel our attitude should be one of gratitude /
like the widows and cripples in old London town /
who owe their large pensions to Werner von Braun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series)#So...
...built entirely to circumvent sanctions and fight "Die Swart Gevaar/Rooi Gevaar"... ("Black Danger" / "Red (Communist) Danger")
When the changes came they continued on without missing a beat except their number one problem now was to convince someone to continue paying them to carry on making munitions.
I love you Tom, I always have. This move is one more song, one more satirical poke at the music industrial complex
I've never seen a website with a specific shut down time. I wonder why he put it there.
And let there be no moaning of the bar
Just sing out a te deum
When you see that ICBM
And the party will be come as you are
[his rhymes are nothing short of amazing, cf the one in his college application for "Harvard" ("larva'd") ]
Because they're gonna shut down on Dec 31 2024? Would you prefer them shutting down without a notice?
Me neither, but I think it's a wonderful idea.
Mr. Lehrer, thank you for brightening our lives.
After I finished, I had to decide between TAing that course, or working on an undergraduate thesis; I did the latter, which helped launch my career, but I regret not working with Tom.
2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24279151
2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036813
2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774608
Tom says “In other words, all the lyrics herein should be treated as though they were in the public domain”, emphasis mine. That’s what got me curious.
Does Tom effectively still hold some rights that are not afforded by “true” public domain?
In the United States, copyright is automatic and exists until expired. Nothing in the federal statute allows an entity to terminate copyright, effectively putting works in the public domain.
The United States also allows authors (and heirs), except work-for-hires, to clawback copyright transfers and terminate licenses after 35 years. This is an inalienable statutory right, which means it cannot be waived even with a contract.
There's an interesting and formally unresolved (because the applicable window for the earliest "copyleft" works hasn't yet arrived, for one thing) question about how this interacts with things like CC0, GPL, and more informal licenses to the public at large. The law requires the termination to fall into a specific 5-year window, with advance notice in writing (and it must be multiple years in advance), served specifically to the person whose rights are being terminated.
The sheer logistics of trying to terminate a license granted to the world are therefore pretty difficult, but you could imagine termination targeting just a handful of lucrative targets. (Even then, when does a generally-available license "start"? When it's first offered? When the specific user first accesses the work? Is the timeframe "refreshed" every day the license is still on offer? This provision really wasn't written with these kinds of licenses in mind.)
It's probably one of the more complex parts of copyright law. There's a few well-known cases of section 203 being used to claw back copyright decades down the line. (Note: I'm am very much not a lawyer)
In 1938, John Steinbeck granted Viking Press rights to publish 13 of his works, including Of Mice And Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and Tortilla Flats, as long as they were kept in print and for sale. In 2005, John Steinbeck's son and granddaughter served notice to Penguin Publishing, who were the interested party at the time, that they were terminating the agreement.^2
This section was originally designed to give artists who may have essentially (or even literally) given away their rights due to inequitable bargaining power a chance to recoup their property down the line with at least several years notice that they are planning on terminating the agreement.^3 In practice, however, it's kind of a mess, and to say that it would allow an artist or their heirs to terminate a grant to the public domain is dubious. It's something that would likely see its way to the supreme court should it ever come to pass.
I've included a couple other articles here just in the general interest of providing more info.^4^5
[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/docs/203.html
[2]: http://billgablelaw.com/sites/law/files/TakingItBack.pdf
[3]: https://abovethelaw.com/2019/05/terminators-mount-up-section...
[4]: https://media2.mofo.com/documents/190700-all-shook-up.pdf
You can give up the economic rights and these are inherited and you can trade them.
Personal rights cannot be traded or inherited and remain with the author till their death. So you cannot change the text without author's permission, you cannot lie about who wrote something, and author can prevent you from using his art for a different purpose (for example if you wrote a song and somebody used it as a military recruitment ad and you're a pacifist - that sort of thing).
I'm not sure how this apply for software, I think it's less restrictive than for art (and it almost never comes up because Poland isn't a litigious country unlike US).
Or, if we want to avoid software: what's the status of a Wikipedia contribution (CC-BY-SA-3.0) made by a Polish resident? Can I not safely assume that the content is CC-BY-SA-3.0? Must I assume that a Polish author can come after me if I follow the letter of CC-BY-SA-3.0, but not in a way that he or she likes?
A lot of it is thanks to the fact that suing people is much less common here, so it never gets challanged. Also the person who lost the case pays the costs here unlike in the US so that's a deterrent.
I've looked into it now and it seems for software the personal copyrights are restricted compared to art. So for example you can't veto changes made to your software after you sold economic rights to it or using it for stuff you disagree with.
> Must I assume that a Polish author can come after me if I follow the letter of CC-BY-SA-3.0, but not in a way that he or she likes?
I think they'd have to prove that the way it's used harms them. It's not enough to say "I don't like it". But again IANAL.
There has been some cases for example about using Solidarity movement logo from 80s by various now-conflicted post-solidarity political parties and their supporters. I don't know who won, but I know that the author of the original logo was involved despite giving the rights to that logo to anti-communist opposition decades ago.
> Sorry, IANAL. Open Source software is written in Poland with all the usual open source licences and it works so I'm sure at least in practice it's not a problem.
But "in practice" is hardly sufficient :P
> A lot of it is thanks to the fact that suing people is much less common here, so it never gets challanged. Also the person who lost the case pays the costs here unlike in the US so that's a deterrent.
I'm a European too, and live in a very non-litiguous country, so I have no problem understanding the mindset of not suing over everything. But it still seems really weird for a country's copyright system to rely on this (sane) behavior.
> I think they'd have to prove that the way it's used harms them. It's not enough to say "I don't like it". But again IANAL.
So if a Polish resident contributes an original photograph to a Wikipedia article under CC-BY-SA-3.0, and I (or a Polish entity) use that photograph under the terms of the CC-BY-SA-3.0 in a way that "harms" the copyright holder, he can sue me (or the Polish entity in question) under Polish law? This seems absolutely insane to me, and surely can't be the case!
This sounds a lot like the license that Berkeley SPICE was under a long time ago [1], whereby it was essentially open source, but specifically the South African police were not allowed to use it. This kind of stuff – even when well-intended – causes massive headaches.
[1] https://perens.com/2019/09/23/sorry-ms-ehmke-the-hippocratic...
I would argue "in practice" is all that matters. No matter what you do if someone with enough power wants to fuck you up legally - he will. As true in USA as in Germany, Poland, Russia or North Korea. Only the probability is different. It's sad, but it's the reality we live in.
I prefer a system with obvious loopholes and low "getting fucked probability" (GFP) to a system with no loopholes and high GFP.
Government of my country in last 5 years broke constitution dozens of times, including unlawfully changing the election date, changing how judges are chooosen (making them dependant on the politicians), restricting many kinds of personal liberties like freedom of assembly without going through the proper process and many others. And nobody can do anything because they have political support because they gave away a big portion of yearly GDP to poor people.
Constutitional Tribunal said the government is breaking the law. Government ignored it and changed the judges (breaking the law again). Some people protested, most people ignored it. Now a PM that admited "our law breaks the constitution but I will vote for it" became the chairman of that Tribunal as a big "fuck you" to the opposition.
So what that our system of checks and balances was pretty good (I'd argue better than the one in Germany and USA) if the government just decides to ignore it and people don't care?
So I much prefer practice to theory. Good system doesn't work if people don't care. Bad system still works if people care enough.
> So if a Polish resident contributes an original photograph to a Wikipedia article under CC-BY-SA-3.0, and I (or a Polish entity) use that photograph under the terms of the CC-BY-SA-3.0 in a way that "harms" the copyright holder, he can sue me (or the Polish entity in question) under Polish law? This seems absolutely insane to me, and surely can't be the case!
I've looked into Polish description of CC-BY-SA-3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.pl
and it mentions "autorskie prawa osobowe" (personal copyright rights) as one example of additional restrictions.
> Licencja może nie zapewniać wszystkich niezbędnych zgód dla niektórych użyć utworu. Dotyczy to w szczególności innych praw, takich jak ochrona wizerunku, prywatności czy autorskie prawa osobiste. Mogą one ograniczać możliwości wykorzystania utworu.
Paraphrased (sorry IANAL and translating legalese is not my strong point): The licence might not ensure all required permissions for some uses of the art. It's possible especially in cases of other rights being violated, like the right to protect identity, privacy or personal copyright which might further restrict possible uses of the art.
I'm pretty sure Poland isn't the only country where there are additional restrictions, I don't know why you think it's insane honestly.
So it seems, only Polish coders need to be careful that when they use FOSS software, that they don't impinge upon the personal rights of any other Polish citizen who contributed code. I guess, to be on the safe side, they can decide to never impinge upon anyone's personal rights.
New "New Math" https://www.wired.com/2016/10/meet-new-math-unlike-old-math/
Even in Lehrer's song, the textbook wants us to do the calculation in base 8, and that's amusing and surprising and... being familiar with octal helps me in minor ways on probably a weekly basis. Being familiar with other bases more generally, even more frequently.
Tom Lehrer - So Long Mom (A Song for WW III) - with intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDFqoReof6A
Sorry about the intro, it was the shortest weird, long intro on this video I could find on YouTube.
"There, the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original."
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered.The way that we cheered/whenever our team/was scoring a touchdown,
The time that the floor/fell out of my car/when I put the clutch down
And you may have thought it tragic
Not to mention other adjec-
-tives...
If you haven't heard the song, he describes the way they used to do math as follows:
Consider the following subtraction problem, which I will put up here: 342 minus 173. Now, remember how we used to do that:
Three from two is nine, carry the one, and if you're under 35 or went to a private school, you say seven from three is six, but if you're over 35 and went to a public school, you say eight from four is six ...and carry the one, so we have 169.
There's.... Earth and Air and Fire and Water.
We tried to do a song parody version of The Elements, but using only Pokemon names. It was enormous fun, until you realize nothing rhymes with Pickachu, or Charmander, or Bulbasaur, or any of them for that matter. That lead to a discussion of how to write a Python script to test for like word endings on combinations of 888 pairs, etc. These songs have an almost mystical power to open minds. And observe there is this property to the universe known as "intelligence"
Were you only rhyming pokemon names with other pokemon names, or could you use other words?
If you can use other words, the trick to rhyming made-up words is to find any word that ends with the same sound, and look that word up in a rhyming dictionary.
Pickachu -> You -> zoo, IQ, caribou, misconstrue etc
Charmander -> Salamander -> gander, candour, meander, highlander etc
Bulbasaur -> Dinosaur -> door, floor, centaur, guarantor, heretofore etc
The rhyme is trivial, since every line ends with "ium". To do it with anything else you'd need to work a lot harder.
Holmium, helium, hafnium, erbium (all h, save the rhyme)
Phosphorous, francium, fluorine, terbium (all f, save rhyme)
Manganese, mercury, molybdenum, magnesium (all m)
Dysprosium, scandium, cerium, cesium (all s sounds, save the first)
Lead, praseodymium, platinum, plutonium (most p sounds)
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium (continue p sounds)
Tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium (t sounds now)
Cadmium, calcium, chromium, curium (k sounds now)
There's also the point to make that most element names are 3-4 syllables long, so the verses are structured with 4 elements per line. The extra-long praseodymium and neodymium are paired with the very short lead and nickel respectively, for example. In fact, prior to the last verse, the 4 elements per line is violated just once (last line before the intermezzo crams in "bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, barium"). The last verse goes a regular 4 elements, then 3, and then launches into this:
* argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, rhodium
* chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, sodium
The first of these lines rhymes all the -ons at the end, and the second goes for alliteration instead.
Of course, there are a few failures to align all the elements by alliteration or rhyme. The ones in the last verse align instead by other means (first you have californium, fermium, berkelium--all named after the same place; then you have mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium--all named after scientists). Now that's clever!
... and now Google has introduced me to preantepenultimate and propreantepenultimate. Wow.
Note: "Satoshi", which is Ash's name in the original Japanese, rhymes with "Pika-Pi", which is why Pikachu says "Pika-Pi" so much.
Each time "Pika-Pi" pops out in the anime, its Pikachu calling out Satoshi / Ash's name. (Sa-To-Shi).
---------
Some things are lost in translation. Calling Satoshi "Ash" in the American version, but keeping Pikachu's original dub, prevents the American Audience from seeing the level of thought put into this.
-------
I think you can similarly force rhymes and/or common syllables and/or intonations between Pokemon. There's over 900 of them now, surely there's a song to make some rhymes out of. (IE: Pokerap style)
... about the same level as "ruh-roh, Rhaggy!"?
I've always been a fan of Lehrer's from the days when he was a household name, it's good he's in the spotlight yet again.
For something filmed in 1967 the audio quality is absolutely stunning. I wonder what equipment they used? My suspicion is that it's a piezoelectric microphone which had fantastic reputation for picking up a wide range of sound (especially for things like multiple people around a table) but fell out of favour as they worked best with valve amplifiers.
Appropriate... https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/lobach...
(Which I love wholeheartedly, but lawyers may find not explicit enough.)
Plagiarize! Let no one else's work evade your eyes. Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, So don't shade your eyes, But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize ---
(Lobachevsky song - Tom Lehrer)
I hope this collection gets onto archive.org.
https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
I found this bookmarklet code here on HN
wget -r -l 2 -A pdf --no-parent https://tomlehrersongs.com/index/
https://tomlehrersongs.com/category/sheet-music/
---
EDIT: Quick DOM-Fu retrieved the following.
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/be-pre...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/bright...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/a-chri...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/the-el...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/fight-...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/the-fo...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/the-hu...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/i-got-...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/i-hold...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/i-wann...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/in-old...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/the-ir...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/l-y-mu...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/the-ma...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/mlf-lu...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/my-hom...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/nation...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/new-ma...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/the-ol...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/poison...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/pollut...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/send-t...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/shes-m...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/silent...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/smut-m...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/so-lon...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/te-amo...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/the-va...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/we-wil...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/wernhe...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/when-y...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/whos-n...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/the-wi...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/the-wi...
Wrong.
An author (or heirs) cannot put creative works in the public domain. There is nothing in the statute that allows this. Only after the expiration of the copyright does the work go into public domain.
Copyright stays with the author (or heirs) and is subject to license termination after 35 years. This would mean the declaration of "use freely" can be revoked. Which is why these works cannot treated as if they are in the public domain.
A better title would be: "Tom Lehrer publishes his songs and lyrics online and states that they can be freely used."
It looks like a pretty brilliant hack to me.