Sixties hits are slipping the copyright leash

The Beatles' first hit, Love Me Do, is now in the public domain, meaning the 50-year copyright on the pop classic has lapsed. Photo from Reuters.

You are going to hear sooner or later, and feel rather old when you do: The Beatles' first single, Love Me Do, is now in the public domain, at least in Europe.

How could that be? Though not the most durable Beatles song, it hardly seems to be from another time, though given the passage of 50 years, it most certainly is. Remember '60s hysteria? The kids who wrote ''Beatles'' on their contact lenses because they couldn't think about anything else? The girls who saved the Kleenex tissues into which they'd wept at the Shea Stadium concert?

Yet the music itself does not feel Paleolithic. Though the world has been anything but stationary, pop music is not as disposable as it was once assumed to be - one reason why the laws are on the verge of changing. By November, the European Union will vote to extend the copyright on recordings from 50 to 70 years. It is a potentially important moment in the world of art and commerce.

The Love Me Do news sprang across my screen from an unlikely source - the website Pristine Classical (www.pristineclassical.com), which specialises in remastering old classical recordings and was protesting the impending change by offering a remastered Love Me Do, one of only two Beatles recordings (the other is P.S. I Love You) released in 1962 and thus in the public domain, before the door slams shut again this year with the copyright extension.

For a business as small as Pristine - old symphonic recordings by the likes of Wilhelm Furtwangler, Arturo Toscanini, and Eugene Ormandy - extended copyright may not be catastrophic news, but it is not good. Often, such indie labels are the only way these recordings will reach the public, considering that the major labels, for which these performances were originally recorded, have been bought and sold so many times that current owners often do not know or care what their back classical catalogue contains.

Love Me Do comes with a very different set of concerns. British rock star Cliff Richard, now 72, has been agitating for years to extend the copyright expiration date. Who thought that would be necessary (or that any rock star would live so long)? Like many pop-music movements, 1960s rock was a point of teenage rebellion - part of its appeal was that our parents hated it. Mine told me not to buy Beatles albums because I would not be listening to them a year later. They had a point: When rebellion is no longer necessary, is the music obsolete?

But not only did we listen to the Beatles for years, subsequent generations did not find it necessary to rebel against us, at least musically speaking - they love the Beatles too.

''If there's one thing your generation gave us,'' a young guy in Philadelphia said recently while blasting the Rolling Stones on his car radio, ''it's great music and great weed.''

It helps that the music continues to be prevalent on radio, not to mention the sound system at your gym.

Also, remarkably little is new in mainstream pop. Yes, there is rap, but that is more a literary form than a musical one. When I occasionally dip back into mainstream pop - groups like Radiohead, Coldplay, Modest Mouse, Scissor Sisters and Of Montreal - the musical voices are distinctive but the idiom is comfortable and familiar.

That evergreen quality is just what fuels the copyright changes. The compositions have extended protection, but they are no longer the central entity of the music business, a change from the early '60s, when a hit such as I Left My Heart in San Francisco could be identified with Tony Bennett but recorded by plenty of other singers.

There was also a big subculture of knockoffs. When Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat Song started to turn into a hit, no-name performers hustled into recording studios to do their own half-price rush-release versions.

That practice became impossible with the Beatles. By the time they got to such high-concept songs as A Day in the Life in 1967, the songs' most intriguing elements - like A Day's fantastical orchestral crescendo - could not even be translated into sheet music, much less imitated by anybody. You might stumble across a Bing Crosby version of Hey Jude that seemed pathetic if only because it existed.

Therefore, the performance is the song. Copyright protection for A Day in the Life as a composition is meaningless unless the recording is protected too; the composition does not exist outside the performance, the case for much post-1962 pop, from I Can See for Miles to Good Vibrations.

In the US, recordings have copyright protection for up to 95 years, thanks to codification of copyright laws prompted by Sonny Bono. However, the internet's dissolution of borders means European copyright law is indeed relevant to both US intellectual-property owners and to consumers. And until the EU copyright-extension vote is final at the end of 2013, it should be an interesting year.

One of the most blatant manifestations of copyright-expiration panic is Bob Dylan - The 50th Anniversary Collection / The Copyright Extension Collection Vol. I. Because copyright protection begins with the date of publication, not the date of the recording, Sony Music is issuing a limited Europe-only four-CD set of early-'60s outtakes. This material, perhaps too rough for widespread dissemination, will not mean open season for enterprising indies.

Already, a label identifying itself as Music Square has issued live Dylan performances from 1961 (found here and there on US bootlegs), one from the Gaslight Cafe in New York, another from a Minneapolis apartment. Americans can access them from European websites with the click of a mouse.