Earlier this year, we discussed that, thanks to shorter copyright terms in Canada, things like early Beatles recordings and James Bond had entered the public domain up north. It was no secret that the recording industry was totally freaked out about this, and that resulted in the somewhat bizarre situation in which Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper single-handedly extended copyright on sound recordings for 20 years by sticking it into a budget update, without any public discussion or concern about the fact that he was simply wiping out twenty years of use of works that the public had been promised.

Of course, this extension only applied to works that hadn‘t yet fallen into the public domain, so there is still a small window of early 1960s sound recordings that are, in fact, in the public domain.