An elderly woman with an acrimonious relationship with her daughter-in-law is found murdered.
Original Radio Broadcast Date: November 24, 1949
Originating from Hollywood
Starring: Jack Webb as Sergeant Joe Friday; Barton Yarborough as Sergeant Ben Romero; Raymond Burr as Ed Backstrand, Chief of Detectives; Herb Butterfield as Lt. Lee Jones
At the start of a recent episode of The Old Time Radio Snack Wagon, I featured a clip from Nora Bayes’ performance of, “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)”. It was a record that was released in December 1918.
Which means it’s in the public domain. It used to be that all records prior to 1972 were set to enter the public domain in 2067. But in 2018, Congress passed the Music Modernization Act, which placed records before 1972 under Federal Copyright protection with additional time. Per federal law, all pre-1923 sound recordings would enter the public domain on January 1, 2022, and then records from 1923-46 would have their copyright expire after 100 years, so all records from 1923 would expire on January 1, 2024.
So, as my Old Time Radio Snack Wagon episode posted at the end of 2023, contained a 1918 recording whose copyright expired at the end of 2021, I was fine to post it. And then I got a copyright claim on the episode barring monetization. I filed a dispute, there was no response, and the claim was released after 30 days, on January 4. Then, just as I was getting ready to write this article, I got yet another claim seeking to split revenue on a public domain recording. Here we go again.
Of course, that’s not the only dispute I’ve got going. For New Year’s Day, I did a Public Domain Day Record Party featuring four records that entered the public domain at the end of 2023. Three of these, once again, have copyright claims:
My point is not to write a woe-is-me article. To paraphrase Casablanca, “The problems of one content creator don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Yet, I’m far from alone in having this trouble with YouTube, certainly not since the start of the year. The first appearance of Mickey Mouse, Steamboat Willie, entered the public domain on January 1st. Disney has continued to file copyright claims on Steamboat Willie, leading to demonetizing videos. In fact, one creator has already had his video demonetized, remonetized, and demonetized again. What’s going on? YouTube’s solution to one of its early problems, and its failure to adapt, is the source of its newest round of ongoing problems.
The Original Copyright ProblemÂ
YouTube has been in existence since 2005, and quickly gained popularity as the go-to place for users to share their videos. Within two years of its founding, YouTube was bought out by Google, who sought to capitalize on the opportunity.
Google’s problem was that YouTube wasn’t just home to fun user-generated content. It also became a den of virtual video pirates. People posted copyrighted music videos, television programs, and movies on the platform without compensating creators. This led to lawsuits by large corporations wanting to protect their interests.
This was not an easy problem to solve. The vast amount of material uploaded every second of every day to YouTube made it impossible for a human being to monitor it all. To proactively fight piracy, YouTube introduced the Content ID system, which, after all these years, is still a bit of a blunt instrument to fight piracy. It’s an automatic system that checks videos for copyrighted content and, in turn, hands out copyright strikes, demonetizes videos, or requires sharing with content owners.
The system has worked to an extent. It has limited YouTube’s liability and it’s also resulted in billions of dollars in revenue distributed to creators (or large corporations that have purchased rights to their works). But it’s also led to problems. Fair Use has been an ongoing problem, particularly for YouTubers whose work is focused on critiquing pop culture such as movies, television, music, and video games, where using clips from a work is covered under the Fair Use exception of Copyright laws (if done appropriately). This led to the “Where’s the Fair Use” social media campaign against the excesses of Content ID.
A much newer problem is content that entered the public domain. In 2007, when Content ID was introduced, the public domain had remained frozen since 1998 thanks to The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. It had extended all copyrights on works created after 1923. It was also widely assumed that Disney, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and all the big media companies were going to be back under some pretext or another to get their Congressional patrons to once again extend copyrights so they could continue to profit off characters, movies, and stories that had been created nearly a century ago. In addition to that, no sound recordings were expected to enter the public domain in the U.S. until 2067. So it was understandable that the idea of copyright expiring wasn’t a consideration at the time Content ID was created.
Yet somehow or another, the film industry didn’t try to extend copyright terms, and the public domain began to grow. And then the recording industry, eager to gain federal copyright protection rather than having their pre-1972 works covered by a patchwork of state laws, agreed to a schedule to let older sound recordings enter the public domain starting in 2022.
Congressional passage of the Music Modernization Act and the failure of any copyright extension to pass in 2018 should have put Google on notice. The public domain was going to expand. The initial works released into the public domain in 2019-2021 were going to be of little concern to YouTube: books, silent films, and sheet music don’t really translate to video. But 2022 and on would be a different story. Congressional action gave them fair warning. They had years to tweak Content ID before a flood of new works would enter the public domain and be free to use.
They didn’t do it.
YouTube’s Responsibility
The public domain is an important principle of copyright law. The artist creates work and, thanks to the protection of copyright by the government, the artist profits from the work. This protection is far-reaching as not only does the government provide domestic protections for work, but they will fight for the protections of U.S. intellectual properties in dealings with foreign governments. This says nothing of the benefits the artist enjoys from living in a society where taxpayer money provides a society where the opportunity to create isn’t unduly hindered by war, famine, or crime.
That’s why, after what the Constitution calls “a limited time”, copyright expires and a work enters the common culture, so that works can be freely enjoyed and also be freely available to other artists to adapt, or incorporate in their own vision.
The public domain is why Disney could make classics like Snow White, Pinnochio,Sleeping Beauty, and Alice in Wonderland and freely and expand upon those stories. It’s why Orson Welles could do Julius Caesar in modern dress. The public domain is a treasure trove of works that inspiring artists can access and use for their own creative ends. In addition to this, some works that enter the public domain find a new audience or gain new appreciation, as happened with It’s a Wonderful Life back in the 1970s.
YouTube has a big role to play in this process and right now it’s failing. In the previously mentioned “Public Domain Day Record Party”, I played these recordings that were newly added to the public domain and offered background on each song. A YouTube commenter suggested I start another podcast, “DJ Adam.” As fun of an idea as that is, I doubt there’d be enough demand for it to be worth it. But it would be great if someone did a podcast where they played public domain records and provided commentary on it.
The problem? Who wants to spend months fighting YouTube’s computerized Content ID system and the lackadaisical response of multi-billion-dollar corporations who are in no hurry to respond to your dispute so you can remonetize your little video?
Of course, you can create content off of YouTube. Audio-only content in particular can have great success off of YouTube. Less than 10% of my total downloads/views comes from YouTube. However, YouTube is trying to change that by capturing more and more of the podcast market. Indeed, there are many metrics that suggest that YouTube is the most-used podcast platform and it only means to get bigger.
YouTube has built itself a place as the world’s top video provider (outside of perhaps Tiktok). There are other video platforms, but YouTube is where creators who want to be seen and heard by a wide audience go. It’s a powerful platform, but, as the saying goes, that comes with great responsibility.
For the next two decades, an entire year’s worth of cinema and song will enter the public domain every year and YouTube is totally unprepared for it. Steamboat Willie is only the start. As the years go on, more enduring classic films from legends like Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock are going to begin their march into the public domain, along with records by legends like Bing Crosby. Creators are going to want to use these in their own works and legally they’ll have the right to do so. However, many creators are going to be caught in the web of YouTube’s outdated Content ID scheme, which will either send all of the money from their work to some multinational corporation with no right to it, or make them split their revenue with that company.
These types of horror stories are going to happen over and over again, and rather than exploring and being inspired by new public domain works, a lot of creators are going to be hesitant to use them. Particularly for popular YouTube channels that may release a video or two every week, getting hit with a Content ID claim can wreck a month’s budget for medium-sized YouTube channels that are dependent on ad revenue.
Due to its unique position in the marketplace, YouTube is able, rather than fostering the use of new-to-the-public domain materials, to stifle them. Its attempts to take revenue from creators and to give it to the former holders of expired ccopyrights is unfair and thwarts the intent of the law. It also serves to penalize and suppress the sharing of great cultural works that are part of our media heritage.
What Should YouTube Do
I’ll admit that I’m neither an engineer nor a YouTube insider. I’m just a podcaster with a YouTube channel that can tell that YouTube’s Content ID is broken. My ideas on how to fix it are basic, but I think have some sense.
First, disputes are sent to the claimants to respond to and only if they graciously refuse your dispute (or refuse to respond to it after 30 days) does the claim get released. The amount of time that claimants are given should be reduced to no more than 15 days. The idea that they need 30 days is absurd, particularly as more and more people’s livelihoods dependent on YouTube. It should also be easier to have someone from YouTube be able to get directly involved and research the case. Indeed, YouTube should probably retain a team of paralegals trained in copyright law for that purpose.
Second, the easiest way to avoid disputes over U.S. copyright is to have publication dates on the audio or video. Was the film released before 1929 or the sound recording before 1924? Then they’re in the public domain in the United States. If publication dates were added to Content ID entries, then on January 1, expired U.S. copyrights could be deleted from the system. This process could be something YouTube could ask of companies that have submitted Content ID or could be done by Google with the assistance of AI.
This gets a bit more confusing with International Copyrights which are often based on the year of the creator’s death. But I think if Google gets the copyright law right for the country its headquartered in, that would be a good start.
This would also be an expensive project, but Google has set YouTube as the world’s premier content provider. And there are serious responsibilities that go along with status. Not all of them can be met on the cheap. Google owes it to its creators and to the society that makes its existence and profitability possible to get this right.
The investigation into a stolen pearl necklace becomes a murder.
Original Radio Broadcast Dates: August 29, 30, and 31, 1956
Originating from Hollywood
Starring: Bob Bailey as Johnny Dollar; Howard McNear; Forrest Lewis; Paul Richards; Mary Jane Croft; Virginia Gregg; James McCallion; Shirley Mitchell; Russell Thorson
Today’s Mystery: Johnny goes to a small Ohio town where a jewel thief is ready to hand over a stolen pearl necklace … for a price.
Original Radio Broadcast Dates: August 24, 27, and 28, 1956
Originating from Hollywood
Starring: Bob Bailey as Johnny Dollar; Howard McNear; Forrest Lewis; Paul Richards; Mary Jane Croft; Virginia Gregg; James McCallion; Shirley Mitchell; Russell Thorson
Friday and Smith look for a man who has committed a series of bar robberies and killed several of the victims.
Original Television Broadcast Date: October 8, 1954 based on a Radio Play from November 10, 1949
Originating from Hollywood
Starring: Jack Webb as Sergeant Joe Friday; Ben Alexander as Frank Smith; Walter Sande; Harry Bartel; Dee Thompson; Eugene Iglesias; Dennis Weaver; Natalie Masters
Even when I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet had a certain reputation, as a somewhat bland brand of entertainment. Even though I watched a lot of reruns, Ozzie and Harriet were never on. The only time I saw them in a TV listing was for a PBS marathon that was way past my bedtime.
I watched a VHS release of their 1952 movie Here Come the Nelsons and found it pretty funny at the time. Whether I still would I don’t know as it was never released on DVD, and the entire TV series waited decades for an official DVD release, even as public domain episodes became available from various companies. The official DVD releases of the first two seasons came out in 2022, with the entire series landing on DVD in 2023. Now the entire series is available for streaming through Amazon – all fourteen, yes, fourteen seasons, adding to more than four hundred episodes. That’s more than stalwarts like Father Knows Best, I Love Lucy, and The Dick Van Dyke Show.Â
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett began airing on television in 1952, the year after I Love Lucy premiered over at CBS. By the time it left, The Andy Griffith show had been on the air for five seasons, and Get Smart had just finished its first. Yet its history was even longer than that, as Ozzie and Harriet had begun over radio.
Before The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
Harriet Hilliard (born Peggy Lou Snyder) was a singer when she met bandleader Ozzie Nelson. The two worked together on programs for the Bakers of America in the 1930s and were married in 1935. In 1941, they joined the Raleigh Cigarette program featuring Red Skelton. Ozzie led the band and Harriet served as vocalist and also appeared in the comedic sketches, most notably as the mother of Junior, Skelton’s “Mean Widdle Kid” character.
In 1944, Skelton was drafted, leading to the end of his radio program, but this would provide an opportunity for the couple. Ozzie wanted to find a way for them to spend more time with their children, and a radio sitcom proved the perfect opportunity to shift their careers from their more demanding schedule.
America’s Favorite Young Couple
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet premiered in October 1944, and was a domestic comedy based on the Nelsons’ home life. Ozzie and Harriet, aged thirty-seven and thirty-nine, were billed as “America’s Favorite Young Couple” and continued to be billed as such well into their forties (one of those things you could get away with over radio). The series was initially heard over CBS, but later switched to NBC, and finally ABC. The series was sponsored by International Silver and later by Heinz.
For the first five years, the Nelsons’ sons David and Ricky were played by child actors, until a 1948 guest appearance by Bing Crosby pushed Ozzie towards having their sons play themselves, starting in 1949.
John Brown was the most prominent supporting cast member. He played Ozziet and Harriet’s neighbor, Mister Thornberry, or “Thorny.” It’s worth noting that, for much of the run, Brown was also a regular cast member on the sitcoms My Friend Irma as Irma’s boyfriend Al, and on The Life of Riley as both Riley’s neighbor Gillis and Digby O’Dell, “the friendly undertaker.” Brown was therefore doing triple duty most weeks until the early 1950s, or perhaps quadruple if you count both Life of Riley roles.
The Circulating Episodes
The series aired 402 episodes over the radio, of which around eighty are in circulation. The various websites that post the series feature a lot of mis-dated and duplicate episodes. I tried to listen to every episode and ended up having to use three or four sources to find them all.
In general, the circulating episodes are spread throughout the series run, with a higher number of episodes coming from the last season, and only two episodes from 1946 in circulation. This is only because long-running comedy programs evolve, and the episodes of Ozzie and Harriet that were considered worthy of saving come towards the tail end of its run over radio, rather than the earliest years. I can only evaluate what I have, but it’s always possible that more episodes might alter the evaluation of the series.
Review of the Episodes
In some early episodes, Ozzie and Harriet did the sort of musical skits that they did on The Red Skelton Show, but this ended early in the series run. What remained was a style of comedy that stood out from its peers for what it wasn’t as much as what it was.
For one thing, there were no catchphrases. Old Time Radio comedies of the era relied on them. You’ll find no equivalent to, “Tain’t funny, McGee,” “You’re looking fine, very natural,” “What a revoltin’ development this is,” “Well, now, I wouldn’t say that,” or “Hello, my fellow, pupil,” recurring lines that filled other sitcoms and earned the actors laughter and applause before an actual joke
The comedy felt more grounded than many of its old-time radio contemporaries There were comic misunderstandings, a scheme or two, and a few lies told throughout the series, but it never reached a point where it stretched your disbelief. The series didn’t rely on characters being inordinately stupid, greedy, or out of touch with reality to make the plot work. In some ways, I think it’s less discussed than most other old-time radio comedies because it’s so different.
Most episodes center around Ozzie’s ill-fated ideas. Ozzie is written as the one person in the Nelson house most likely to get carried away with some new fancy gizmo, make a big bet, propose major changes to the family, and the one most likely to put on airs or to boast of something that reality won’t cash. The other source of comedy is the Nelson boys, acting like brothers and finding ways to pick at each other, with Ricky, especially, having some great lines. Harriet is likable, charming, and always seems to be a step ahead of Ozzie in the end.
The series has some fairly clever episodes. My favorite had to be the episode where Ozzie and Thorny try to boost the neglected small-town minor league baseball club, and get some help from a local used-car salesman (played by Gale Gordon), who has some ideas on how to improve the team. This is probably peak writing for the series, and also an interesting turn for Gordon, whose later career was defined by playing bombastic authoritarians like Osgood Conklin with a slow burn. This really showed some of his range as a performer.
If the series has one fault, it’s that it feels almost too domestic, particularly in some episodes where the action (such as it is) doesn’t leave the Nelsons’ home. Indeed, there are way too many circulating episodes where everything happens either at their house or immediately next door. Also, there’s a certain generic feeling to the series, with the lack of recurring characters in their generic (and never-named) suburban hometown, and Ozzie having a job that’s never specifically mentioned in the radio episodes, and even the local store that is known as “The Emporium”, rather than a specific name. That the episodes have a general feeling of things going wrong precisely when Ozzie tries anything new leads to a (perhaps unintentional) ethos of, “Do what you’ve always done. You’re a fool if you try to do anything different.” So, if you wanted to create some superficially pleasant 1950s sitcom world with a dark reality behind it, this would probably be what you’d base it on.
Also, I think Harriet is almost too nice and too understanding. While Ozzie isn’t at the extreme end of boneheaded radio sitcom husbands, he does some things that most wives would lose their cool over. I actually got a thrill from the one episode in which Harriet loses her temper with him when he tries to teach her to play golf.
Conclusion:
All in all, The Ozzie and Harriett radio program comes down to a matter of taste. For what it is, it works. It’s a light, mostly inoffensive family comedy that’s generally a bit more subdued than its contemporaries. If you prefer the more extreme situations of something like The Burns and Allen Show, or the characters that inhabit places like Summerfield in The Great Gildersleeve, this may not be for you. But if you’re in a mood for a comedy that’s a bit silly, and you can overlook the overly generic nature of the setting, this may be worth seeking out.
Steve goes to New Guinea, hoping to discover through talking with a notorious smuggler the identity and location of a Mr. Big in a gun-smuggling operation.
Original Radio Broadcast Date: January 7, 1953
Originating in Hollywood
Starring: Brian Donlevy as Steve Mitchell; Herb Butterfield as the Commissioner; William Conrad; Paul Frees; Ray Dietrich; Betty Lou Gerson; Don Morrison
