Copyrighted
“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 ours, cause we don't give a darn. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.”
-Woody Guthrie,
Message on mimeographed copies of lyrics distributed to fans in the 1930s, as quoted by Pete Seeger in an NPR interview "Pete Seeger remembers Woody" (1996)