"The greatest irony about Sita Sings the Blues is the copyright bind that it falls into. This is an arcane situation, owing to the bizarreness of the retroactive-active copyright extensions foisted upon the US public in the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act.
"It turns out that, despite the work being over 80 years old; the authors being long since dead; and the copyright term at the time of production being an absolute maximum of 56 years (28 years plus an extension of 28 years); the songs performed by Annette Hanshaw used in this film are not in the public domain.
Curiously, however, the recordings are. In other words, none of the rights are owned by the heirs of Annette Hanshaw, but the rights to the musical compositions and lyrics that she sang are owned today by various music corporations."
