91Èȱ¬

The filmmaker and writer Charlie Shackleton explores the rocky ground of the public domain through the contested history of a single song - Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land.

One of the most famous odes to the public commons ever composed, Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land offers a playful rebuke to the ‘big high wall’ of private property. In this documentary of legal interruptions, Charlie explores the history of the song and asks how much of our shared cultural history is truly shared, and how much should be?

Featuring interviews with Joe Klein (Woody Guthrie's biographer), Jennifer Jenkins (from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School) and Charlotte Vaughan (Senior Intellectual Property Counsel at 91Èȱ¬ Legal) and archive of Nora Guthrie from Songlines in 2009 (presented by John Cavanagh and produced by Fiona Croall) , Woody Guthrie from the 91Èȱ¬'s Children's Hour in 1944, Pete Seeger from the 1968 documentary Bound for Glory and 'Interview with Flora Robertson about Dust Storms in Oklahoma, August 5, 1940' courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Produced by Charlie Shackleton and Eleanor McDowall
A Falling Tree production for 91Èȱ¬ Radio 4