Sources & rights
Every record in this edition is a commercial 78rpm side cut between 1898 and 1921, digitised by the Library of Congress and in the public domain in the United States. Here is exactly why — because with recorded sound, “it’s old” is not an argument.
Where the records come from
The audio and the catalogue data are the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox, its collection of acoustic-era Victor and Columbia sides transferred from originals held by the Library and by the Johnson Victrola Museum. The label images are the Library’s own scans of the discs.
Paneful plays a twelve-second clip cut from each side, hosted here rather than streamed from the Library. Each round links back to the Library’s page for the record, where you can hear the whole thing.
Why these recordings are public domain
A recording carries two copyrights: the musical composition, and the recording itself. Both have to be free, and until recently the second one almost never was — sound recordings made before 1972 had no federal copyright at all, and were instead protected by a patchwork of state law that ran to 2067.
That changed with the Music Modernization Act of 2018, whose Title II (the Classics Protection and Access Act, codified at 17 U.S.C. §1401) put pre-1972 recordings on a federal clock for the first time and started retiring the oldest of them into the public domain:
| Recording first published | Entered the US public domain |
|---|---|
| Before 1923 | 1 January 2022 |
| 1923 | 1 January 2024 |
| 1924 | 1 January 2025 |
| 1925 | 1 January 2026 |
So as this is written, every recording published in the United States through the end of 1925 is free. The compositions are easier: a musical work published before 1931 is public domain in the US, and anything old enough to sit on one of these discs was published decades earlier.
The margin we keep. The statute counts the date a record was published, and the Library’s catalogue records the date it was recorded — usually a few months earlier, occasionally longer. Rather than guess at the gap, this edition simply stops at recordings made in 1921 or earlier, four full years inside the line. Every side here was on sale long before 1923.
What the Library’s rights note means
Items in the National Jukebox carry a line reading “Inclusion of the recording in the National Jukebox, courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment or EMI Music.” That sentence describes the agreement under which the Library began streaming these sides in 2011 — years before the Music Modernization Act existed. It is neither a licence granted to us nor a restriction on material that has since entered the public domain by operation of law.
No archive hands out a per-item warranty for pre-1972 sound recordings, and none is available to be had. The statutory analysis above is the mechanism, published here so it can be checked rather than taken on trust. If you believe a particular side is not in fact public domain, say so through Screendoor Studio and it comes out of the pool the same day.
What has been left out
The American record catalogue of 1900–1921 is not a neutral archive. Alongside the marches, arias and rags, it contains a large body of minstrel and dialect material whose titles carry racial slurs. None of it belongs in a daily game, so this edition excludes the Library’s “ethnic characterizations” category outright, filters titles and performer names against a blocklist of slurs, and drops spoken-word and monologue sides entirely. The filter is deliberately blunt and takes some innocent records with it.
Also set aside, for playability rather than principle: medleys and “selections” (the same title belongs to a dozen different discs, so there would be no single right answer), sides sung in languages other than English outside the opera and classical repertoire, and all but one recording of any given tune.
How a clip is chosen
Nobody sat and auditioned five hundred records. Each clip is the loudest sustained twelve seconds in the first three-quarters of a minute of the side — which, on acoustic-era discs, is reliably the full-band statement of the refrain. It is a machine’s guess at the hook, and now and then it lands somewhere odd.
Paneful is an independent game. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by the Library of Congress, and the Library’s appearance here is not an endorsement of it.