I couldn’t tell you for sure but chances are it’s now out of copyright (against the Yahoo Answer you got.)
Things you need to know:
Is the music included on the cinematic copyright or has it been copyrighted separately?
What was the International Law (I am guess this will be more relevant than your local one) at the time. Is has changed quite a few times since but as far as I remember for my time at college many years ago the original copyright is what holds, not changes made afterwards.
If the music is counted as part of the cinematic piece, and does not have a separate copyright, then you are fine. Even under revised copyright law cinematic piece are 50 years after first showing, rather than 50 years after copyright holder’s death as with most piece of creative property (except photographic, which is even less at 25 years.)
If it is separate I would think it likely to be copyright free as I believe the change to 50 years after death was one of the later changes in the law. If it does fall within this you will have to find out the musical copyright owner and their date of death.
Thanks for your answer. I’ve been searching for hours but I get lots of different messages (not saying yours isn’t the right one). I’ve been looking for someone at Disney to contact about the copyright on this thing but I can’t find any. Then there apparently is some thing going on in which Disney is copyrighting all their mickey mouse stuff extremely well.
Anyway, I found out that the composer was Carl Stalling. (died in '72)
So there’s a possibility it will be copyrighted until 2022.
EDIT: Apart from the fact that in America an Organisation can have the same rights as a living person and an Organisation never dies. So if somehow Disney Org was the copyright holder, rather than either Walt Disney or Carl Stalling there may be some difficulties…
Personally I’d try and find a layer who specialises in this kind of thing. Disney would likely want to put you off anyway and Copyright is a VERY complicated subject! Not sure how much a single query like this would likely to be charged, or if anybody would know somebody who already works for record labels or the like, but would say definitely they safest way to go. Do Greenpeace not have anybody who can look into it for you?
Also bear in mind the differences in different countries…
