First, “Happy Birthday to You” lost its copyright. Then “We Shall Overcome” became public domain as well.

But on Friday, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” avoided what had been shaping up as a growing trend affecting the copyright owners of old songs, as the publishers of “This Land” defeated a challenge against it.

In the case, a young musical group called Satorii sued the song’s publishers, Ludlow Music and the Richmond Organization, after paying $45.50 for a license to release a cover version of “This Land Is Your Land,” which Guthrie wrote in 1940. In their complaint — filed by the same lawyers behind the “Happy Birthday” and “We Shall Overcome” suits — the group used a detailed timeline of decades-old paperwork and Guthrie’s own hand-decorated songbooks to argue that Guthrie had essentially forfeited his copyright to the song decades ago by failing to renew it properly.

They asked for the song’s copyright to be declared invalid, which would have put “This Land” in the public domain. Since “This Land” is under copyright, the song must be licensed any time it is recorded, used in a film or performed in a commercial setting. For some of those uses, like a radio broadcast, the license may already be covered under “blanket” deals in which users pay a fee for access to thousands of songs, with the fees eventually divided among the individual copyright owners.