Public Domain Superheroes?

SerpicoWasTaken writes "Here is an interesting article about a group of comic book heroes from the golden age that are in the public domain. Apparently, a bunch of golden age heroes were never copyrighted and just faded into obscurity. The article also contains a long discussion of copyright and the public domain. It is an interesting read for all those interested in the public domain." Update: 09/25 17:51 GMT by M : Link removed at the request of the site maintainers because it's killing their server. Update: 09/25 19:02 GMT by M : They've put the document on a static page instead of a cgi script. :)

Comments

slashdotted already?!

[byolinux]

That's gotta be a record!

Re:slashdotted already?!

[Clover_Kicker]

You know you're in trouble when the first post is to saw you've been slashdotted...

This

[Anonymous Coward]

first post is public domain. Enjoy, GNU hippies.

Get some PRIORITIES!

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst terrorist attack in recorded history occurred over a year ago, followed by a Holy War against Islam, and now Israel and the Palestinians as well as India and Pakistan are teetering on the brink of their own war, Argentina is in the midst of a financial crisis, America is considering launching attacks against Somalia and Iraq, and you people have the gall to be discussing Public Domain Superheroes???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!

The bodies of the thousands of innocent civilians who died (and will die) in these unprecedented events could give a good god damn about Public Domain Superheroes, your childish Lego models, your nerf toy guns and whining about the lack of a "fun" workplace, your Everquest/Diablo/D&D fixation, the latest Cowboy Bebop rerun, or any of the other ways you are "getting on with your life" (here's a hint: watching Cowboy Bebop in your jammies and eating a bowl of Shreddies is *not* "getting on with your life"). The souls of the victims are watching in horror as you people squander your finite, precious time on this earth playing video games!

You people disgust me!

Arseman

[The Original Yama]

I don't see a (c) on the Arseman. Does that mean we all own a bit of his arse?

Re:Pretty Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

The Masked Kitten - Some sexy bint who runs around in a mask. She is NOT catwoman, because she wears a mask and is called 'huni' by her side kick 'Sheba' - who is actually her boss though neither of them know it. They were independent crime fighters when they first met at night while Sheba was kicking in a gang members head. The Masked Kitten liked her style!

Are they lesbians?

Re:CowBoyNeal CowGyrlKn33l Th3 FUT4r3 of S1ashFucK

[Anonymous Coward]

The Future of SLASHDOT.

2002. Slashdot publishes 1,000,000th rumor passed off as actual story. The story generates 480 comments, 263 of which agree with the article, and 107 of which point out it's a rumor and are modded down as redundant. The remaining comments are all "first posts." or posts that contain any rational insight are modded "troll."

2002. CmdrTaco married to a human female, reports are that she does not have 46 chromosomes, however. Fent does display tendency to retardation.

2002. Slashdot parent corporation VA Research^W Linux^W Software stock worth 35 cents. Rumors that AOL, Microsoft, or even Jimmy the hobo who lives under the Longfellow Bridge may buy it.

2003. VA Software bought by Microsoft for a cup of coffee and a donut. All Microsoft-critical articles mysteriously disappear from Slashdot. Bill Gates as Borg logo replaced with Bill Gates as God. (Taco suggested that in order to be "God," or his vision of God, Gates would have to be seen in a NAMBLA T-shirt. Luckily good taste prevails in favor of the old man image in glowing aura.)

2004. CmdrTaco loses virginity, well, not sex with men virginity, that's long since gone, and not sex with anime blow up dolls, this time, real sex.

2004. The WIPO Troll returns again, showering Slashdot in 45,000 copies of the same post: "Lick my crotch hairs." Slashdot, despite running on 18 redundant IIS/8.0Beta6 servers, buckles under the load. The term "Slashdotted" is replaced with "WIPO-Trolled."

2004. Slashdot officially shut down. Millions of screaming, unwashed geeks invade Redmond campus and lynch Bill Gates.

2005. Linus Torvalds and Anal Cox found dead along with six penguins, a tub of crisco and several used condoms. FreeBSD users are glad the insanity is dying.

2005. CmdrTaco rumored to have had sex again, even with constant Viagra therapy, it took this long. He complains, I can be ready to go again in five minutes if I was looking at a nude man, to the dyslexic Fent.

2006. CowboiKneel found dead in hotel room with 56 pizza boxes covering his bloated corpse. Three suffocated gay prostitutes are extracted from beneath his body as police remove it with a backhoe.

2007. CmdrTaco actually has sex again, this time plugging Fent in the ass for a more manlike feel.

2007. BSD is still officially "dying." No word on when its demise will take place. FreeBSD 9 is delivered in perfect working order in a coherent superior, commercially viable and useable fashion with real documentation, the same practice followed since inception. Linux lunatics, after the death of Cox, are still trying to perfect the Trident driver while ignoring the existence of the GeForce 9. Netcraft dies along with all the surveys they held on Microsoft and Linux servers are lost as well.

2007. CmdrTaco starts new weblog to replace Slashdot, creatively named Dotslash. Remainder of Linux users flock to the site and immediate WIPO-Troll it out of existence.

2007. Box running FreeBSD for 6 years sets world record for Unix uptime on consumer hardware.

2008. CmdrTaco has sex with his wife for the first time without thinking of men. He has dawned on the extra sexual pick me up for his twisted mind, small children.

A long long fucking time from now. Malda, fat, poverty-stricken, unrespected and unremembered and living in an appliance box in Michigan with a pickle jar for a toilet comes to a series of epiphanies. The 8.3 file system that made him truncate his nick to an 8 letter series of characters has long been forgotten, and he finally realizes he looks like a fag using it. He also realizes that men's asses look like tacos, especially with the beef pouring out and that his name sounds more like Commander of Ass, since one can command asses because the belong potentially to sentient or living things, it is difficult to command inanimate objects such as food , so one can only conclude he was commanding ass.

He also realized his site was a lame, fad, he sold out, he needed to refactor his shit code and never did it. He also realized that communites such as Fark don't have this complete asshole running it with gay lameness and compression filters and lame IP blocking bullshit and cheating, pissing and whining and barely anyone trolls it.

We hate you, Fucking Robbie;

he remembers as reams of pages of trolls cry for his expulsion. He also realizes he cant have a computer anymore because he hates the RIAA and MPAA but ran out and gave George Lucas and other shit media companies tons of money to ruin the laws in favor of the omnicorps. He also realizes his socialist and fascist fucking moderation system squelched all the real comments out of view. He also realizes that a full time crew "working" at Slashdot did a shittier job than anyone thought possible.

He also realized he didn't do SHIT for subscribers and punished them as he would anyone else with page limits, IP blocks, compression and lameness filters. He also realizes Signal 11 is a better man than him and that he is a fucking loser for throwing out S11. He realizes despite being an Open Source advocated, his horrible, unusable unreadable pile of shit called Slashcode was one of the worst projects ever. He realized that retarded journalists are better at reporting the news than Slashdot, that Slashdot news was often inaccurate and unverified.

He also realizes that Aprils fools jokes were really stupid and everyone hated them. He realizes bitchslapping, banner ads, ^H and ^W to show deletion and moderation $rtbl are fucking gay and lame. He realizes this all in a flash as the totalitarian regime he was a small part of constructing (through teaching mobocracy, populism as a rule, hordes of untrained and meritless swarms of people allowed to crucify those who would oppose the thinking of the state) determines his body is a waste of government resources and that he needs to be expelled to a concentration area of the worthless. I figures he would have been the first resident in the camp of the beings deemed worthless to society, along with Jon Katz, but the government, even as a fascist totalitarian regime takes a while to getting around to things.