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O'Reilly Commits to Short Copyright Durations
Sam King writes "I found the following link on the lisnews.com site: O'Reilly Adopts 1790 Copyright Durations. A small but encouraging step taken by a publisher." We should provide direct links to O'Reilly's announcement and the Founder's Copyright website.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/22/195121 6&mode=thread&tid=162&tid=99
I can't remember O'Reilly ever fucking up in a big way (alas they had their share of heat) and their right to rake a decent profit (otherwise no more O'Reilly books and now that would be a shame) goes undisputed.
I like this move. I really do.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
If it was published before 1923 it is in the public domain. Otherwise here is a link to a table that has all the other cases. Until Congress extends it again
Free cell phone tracking
You are confusing copyright and trademarks. Disney holds several trademarks on Mickey Mouse and his likeness. Trademarks can be renewed forever.
The copyrights for Steamboat Willy are for the screenplay and the actual movie only. These copyrights should have run out long ago.
Even if "Steamboat Willy" becomes public domain people would still have to pay Disney to use Mickey Mouse.
Moby Dick is available at Project Gutenberg. Herman Melville died in 1891; it was release in 1991.
As far as 28 years for computer texts go, if you're talking about something like Using Java 1.2, then yes most of the information within it would be dated. However, if you're talking about books along the line of 'Solving Real World Problems with Logical Representations', then the concepts would still be useful, even if the examples require modernization. (And there's no such exact book that I know of, though there are probably similar ones that approximate it.)
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
You can't get away with something like this on Slashdot. You have to expect some asshole like myself to bring up an irrelevent detail.
The function keys are labeled: F1 F3 F5 F7.
The even numbers are available with the SHIFT key.
-Dave
You're wrong on both points. Actually characters can be copyrighted. (To learn more about copyright law, try the relevant Open Directory category.) Mickey Mouse is protected both by trademark and by copyright. Also, Steamboat Willie came out in 1928, so it's still under copyright protection in the U.S. The last date whose copyrights were ever allowed to expire was 1922. So far congress just keeps on renewing 1923+ copyrights, and shows every sign of intending to keep renewing them until the end of time.
Find free books.
Disney holds a trademark on the phrase "Mickey Mouse" as it pertains to "Audio and visual recordings in all media." Trademark trumps everything else. If you want to take the story of Steamboat Willie and remake it into a gay porn movie you can as long as you don't say it is starring Mickey Mouse (that is after it become public domain). You could also take the original movie and repackage it along with a bunch of other PD movies and sell it on a DVD.
What I think you are missing is that Mickey Mouse is the actual trademark not Disney's Mickey Mouse.
Nature's change wasn't just motivated by employers taking away right from authors. There was and is a growing dissent from various corners of the political spectrum and of the scientific establishment that signing over to a (private) publisher copyright of a manuscript that resulted from publicly funded work is fundamentally wrong. If you read the fine print of some of those contracts, after a paper is published a scientist can often not legally use an illustration from that paper in a presentation without written consent from the publisher. Of course, most of us never bothered and got away with it, but increasignly less so.
Another facet of this is the growing prevalence of ties from academic institutions to commercial entities. Most of these agreements stipulate some form of IP transfer to the commercial side. The government research funding agencies have had an increasingly hard time to allow such wholesale transfer of publicly funded research results to the private sector. Many public grants now stipulate that private cosponsors cannot stop or influence the publication of research, other than maybe hold it up for a short time to review it for possible exploitation down the line (say, through patents).
All told, Nature's step is very commendable and is a great first step in a direction opposite from current trends.
Is not! Is so! IS NOT! IS SO!
If you're going to argue this point, you need to do better than reference a couple of the greatest SF books of all time; by their nature, they are exceptions. You're going to need numbers that give us the longevity of the typical work, not the exceptional one.
My numbers:
In 1930, 10,027 books were published. Today, 174 of those books are still in print. Source: a Red Herring article on copyright
The other 9,853 books are not deemed worth the cost of keeping in print, or the rights owner has died and no one knows who has the power to grant permission, or a thousand different reasons, all of which keep the work "frozen", even if someone wants to do something with it as a labor of love, or perhaps in a niche market that doesn't interest the rights holder.
Keep in mind that, for the vast majority of works, the slope of the sales curve is initially very steep; 80% of a typical paperback title's copies are sold in the first 3 months (source). Or consider music; for the last few years there have been about 25,000 to 35,000 new titles released each year, of these about 7,000 are released on major labels, and of those only about 10% are profitable (source). We can safely assume that the unprofitable titles go out of print. A small percentage are re-issued by indie labels, but again, the majority of titles end up in the vault, waiting for copyright to expire, useful to no one.