What Would Have Entered the Public Domain Tomorrow?

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain about items that would enter the public domain starting on January 1, 2010, if not for copyright extenions: "'Casino Royale, Marilyn Monroe's Playboy cover, The Adventures of Augie March, the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Crick & Watson's Nature article decoding the double helix, Disney's Peter Pan, The Crucible'... 'How ironic that Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, with its book burning firemen, was published in 1953 and would once have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2010. To quote James Boyle, "Bradbury's firemen at least set fire to their own culture out of deep ideological commitment, vile though it may have been. We have set fire to our cultural record for no reason; even if we had wanted retrospectively to enrich the tiny number of beneficiaries whose work keeps commercial value beyond 56 years, we could have done so without these effects. The ironies are almost too painful to contemplate.""

Comments

Re:14+14 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you've never created anything that was worth paying for.

Re:Boyle's logic failure

[DaveV1.0]

Let us examine your statements.

At less than a dozen libraries in the United States...Nobody knows where they are or can be found--and just because it shows in a catalog doesn't mean the first two places I contacted could locate it.

So, you are a lazy fuck

Or would have sent it to me even if they could.

Maybe, maybe not, but you didn't even try. Or, ask them to send you a fair-use copy.

My professor had some 40 year old yellowed mimeograph

I see.... You are trying to find a 40yo magazine article.

In other words, you are a lazy loser who wanted to find a 40yo magazine article, did a crappy job of trying to find a copy, and gave up. And now, you are trying to blame your failure on copyright, which, even if it didn't exist and the article was in the public domain, did not cause the loss and/or destruction of the original publications.

That about sum it up, right?