Slashdot Mirror
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.""
This is an excellent idea, to continually point out what we're losing out in the reneged Copyright bargain. The next step, for those with far less imagination than our own, is to point out the kinds of successful artistic endeavors can stand on the shoulders of the culture that has entered public domain. Point out that if powerful Copyright had prevailed earlier, then without heirs' approval, we would not have such works as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The West Side Story (adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette), and many adaptations of The Raven including The Simpsons. What kind of legal pain happens when protected works stifle creative adaptation? Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind was retold from the slaves' point of view in The Wind Done Gone, long after Mitchell died; the heirs sued over its publication and finally took a payoff to allow an 'unauthorized parody' label on it (which is ironic, as 'parody' is one of the four valid branches of copyright infringement defense).
[
The tone of the submitter was as if the works had some how died or at least been banned from distribution.
A copyright owner who takes a work out of print effectively bans it from distribution. You can prove me wrong by showing me evidence of an authentic U.S. DVD release of Disney's Song of the South. Works whose copyright owner cannot be located are also banned from distribution.
Without traditional distribution and funding most of these works either would have never existed in the first place or had never been released for the public.
The works were first published when the statutory maximum copyright term for a new work was 56 years, with a maintenance fee due in the 28th year. How would Congress's failure to extend the copyright term in 1976 and 1998 have caused these works not to have been published in the 1950s?