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.""
Since everything is so readily available now through torrents I can't really say there is anything that I can't get my hands on now that I would be able to get my hands on if they were made public domain. Unless of course you start including classified government documents and the like, or very obscure gems that for some reason never made it into widespread circulation
These copyright "extensions" are nothing more than another government bailout.
Any legislator that voted for these extensions should be voted out of office, no matter their party affiliation. There wasn't even the possibility that they'd put the good of the citizens above the good of corporations.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The Copyright Act of 1976 did away with the "x years, with an additional x years on renewal" clause of copyright law; nowadays you just have one option, which is the length of the copyright term. Allowing authors and artists to renew their copyrights if they so choose keeps commercially viable works protected (which is arguably good), as it will be worth it to pay the fee to renew the copyright, but it also lets works that aren't commercially viable (and in many cases, not even commercially available) fall into the public domain much sooner. Since copyright encompasses all works, not simply those that the entertainment industry promotes and sells and makes huge profits from, it needs a sort of balance and the return of copyright renewal could be a step along that path.
I mean, there are lots of creative works out there that are still under copyright, but because there's no central registry of copyright holders (which is another advantage that copyright renewal could bring, as it would require registration), it's difficult, expensive, or just plain impossible to find out who the rights holders are. These are works that are decades old and haven't brought in any profit in years and years- and yet it's still illegal to use them because of copyright law.
Thanks a lot, Mickey.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
...at the beginning of the decade I believed this, but turns out it doesn't if the damage is sufficient.
To sum up this decade: We marvelled upon the freedoms that networked computers promised; not merely electronic versions of existing media, but a whole new frontier, only to watch it be crushed for the most trivial of reasons.
1. Protectionism in the popular music and film industry. All that is trivial, frivolous yet mildly entertaining in our culture.
2. The completely non-existent, child predator moral-panic, boogeyman.
3. Security theatre and the statistically vanishing threat of global terrorism.
Out of a comprehensive list of possible reasons, those have to right at the bottom of the list, scraping the barrel of pathetic excuses.
I wonder if the people who actually created the work care that after five decades they may not be able to make a miniscule amount of income from it - personally, I would be fairly embarrassed if I made one 'great work' and then ended up desperately lobbying governments to protect my one meagre source of income, instead of continuing my artistic development and releasing new material that consumers value enough to buy (while getting a kick out of the fact that someone's rewritten a story that I wrote decades ago, and is now making their own name).
One thing that people do not seem to understand is that if works were entering public domain this does not mean that there would be huge numbers of things suddenly available for free. What it likely means is that some mega-distributor (think WalMart or Sony) would snap up materials that no longer had an "owner" and they would publish and distribute them.
Now some people might laugh at a book on the shelf at WalMart that was simply a reprint of something that had entered public domain. Alternatively, there are many that would buy it. Printing books is cheap, promoting them is not. If WalMart had zero cost other than simply putting the book on the shelf, would they print lots of books?
Would Sony make them available "exclusively" for the Sony Reader? Wouldn't it be fun to see Amazon and Sony both declaring that they exclusively were making Gone With the Wind available to for their devices? And then Barnes and Nobel coming along with "their" version for their device.
Free stuff isn't interesting to people with large distribution channels. Stuff you can charge for, even just 1% over the cost of production, is much more interesting. Stuff you can charge 200% over the cost of production is even more interesting. As long as most of the world doesn't have access to high-speed Internet connections or have the knowledge to make use of them distribution is going to be where the big bucks are.
the return of copyright renewal could be a step along that path.
One condition of joining the World Trade Organization is joining the Berne Convention, which appears to ban countries from requiring a renewal or any other formality from a copyright owner. Reintroducing copyright renewal might require the United States to withdraw from the WTO.
My great-great grandmother wrote a book in the late 1960s just before she died. It is long ago out of print, but we luckily have a copy thanks to someone who had a used copy for sale on Amazon.com and our luck of happening to look for it right when it was for sale.
I would love to make a PDF copy and put it up on my genealogy site as a free download, however from my reading of copyright laws it appears it is still under copyright. No one knows who is the owner of the copyright is at this point, we have no idea if the publisher is still around, and I doubt it sold more than a few hundred copies back when it was released in the first place. No way it would make any money at this point even if it came back into print. In short, the best place for this book is the public domain.
A perfect example of what a smartly written copyright law could do. This book should have long ago been in the public domain and even if it was copyrighted thanks to a renewal, there should be clear information on who the owner is.
Speak for yourself. Works still exist. Three years ago at the university, I tried to get my hands on a couple of papers in my field. They exist. Barely. At less than a dozen libraries in the United States. Sorry--I didn't want to check on what I had to do to get a European intralibrary loan. The publisher long ago went out of business. 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. Or would have sent it to me even if they could. I'm not talking about some rare original copy of some book by Chaucer here--but papers published in actual academic journals. My professor had some 40 year old yellowed mimeograph (I think) he refused to let students see for fear it would crumble to dust. They weren't in books, they weren't aggregated in later volumes--the author was long dead, the publisher out of business or purchased--google could find me some citations but no sources. Yes--I could have read it--if I'd traveled to Boston. Maybe. Even then, I'd half wonder if it was actually in the stacks of the library or not.
It's not an outright lie--copyright destroys our culture by making it impossible to lawfully propagate and reproduce materials that are unnaturally scarce to the point of unavailability. What happens as those 50 year old out of print journal articles fade to the point of being illegible? When you take something, make it unnaturally scarce, and make it illegal to replenish it--eventually it decays to the point of nothing.
Just because fireman don't burn them doesn't mean copyright doesn't have the same effect when spread out over something first printed in the early 30's. 80 years later--I really can't get a copy without traveling. And soon those will turn to dust, or only be available with white gloves in some obscure room. If the university libraries don't pitch them.
Sorry--copyright is a fire--and it needs to be put out. Any work that has more than 90% of its original publications lost/destroyed should be immediately opened to the public domain.
Mickey Mouse will never enter the public domain. Disney will always get a retroactive extension to copyright that includes it through congress before that happens. You can argue that this is bad/unfair/unconstitutional/great/etc but that is the practical reality. Any practical proposal for a reform of the copyright system has to take this into account.
Under the current system this means that anything from that era forward also stays out of the public domain forever, including “orphan works”. The loss of these “orphan works” that are long out of print and with no clear owner is the one thing that (almost) everyone can agree is a Bad Thing. So, any reform that has any chance of passing must improve the situation with those items while preserving the interests of politically powerful copyright holders (Disney, Sony, etc). I can see some options that could do it, though in any real world implementations would reveal some flaws.
Opt-in renewal is the one we hear tossed around the most. This sets forgotten material into the public domain but preserves the copyright on anything the owner finds worthy of a nominal renewal fee. It has the added bonus of registering who you can license the publishing rights from.
Letting works fall into the public domain after being out of print for X years could also accomplish the above goals. It would also have the added bonus of encouraging publishers to keep a work available/in-print to preserve their rights.
Lastly we could instead create a special extension for trademarks, franchises, and corporate identifiers. Things strongly associated with an ongoing business could be protected for a longer period. DC would keep Superman and Disney would keep Mickey, but an out of print science article would not get the new extension and would eventually enter the public domain.
None of these proposals would satisfy copyleft purists or “hands off my copyright!” paranoids but they could be a reasonable starting point for compromise.
Fixed that.
"No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed."
This is the classic exposition of what "ex post facto" means in in America law and it has held for 212 years.
I will state what laws I consider ex post facto laws, within the words and the intent of the prohibition. 1st. Every law that makes an action , done before the passing of the law, and which was innocent when done, criminal; and punishes such action. 2nd. Every law that aggravates a crime, or makes it greater than it was, when committed. 3rd. Every law that changes the punishment, and inflicts a greater punishment, than the law annexed to the crime, when committed. 4th. Every law that alters the legal rules of evidence, and receives less, or different, testimony, than the law required at the time of the commission of the offence, in order to convict the offender. All these, and similar laws, are manifestly unjust and oppressive. In my opinion, the true distinction is between ex post facto laws, and retrospective laws. Every ex post facto law must necessarily be retrospective; but every retrospective law is not an ex post facto law: The former, only, are prohibited. Every law that takes away, or impairs, rights vested, agreeably to existing laws, is retrospective, and is generally unjust; and may be oppressive; and it is a good general rule, that a law should have no retrospect: but there are cases in which laws may justly, and for the benefit of the community, and also of individuals, relate to a time antecedent to their commencement; as statutes of oblivion, or of pardon.
The expressions 'ex post facto laws,' are technical, they had been in use long before the Revolution, and had acquired an appropriate meaning, by Legislators, Lawyers, and Authors. The celebrated and judicious Sir William Blackstone, in his commentaries, considers an ex post facto law precisely in the same light I have done. His opinion is confirmed by his successor, Mr. Wooddeson; and by the author of the Federalist, who I esteem superior to both, for his extensive and accurate knowledge of the true principles of Government. Calder v. Bull, 3 Dall. 386 (1798)