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.""
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?
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 original copyright term was 14 years, with another 14 years if you bothered to renew. That's the maximum copyright any work should get. Anything longer than that is grossly unfair.
Public domain isn't about getting content for free, it is about creating a public pool of culture from which to base further creative works. If you found a torrent of "From Here To Eternity" you could not create a new work with those characters or the story or whatever.
Current copyright law (at least US copyright law) is stagnating the pool. We grow up surrounded by ideas and culture that inspire us, but which we can't use to create our own works.
Here we go, the whining and complaining from people who are too cheap or too poor to buy a Congressman. Congress works fantastically well if you're willing to invest in it. The return on a few hundred thousand bucks can reach into the billions, as the entertainment, weaponry, and banking/gambling industries have shown -- go find any other investment with that sort of ROI. Stop yer socialist whining -- Congress does a fantastic job when it's made worth its while.
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?
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.
And so much of it has changed right before our collective eyes. As example, there is no way anyone in their right mind would try to create an album like Paul's Boutique in today's sue-happy licensing-whore world - yet that album still stands as one of the greatest rap albums of all time.
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
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.
It's important to the copyright lobby that old works become locked away, inaccessible to anyone. If you're reading Watership Down then you're not reading Harry Potter and the Basket of Radishes. The more historical culture is available to us the more we tend to stay with the stuff that's stood the test of time and less of today's releases which frankly have never been more good than bad.
This is probably a bigger motivator for endless copyrights than being able to milk a few additional dollars a year out of 20 year old works.
It's a huge loss because it's the remixing of the old with the new that allows us to find new heights of imagination and build identification with our culture. Very few people can build a solid attachment to a culture that's perpetually two years old. The net result of this is that of course we become less interested in civics and nationalism - at our peril. Unrestrained nationalism is a bad thing of course, but the complete lack of national identity leads people to the necessary conclusion that their nation lacks redeeming values worth preserving.
Help stamp out iliturcy.