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Why Recordings From World War I Aren't Public Domain
An anonymous reader writes "While Disney and others have done a great job pushing the end date for works entering the public domain ever further forward, most people have assumed that anything from before 1923 is in the public domain. However, it turns out that this is not true for sound recordings, in part due to an accidental quirk in copyright law history — in that Congress, way back in 1909, believed that sound recordings could not be covered by copyright (they believed the Constitution did not allow recordings to be covered), and thus, some state laws stepped up to create special copyrights for sound recordings. A court ruling then said that these state rules were not overruled by federal copyright law. End result? ANY recorded work from before 1972 (no matter how early it was recorded) won't go into the public domain until 2049 at the earliest."
It looks like my epic youtube video made up entirely of WWI soundclips will have to be put on hold. And yes, a video made entirely of soundclips. What now, huh?
I'm interested however in the equivalent laws over here in the UK. Are we bound to the USA's system as part of some global copyright law thingy? I don't pretend to understand Public Domain, but I'd like to.
To much anime is bad for the brain...desu.
Sorry. Couldn't help it.
So does that mean that if we manage to record the words of Christ from a 2000 year old clay pot, the RIAA will come after us?
No, the Pope will.
Every time I start to feel a shred of guilt about my rampant piracy, I read something like this. Then the guilt goes away. Copyright is a corrupt system, which no longer serves it's original purpose of promoting production of useful art. Instead it is nothing but a mechanism to ensure maximum profits for those least deserving, and to make sure that the public domain remains small and legally dangerous enough to pose no serious competition. I pay copyright law no respect, and will not do so unless it it reformed to bring it back in line with sensible terms, make it less biased towards those who can afford millions of dollars in legal fees and eliminate the possibility of copyright being abused as a tool to censor criticism or prevent interoperability.
So any movie using the Wilhelm Scream are also breaking copyrights? There go a *lot* of big Hollywood movies!
I'm going to continue doing what I normally do, and ignore copyright law. Absurdities like this just show how backwards and useless the system is. Scrap it, make everything public domain.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Coming from the UK, I can understand how people can be extradited on US federal law charges. I'd be surprised if state laws apply too. For that matter how does this affect US citizens in say NY if the law is broken in CA?
Whoops, somebody forgot to read the Constitution.
News flash: Copyright existed, and should exist, to allow an individual to profit from their creation
Did all States create those copyright laws? Or did just some of them do? And what about materials recorded abroad, or broadcast abroad? Enforcing copyright law on a State by State level would seem to me like a very difficult thing to do.
Well, I indeed use it as an excuse for theft. I go into the store and steal the DVDc, CDs and books I want. I even steal the DVD players and TV sets to use them. That way when somebody raids my house and sees I have about 10.000 CDs and DVDs that where stolen, I will be paying much less then somebody who did some copyright infringement of 3 numbers on their mp3 player from an album they bought.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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I agree. The individual artist should be able to profit from their work for the rest of their life. The problem is that a copyright lasts long after the artist is gone. Why does an estate get to profit off the work of a dead individual? If the owner in question is a corporation then the copyright should be valid for a fixed period of time. I would be ok with using the figure of the life expectancy of a female child born in the year the work was created. A female child born in 2003 has a life expectancy of 80.1 years according to the US government. If the rights are sold the copyright expiration should remain the same. If the corporation goes out of business and no one buys the rights then the work should go into the public domain. Individuals and corporations should be allowed to place their works in the public domain at any time during the copyright lifetime with the understanding that the work can not be taken out of the public domain.
The new findings are not a disaster, it's just yet another example of the ongoing insanity that copyright has become.
So, hopefully, in these creativity-starved times, some hip-hop artist forgoes mashing-up some other creator's work and goes the extra mile to invent something brand new.
There is nothing truly new. Even the most original composer is 90% influenced by the music he has already heard. Getting a jazz musician to play your newly composed jazz solo costs time and money. Sampling is a way for musicians without oodles of money (i.e 90% of them) to make decent music easier. It makes more people able to participate in the creation of our culture.
So, hopefully, some student whose research involves early recordings can't find what he needs on the Internet and visits a library for only the second or third time in his life, and a hundred news worlds are opened to him.
Why force people to use a less efficient tool (vinyl records and CDs at the library) when modern information technology is available in most homes?
Working hard is not an end in itself. If something can be done easier (and probably better), let people do it the easy way, and spend their efforts where they're needed.
The Berne convention may complicate things. It means that works should be treated as if they were copyrighted locally, so a work from outside Ohio would be covered by copyright in Ohio. If you distribute it in Ohio, the owner would be able to get a judgement against you there and the fine would then become a debt, which could be collected locally wherever you happened to be in the USA. If you are outside the USA, you're probably safe though...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Trademark and copyright are completely separate systems. Arguments from one do not copy over to the other.
But the publishers of mass-market works of authorship set in fictional universes, who license the trademarks and copyrights related to a fictional universe as a unit, want end users to forget how separate these systems of exclusive rights are. So they use phrases such as "intellectual property" that confuse the two.
receiving a copy of something isn't copying
The exhaustion of exclusive rights after the first sale of a phonorecord (17 USC 109) applies only after the first sale on United States soil (17 USC 602).
So, hopefully, in these creativity-starved times, some hip-hop artist forgoes mashing-up some other creator's work and goes the extra mile to invent something brand new.
Even people who try to create something that they think is original sometimes fail. It isn't directly applicable to the case of the article (reproduction of sound recordings), but George Harrison got sued and lost when it was discovered he had accidentally copied the ten-note hook (5~ 3~ 2~, 5 6 8 6 8 8) from "He's So Fine" into his song "My Sweet Lord".
That's right, copyright is STEALING! It is stealing history and culture from future generations. It is stealing from the global knowledge of humanity. Not just infringed upon; information is locked up until it rots in to nothingness.
I have no specific desire to take control of mickey-frikkin-mouse away from the Walt Disney Corporation, or similar works from their holders. But I believe the original idea of copyright was to benefit humanity by encouraging people to create more works by granting an author the PRIVILEGE to control how their work was distributed for a limited time.
However, if a holder does not ultimately contribute something back to humanity in exchange for this privilege, then they are literally stealing from humanity.
The current system effectively prevents these works from continuing to benefit and enrich humanity after they are out of print by failing to permit works from entering the public domain in a timely manner if ever. This needs to be fixed.
For a person or entity to retain control over a work indefinitely, such as current laws essentially permit, is STEALING from humanity.
But remember, don't play it backwards!
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
So does that mean that if we manage to record the words of Christ from a 2000 year old clay pot, the RIAA will come after us?
No, the Pope will.
What's the difference between the Pope and the RIAA?
The Pope hasn't had a crusade since 1272
While I was writing my philosophy thesis, I discovered that many of G.K. Chesterton's works that he wrote in Britain between 1923 and 1936 when he died are public domain in Britain, where they were published.
But they are not public domain in the U.S.
One of my unfinished projects is to combine all his works that are public domain, and throw a full text index on it to make a little G.K. exclusive search engine -- but we're going to have to go with a non-U.S. ISP if I ever do get around to getting it off the ground.
Pay? In the UK you might even get a flat rent free:
Bradley Wernham, 19, responsible for a £1million crime spree, was spared a prison sentence last October after police told a judge he had turned his life around.
Wernham was given a community service order instead and relocated to another town where he was given a flat rent-free.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/08/05/one-man-crimewave-bradley-wernham-jailed-by-the-judge-who-let-him-off-115875-22465784/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/7926040/Prolific-burglar-given-second-chance-offends-again-after-three-months.html
The individual artist should be able to profit from their work for the rest of their life.
Why? I can invent something that saves people's lives and get protection for 20 years under patent law, but some crappy pop song should get protection for the rest of that person's life? Something is wrong there. Why not make it a fixed length of 20 years also?
When you say "should be able to profit" you mean of course be granted a legal monopoly. An artist can profit from their work without any legal protection.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
If a recorded item, writing or whatnot is considered valuable, then the owner should have to buy a license to keep it out of the public domain after a reasonable and free period of time (like the original 7 years). after the free period is over the owner would have to make a determination if the item is valuable enough to pay for to keep it out of the public domain. This protects Mickey, but releases a whole slew of recordings and books that have no commercial viability.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The individual artist should be able to profit from their work for the rest of their life.
Why? The rest of us actually have to work - we don't get to show up for a few weeks and then say "You have to pay me for the rest of my life for that work". Giving them a few years of copyright to make money off of it, sure, I'm fine with that. However, it's BS for them to get paid to sit back and do nothing for 60+ years because once upon a time, they wrote a few songs.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
...something brand new.
No such thing. There are only unique combinations of what already exists. And more often than not, more than one person will independently come up with the same combination, which only further illustrates the absurdity of copyright, patent, and trademark law...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
...should be able to profit from their work for the rest of their life.
Then I'm entitled to the same benefits. I want mileage royalties on every car I fixed back in 1973 for the rest of my life. A penny per mile will be sufficient...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
It works the other way around as well. The US vs. pretty much the rest of the world use different milestones to calculate copyright expiration. In the US it's the date of creation, elsewhere it's date of the creator's death. So for a long-lived creator who got an early start on his career, copyright on his early works would expire sooner in the US than elsewhere*, but for a short-lived creator or one who created works shortly before his death, those works will generally expire sooner in the rest of the world. (The US has changed its standard to match the rest of the world for new copyrights, but it'll be a while before that's relevant.)
*Once upon a time it was possible for a creator's US copyrights to expire while he was still alive, which was obviously not possible elsewhere.
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In reality of course the whole point of copyright was to promote works of art and scientific discoveries. In the US this purpose is even spelled outright in the Constitution where it reads: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.".
The Founding Fathers (Jefferson particularly ) were very uneasy about granting effective monopoly to authors at the expense of the general public and so they sought to allow it only if the general public benefited from such an arrangement more then it had to invest (in terms of enforcing such a law).
Your attempt at insight aside, the limited time span of Copyright is designed to increase the availability of the arts to everyone in the long run by creating a temporary monopoly on a work for profit to be gained so as to encourage the creation of works that will end up in the public domain eventually.
The goal is to have all of this creativity available to everyone for free, that's the destiny of the work. The temporary profiteering is allowed to encourage creativity from people who are monetarily driven.
Libraries bypass this system by actually purchasing works and then making them available free, entirely bypassing the intent of Copyright to our benefit.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
It doesn't work that way any more (if it ever even did). When I go to the voting booth, I get to choose between copyright extension supporter A and copyright extension supporter B. No thanks. I'll just copy freely and under the radar, like many, many more people do.
This 'times' or no more or less creatively starved then any other time.
Get back under your bridge you damn troll.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
News flash: you're an uninformed troll who's never read what Copyright exists for.
Copyright is designed to create a temporary monetary gain to encourage the creation of works for the greater good in the public domain.
Copyright is not an implicit human right, its an artificial incentive to allow artists to gain renumeration for their efforts for a limited time. Go do a bit of public domain reading yourself. From copyright.gov:
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
actually he means works will be under copyright in the states that passed the law.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You want to ensure that your great-grandchildren have a roof over their heads? Encourage your children to tell their children to study hard in school, learn a useful trade, and get a job, so they can provide for their children. You're not supposed to have to pay for that yourself.
When did the establishment of a hereditary leisure class become a social good?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
What the hell does the Constitution have to do with this discussion?
Sigh...
"The Congress shall have Power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
This. I made the same comment in another story just yesterday. When you make something or provide a service to the community, you get paid for it. Society says, "thanks for doing that". That money is your influence within that community. The more good you do for the community, the more money/influence you have.
How the hell do you justify being able to pass on that influence to your kids? That doesn't benefit your community in any way. If you pass on the ability to do what you did - a skill, a trade, etc., then that helps. If you give them nothing beneficial to give back to that community, and the ability to influence it in negative ways, it's a social evil. It doesn't help the community you live in in any shape or form.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
> So seeing that I am probably the only person that has this copyrighted material
Your case underlines the bizarre "logic" of modern copyright law. Since you own the media, it is perfectly legal for you to destroy the recordings, which would, of course, destroy the "property" of the rightsholders (since they are the only copy). One wonders how that weird edge case fits into the "you wouldn't steal" rhetoric.
On the other hand, it's totally illegal for you to distribute these recordings to anyone except the rightsholders themselves. So it is effectively illegal for you to preserve this work for future generations.
This is why I do not feel bad in the least to advise you to digitize the recordings and upload them to some filesharing site like RapidShare or MegaUpload in an anonymous way, and then publicize the sharing link on a web forum where there will be a lot of interested people (I'm sure there must be some web forums where WWI history buffs hang out). Much as I like creators to be able to get paid, I hate even more for culture and information to be lost.
-Encourage your children to tell their children to study hard in school, learn a useful trade-
-Without some source of income, the kids won't have the money to go to a good school in order to study hard.-
That involves a different and separate societal arrangement between two parties; employment. It works for everyone else that doesn't hold copyrights on valuable works. Why should the descendants of copyright holders be the exception?
In other words, tell the lazy kids to get a job or hope that grand-dad left them wealth in the common forms everyone else uses like cash, stocks, bonds, etc. Locking down a societies' culture is a poor replacement for a life insurance policy.
I agree with the notion posted elsewhere in this thread that copyright in its current "Disney Wish-List" form should be largely ignored.
"An unjust law is no law at all." -Martin Luther King.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
A job counts as "some source of income". It was enough for my parents. And theirs. And so on. Somehow, we've managed for generations without the patronage of a rich ancestor! I'm sure that our descendants will also.
(And in most of the civilized world, you can get a decent-to-excellent education even without your parents having a job.)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
"by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
So, Authors can be given the exclusive right to sell, perform, use, whatever, things they've made or discovered. Cool. Except that right extends beyond the author's death- either to his/her estate, or whatever corporation had been given it.
What is the Constitutional rationale for rights extending after death? I can't imagine it promoting useful art.
Say I've got money from copyright royalties.
I bankroll my kids' educations.
They work hard at school, do well, go on to earn money in the real world. Maybe one of them makes money by producing works under copyright.
By the time THEY have kids, they've got enough money to get them through college. Maybe they inherit some of my money when I'm dead.
Rinse, repeat.
No need for inherited copyright.