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Greg Bear, Others Cry Foul on Project Gutenberg Copyright Call
Nova Express writes "Recently a lot of science fiction stories from the 1950s and 60s (including work from still-living authors like Frederik Pohl and Jack Vance) have been showing up on Project Gutenberg as being in the public domain. However, according to science fiction writer Greg Bear and his wife Astrid Anderson Bear (daughter of Poul Anderson, some of whose works were among those put up), Project Gutenberg has made a mistake: 'After conducting legal research on the LEXIS database of legal cases, decisions, and precedents, we have demonstrated conclusively that PG was making incorrect determinations regarding public domain status in many, many works that originally appeared in magazine form ... In general, Project Gutenberg is doing a tremendous service by making available texts that have truly long since fallen out of copyright, but they are clearly overstepping their original mandate. They are not merely exploiting orphan works, but practicing a wholesale kidnapping of works that are under copyright protection.'"
These works have been forgotten about a long time ago. They should have been in public domain since nobody is profiting from them anymore.
Nitpicking that magazines don't fall under the charter of the organization isn't valuable, ALL this information should be free if not only for archiving purposes. Those books are literally falling apart unless they were expensive hardcovers.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
So, if it say, is on a Kindle now, it gets another eleventy years of copyright protection? What exactly is special about a magazine/book that makes the stories not public domain? Copyright extends from the time it's written, not published, yes?
Wholesale kidnapping?
Who, exactly, is "kidnapping" the stories in this case? The people who are putting them in a publicly accessible format so that everyone can look at them, or the people who are keeping them behind an iron wall of intellectual property?
I was under the impression that it was the people doing the imprisoning that were generally the kidnappers, not the people granting freedom. Silly me.
If they genuinely made a mistake in their selection of the copyrighted works, and they own up to it and remove it, then they can fix it and move on. Problem solved, end of story. Now, if they're going to be dicks and fight it, well... then we'll have an interesting story. Until then, I find myself giving it a resounding... "Meh..."
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Is this all about semantics? I mean, Project G is very clear about this: If a copyright holder makes a claim, they take the material down. I would think putting this stuff out there, rather than letting it rot is hardly a disservice to the authors/publishers.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
They should be in the public domain.
Works that are not in active circulation will likely be forgotten and effectively lost to the world if they are not allowed to transition into the public domain in a timely fashion.
Copyright needs reformation.
Wow, sounds almost as bad as piracy... If they really think PG is doing a "tremendous service" then what's the deal with the loaded language?
Particularly music is lost to the world. It is not as if one has an alternative and can go and buy the music or the novel. Try finding Jazz from the dawn of the twentieth century. If you are lucky enough to find it at all it is likely a crudely put up version that is almost useless. And I'm talking about scores not finished music.
This is an extremely unwise move for Project Gutenberg. While I am certainly opposed to the overly-long copyright terms we have today, and somewhat sympathetic to testing the boundaries of the often unclear copyright status of some works, PG is not the group to do it. They are nowhere near funded well enough to risk a legal confrontation with the major publishing houses or their star authors, and by taking that risk, they are endangering the good and unambiguously legal work they have been doing for so many years.
I don't know Greg Bear personally, but I am familiar with his position on copyrights generally, and he has always seemed to me to be one of the more reasonable authors in this area. Even if he's wrong on this point, Project Gutenberg should leave the grey areas for better-suited groups to explore. While it is deplorable that it is often prohibitively expensive to secure justice in the courts even when one is entirely in the right, that's the reality PG has to deal with if it wants to venture into this area, and it should not be done carelessly.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Why don't they host their servers in a country with more reasonable copyright laws? Specifically with regard to copyright duration. Australia and New Zealand have much more reasonable copyright durations than the US. IIRC 50 years instead of almost double that.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
But, but, my great-grandchildren will be stolen from if copyright is less than life + 99 years!
SSC
They are not merely exploiting orphan works, but practicing a wholesale kidnapping...
Wow. Hyperbole much?
Seriously, that little tirade is just shy of "won't someone think of the children"...
I have troubles taking any point seriously, regardless of how valid I think it may or may not be, when it's attached to gross, blatant hyperbole of this sort. Make your point in an intelligent manner and people will respond. Make it sound like the sky is falling and doom is eminent and you'll quickly be ignored.
"should" - either take it up with your representative (congress if you're in the US) or be aware that civil disobedience carries penalties.
At least some of these works are in fact in circulation, by the way. See the original article; there are stories that were first published in magazines and then in books.
60 years isn't actually very long as copyright laws go (sadly) - when I'm researching images or my Web site, http://www.fromoldbooks.org/, I frequently find images over 100 years old that are still in copyright. Sometimes even older.
As for "lost to the world," well, I agree, but note that there are "dark archives" (e.g. at the Library of Congress in the USA) where items are held until such time as copyright expires.
A difficulty with copyright law is that it's the publishers who make the money, and hence have the most representation at governmental levels. I'd guess that with wider representatoin, copyright terms could be simplified and shortened. However, in the US, you also have to remember the Disney Laws. Protectionism and corruption.
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
http://cand.pglaf.org/bear-response.txt
"The error occurred because we did not know that Brainwave was a
complete publication of the serial parts of The Escape. We did know
from the publication of The Escape in 1953 that it was the first part
of a serialization, but did not know that Brainwave, from 1954, was
the title of the complete serialization."
Project Gutenberg is scrupulously careful and does not post material without a very solid case that they have a right to do so -- usually because things are public domain in the USA. PG Canada, Australia, Germany etc abide by their applicable laws just as scrupulously.
Whatever may be wrong with the copyright rules in the US (and elsewhere) it is certain that the rules are spelled out in enough detail to allow an unequivocal determination that these items are public domain in the US.
The authors don't have a leg to stand on and they know it. They are nothing but whiners.
They should be in the public domain.
That's not your, nor PG's, call to make. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of IP, and my opinion is that Golden Age SF is probably best preserved and distributed in the public domain, but it appears that these works do have legitimate owners who don't necessarily agree.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
If I was a conspiracy theorist I would say that this is just a way to help the very rich keep making money after they achieve immortality. I mean, if the poor bastards are going to live for 600 years, why are you trying to kill their money source just after a few decades. Then again, it might be just a batch of bad coffee.
The theft of the public domain by companies and politicians is the true criminal act.
I hope Project Gutenberg adheres to the letter of the law but doesn't give an inch of generosity to grey areas.
Personally I don't see why the author's death should figure into it at all. A couple of decades from publication to public domain is plenty. If you don't want your thoughts and ideas to enter the public domain then keep them to yourself.
A decade or three of exclusivity is a reasonable incentive to create. Carving out chunks of language and idea space for your own exclusive ownership practically forever is not.
Our shared cultural heritage is far more important that someone's "right" to continue profiting from work they or their ancestors did half a century ago. And if no one is profiting but the works are simply being suppressed because they're out of print but "protected" anyway then that is a crime against humanity.
How do you know they are not in active circulation? The second hand copies of the original books certainly are. And I'm sure that I've seen some old Vance books reissued recently.
As as active collector of SciFi I have books that were written in the 20s and 30s. Some of the authors from the golden age like Asimov, Clarke, Hienlen are still being published and books from Doc Smith etc can still be found.
Just because they are not on amazon doesn't mean they don't exist.
Here's my proposal:
Movies, books, TV shows, video games, etc.: 10 years from first publication. No extensions, although a "new and improved version" rerelease is copyrighted separately. This puts plenty into the public domain: Star Trek up to Insurrection, the classic James Bond films, the first few Super Mario Bros. games, and so on. However, it also provides plenty of time to make a profit, and even when something enters the public domain, some people will still buy it (see The Lord of the Rings, the original printing of which is PD in the US due to an oversight)
Genuine inventions: Patent lasts 10 years. Extension can lengthen it by another decade if you are actively using the patent in a product. This cuts down on patent trolls, but otherwise keeps the system as-is.
Software/Method patents: Six months. This is mostly to make it easier to strike down the 20-year patents: it's less of a jump to say "this was patented in the wrong category, and as it has been X years since registration, the patent is no longer valid" than it is to say "this thing should never have been patentable".
Trademarks: Pretty much as now, although I'd make protection of parodies much more explicit
"Casual infringement": If you "steal" something from a P2P site, the most you can be liable for is the most common trade price of the thing, and the prosecution is responsible for court costs. This would make it pointless to sue people for downloading a few albums, but it would still be possible to sue massive-scale "pirates" or even people running torrent sites if they're advertising "pirated" material.
Where does Abandonware fall?
Or stuff that owned by dead companies.
but note that there are "dark archives" (e.g. at the Library of Congress in the USA) where items are held until such time as copyright expires.
Can you expand on this concept, please? I googled "dark archives" and nothing of use came up.
moox. for a new generation.
Its a privilege not a right. Copyright is a bad term. Ideas do not belong to the first being to hold them in their mind. Art does not belong to the artist. I'm not going to say some hippie crap like art belongs to everyone, rather I say it doesn't belong to anyone, it just is. You can't own blue, righteous indignation, the smell of napalm, or the force (sorry Lucas). We grant the privilege of profit for a period of time as a robust method of rewarding people for their efforts in proportion to how much people like the results of their mental labor. We made this law in the hope that it would encourage more such effort. The law was broken by PG, probably accidentally, but this is a legal issue, not a moral one, as no one is having their rights violated.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Its surprising to see such backwards thinking from people that are normally regarded as futurists. If anything you would think they would recognize that perhaps releasing the older works into the public domain would actually increase interest in the authors who as they point are either still living or recently dead all but ensuring greatly increased royalties from later works. A vast majority of these older works have been all but forgotten. You would think that as a writer of speculative fiction Bear would be able to see the future dark void of lost art that the current copyright over-extensions are creating and would be at the forefront of working to prevent it. Even without that awareness you would think that typical heir greed would compel them to think about the potential windfall of sales from later works rather than the potential loss of future revenue from something like Chain Of Logic or Tomorrows Children which after 60+ likely does not result in enough revenue to buy a new hardback title.
I remember, 10 years ago, the same argument being made about arcade ROMS and the MAME Project. I would never have believed that many of these games could become semi-relevant again (thanks to digital distribution), and even generating new income for the IP owners.
Can you expand on this concept, please? I googled "dark archives" and nothing of use came up.
Well, they're hard to find because they're dark :D
Othe terms include hidden archives, or escrow archives, but see this google search for some pointers.
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
Let's be honest. Copyrights expire at death, with a minimum term (like 15 years) to support any children. Or how about death + years until any children are over 18.
Frankly, copyright should be original publish date. If it was published in a magazine, then later in book form. Should the copyright be furthered? The music industry has used so-called "re-mastering" to continuously keep works in copyright.
And we all know that when these 70 yr copyrights expire, a law will be passed to extend it to 100 yrs. And then after that - infinitely. But hey, no one will be alive that will remember anything but infinite copyrights.
DISGUSTING....
All recordings of Jazz from the dawn of the 20th Century is a crudely-recorded almost-useless version. They were still recording on wax cylinders and primitive records back then. There was no hi-fi or analog tape yet.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Before you learn about the dark archives, you must strike down your master in anger with a lightsaber.
The best thing for the US would be to announce that all works from before 1940 should automatically return to public domain one year from now, unless rights holders come forward to claim copyright. If there's nobody living to make the claim, then let it into the public domain.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Hi Senator, my office would like to work with you on these ideas that you have.
By the way, my son started a new company that deals in green energy. Would you like an opportunity to get in on the ground floor and invest? There's a new law that says the US government must buy his products.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Folks at Project Gutenberg are obviously aware of the potential for a lawsuit. They would like to have one, so that the decision on the copyright status of these works is made concrete.
Bruce Perens.
it's to prevent older but still relevant works from competing with new works
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I foresee copyright claims going the way of (intestate) land claims... inherited by the family or spouse, unless debts are owed, until the end of time.
For Brainwave (the novel from TFA) the original copyright was filed on 5/19/1954 and the renewal was filed on 12/16/1982, which is after the 28 year window. They were 7 months late in renewing the copyright. That novel is public domain.
I believe he was expanding on the term 'dark fibre' which refers to fibre optic cabling that exists but is not in use.
The law does not change from rule of kings. You have to do what you want and fight the lawsuit - if it ever comes - and win to change the law.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Software/Method patents: Six months
"Software patents and method patents" or "Method Patents and Software (probably copyrights)" that should last 6 months?
If it is the former, I can't agree: software should not be patentable (even thought a 6 month patent on software is short enough not to count).
If it is the later, I can' agree either. Software copyrights are still the very basis allowing open-software to remain open (it is the will of the authors and is protected by copyright).
If neither of them, then what do you think about software copyrights? Take the Linux kernel that's under development since 1991 - when do you think the copyright on it should expire?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
These works have been forgotten about a long time ago. They should have been in public domain since nobody is profiting from them anymore.
From Amazon.com:
Poul Anderson
Author Page. 99 books.
Ray Bradbury
Author Page. 105 books.
Frederick Pohl
Author Page. 60 books.
Jack Vance
Author Page. 54 books.
Copyright gives the author - and his heirs - an exclusive and constitutionally protected right to control the distribution and use of his work. No where does it say that those rights are forfeit because his work isn't making any money.
Then they should pay property taxes on it until the end of time, just like the real estate taxes they pay on their land.
Assigning an appraisal value is more problematic than for real estate, but cheating to reduce taxes could be prevented by making the owner's declaration of value an automatic offer to sell at that price. If the owner wishes to avoid the taxes, he or she could assign a value of zero, in which case the "property" would revert to public domain.
Government lawmakers: take note of this fantastic opportunity to raise new tax revenue to reduce budget deficits!
Works that are not in active circulation will likely be forgotten and effectively lost to the world if they are not allowed to transition into the public domain in a timely fashion.
I vote for Lady Gaga to be put in public domain.
It is blatantly unconstitutional for someone other than the author or inventor to control the rights to their work. Remember, the Constitution says what the government can do, not what it can't. Anything not expressly stipulated is forbidden. Thus, allotting copyright to anyone other than the author or inventor is not permitted under the US Constitution.
"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."
If copyright required a small annual fee to renew, we'd probably see many works coming into the public domain much sooner than author's life + 70 years. If a copyright isn't worth, say, $25 / year to maintain, then the work should be given over to the public. If an annual maintenance fee were required, I bet a nickel all these works Greg Bear is complaining about would have gone public sometime in the 1960's.
While I agree that there is still money to be made with older works, copyright should be there to encourage the creation of new works, not just let publishers go lazy with their huge back catalogs. Also keep in mind that many of the companies that created the original works are now defunct, so the rights holder is making the money and not the original creator.
No, even worse, they'll be kidnapped! Copyright infringement is theft, kidnapping, extortion, murder, and genocide, didn't you hear? It's the lowest of the low!
should be made a crime!
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Its a privilege not a right. Copyright is a bad term. Ideas do not belong to the first being to hold them in their mind. Art does not belong to the artist.
Hmmm, let's try this experiment.
Artists: I created something new.
Flailing audience: Gimme! Gimme!
Artists:But I haven't released it yet.
Flailing audience: But it doesn't belong to you.
Artists:So I will not release it then.
Flailing artists: Well since we're capable of coming up with the same "ideas" as you then we don't need you, so there [sticks out tongue].
Artists: You're welcome to try, and I hope your audience is as capable as you are when you say no.
Yeah, a couple decades later it gets better.
For example, the 1929 original "When The Levee Breaks" (see http://www.archive.org/details/Kansas_Joe_Memphis_Minnie-When_Levee_Breaks) has some '78rpm hiss', but is still quite relatively listenable IMHO. Same goes for Robert Johnson's 1937/1938 recordings. That's all the sample data I have - not a big fan of early-20th-century music, just a Led Zeppelin fan checking out some of the influences.
I have to say, if I had mod points, this would be at +1 by now. While its parent is not 100% definitive, it's accurate enough, and this one is even moreso.
Robert Johnson's recordings are some of the best music I've ever heard, personally.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Who says these works are not in active circulation? And even so, that's still up to the writer to decide, as long as he's alive.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Greg, 50 years is long enough.
Sincerely,
the rest of the humans
expandfairuse.org
I believe that was proposed in Robert Heinlein's book "The number of the Beast" - if memory serves me well, owners appraise their own land. However, anyone may buy their property, /against the owners will/ at the appraised price. The only way to prevent the sale is to immediately raise the price so high that nobody wants the property. The catch is, you pay 3 years back taxes on the new, higher, price.
Congrats, now get the rest of the country to think like you and reform the system.
Until then, keep dreaming...
[Unclear how your statement parses with regards to what you quoted]
Wouldn't help me much. :P
The concert tickets are the big expense, and those would still have private property and contract law going for them. (From Interscope's perspective, a WSJ article on Gaga confirms that she *is* 360'ed.)
Granted, that's for a big marquee show with big prices, as opposed to the relatively cheap indie shows I also go to. However, I wonder if those cheap club-show indie acts would have to make the tickets more expensive or otherwise scramble to compensate; since they're dependent on hustling CDs/paid-downloads and merch (well, the merch is *trademark*-relevant, but okay...)
Hmm, no recording copyrights would kickstart the remix/mashup industry, whatever the artist.
How would property/contract law still apply to stem tracks, though? (From what personal experience I do have, I can say that mashups *can* be done with album versions, but they're better with acapella/instrumental component tracks)
~KingAlanI, agilfoy@frontiernet.net (already modded)
I think any book that you can put online should be free. This way we'd have an awesome Internet library so big it encompasses any piece of work that anyone has put online. Authors could still make money, but they'd have to be smart about it. Mainly the biggest boon from this is the cost of getting an education would be closer to 0. So when you do you're one Laptop per child, they could get every book ever known to man available to them. Also K-12 education would have their books for free. As education costs go down, the intelligence of society goes up! There might be a lull of book creation for a few years in protest, but when people start writing the books, they'll be much more educated and do a better job. There is a lot to it, but I am arguing that putting everything you can scan and put online to be free would result in a better educated society. We'd even be able to bring a 1rst world education into 3rd world countries.
Regardless if the laws change or not, I'm making it a personal goal of mine to educate people better and cheaper through software. I'm not doing it immediately though. First things first, get my feet on the ground with some video games. If I can get a money machine through video games, I can then do more humanitarian projects. Cuz the thing is,"Even if they don't change the IP law, no one says you can't rewrite a ton of books yourself, and give it out for free."
God spoke to me.
100 years?
For US material, the 1909 (which would apply) act specified 28 years on registration, with a 28 year extension. Which is 56 years.
Of course, if someone uses a public domain image in a new work, a copyright can then be claimed on the new work, or if someone (say) publishes Shakespeare, a copyright can be claimed on the layout -- but the image itself must be clear of copyright.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Yes, the actual copyright terms are set by the industry lobbyists and administrators who do the grunt work at WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) and now that WIPO has started listening to non-industry concerns, at ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) negotiations.
However, each and everyone of us is perfectly entitled to call out what we think are reasonable copyright terms. That is how the popular opinion is formed.
The further that the copyright regulations deviate from the popular opinion, the more they are risking an actual backlash. Right now we've only got a few small pirate parties with little political presence, but similar ideas are making headway in other small parties, and the potential for change is there. That's why each and everyone of us SHOULD think over and discuss what kind of copyright terms would actually make sense in a case like this Project Gutenberg mishap.
These aren't that hard to find. I grew up on these guys, and just because most kids on Slashdot don't read them doesn't mean they're lost. Especially since the rise of the internet, it's been relatively easy to find old copies through networks of used sellers, so anyone who wants to read one can. The "lost knowledge" gambit doesn't quite work. The actual books are on the obscure side for the most part, but there are exceptions--Fritz Leiber's classic The Big Time won a Hugo award and can easily be found on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Big-Time-Science-Fiction-Travel/dp/1452857393/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291192452&sr=8-1).
The availability of the Kindle edition for that one makes one obvious point--even if most of the others are not currently in print, they could easily appear on a Kindle in the future. There's always been the theoretical possibility of someone re-publishing or dramatizing an old "classic," but the digital age makes the republishing so cheap that there is now a market for these books that didn't exist previously; you can't really pretend that there's no way to distribute them without benefitting the authors. And we're not talking about U2 griping over some bootleg copy; most of these guys wrote huge numbers of books because they needed to do so to pay the bills.
The Anderson/Bear folks posted this a couple of places, and it was picked up a few other places. Here is the text of the most recent substantial message I sent them on the topic: http://cand.pglaf.org/bear-response.txt . The group has not provided the author/title (or PG eBook number) of any title they think was wrongly determined to be non-renewed, other than those mentioned in the email. They seem to have some theories about what is eligible for renewal, or who can renew, but these are not contested by Project Gutenberg (in fact, our policy is to NOT to question whether renewals were fully compliant with the law, nor whether a person had the correct standing to renew).
The issue is whether a renewal was made. For The Escape, part 1 was republished with a different title, complete with part 2. Part 1 was not individually renewed, but the newly titled complete work was. We were unaware of the subsequent retitled republication, so did not find the renewal. For the purposes of copyright and renewal, a major outcome of the legal advice we received concerning The Escape is that serialized works are treated as single acts of authorship. Thus, renewal of a part may be considered to apply to the whole -- provided it happens within a reasonable timespan (we have been advised to use +/- four years).
The Project Gutenberg Copyright How-To has details on our procedures, although the Rule 6 how-to there (for non-renewals) is older than the version we used for the original Anderson/Escape non-renewal determination. We are working on a revision that will include additional research for serials, and a few other variations like republication with different titles. The how-to is here: www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To
For those who aren't aware, Project Gutenberg is classified in the US as a 501(c)(3) charity, as a library. With over 35,000 published titles, and well over 50,000 unique instances of copyright research (thousands for our Rule 6), it's not surprising that we make occasional errors. To date (I've been doing this aspect of volunteer work for Project Gutenberg since around 1999), we've changed our stance on fewer than 1/2 dozen public domain determinations. Not perfect, but I believe we're doing a good job overall, and have some very solid procedures by copyright experts over the years.
I first initiated our Rule 6 nearly 10 years ago. This was because I saw that of all the books and serials published in the US from 1923-1963 (when renewal was required for copyright to still apply), 85--90% were never renewed. The US Library of Congress does annual reports on this. Statistically, that means there a million or so items from 1923-1964 whose copyright expired after a 28-year term. These items have been in the public domain in the US since 1992 or earlier (1964+28), and many are out of print. As a policy decision, Project Gutenberg decided it was worth the risk of occasionally missing a renewal, to be able to affirmatively identify the many items for which no renewal occurred. I still believe this decision was the right one.
For those who are paying attention to Project Gutenberg news today, there was a story in the Washington Post that, more or less, accused Amazon of abusing their customers by selling public domain Project Gutenberg works, with DRM added, for a fee. The article is here: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/11/amazon_charges_kindle_users_fo.html . (I exchanged several emails with the author.) It's a weird coincidence that within the same 24 hour period there is another story that basically accuses Project Gutenberg of stealing.
Enough for now. I'm going back to reading Marusek's "Mind over Ship" (sequel to the excellent "Counting Heads"), one of the hundreds of printed books I purchase every year. Maybe before I shut down for the evening I'll post Doctorow's "Makers"
If neither of them, then what do you think about software copyrights? Take the Linux kernel that's under development since 1991 - when do you think the copyright on it should expire?
If I'm understanding your question correctly each new work is covered by copyright. As time passes the older versions would become public domain after the copyright period expires.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
Replying to myself, but browsing more has another minor classic--Harry Harrison's Deathworld--also unsurprisingly in print (or at least available new.)
It doesn't look like there's any particular effort been made to filter out in print books. Those two I found by paging through the linked list and glancing at titles--Deathworld and The Big Time--are pretty well known to fans of the period. They don't "slip through" unless there's no thought being put into this. And while Leiber's passed away, Harrison happily has not.
In fact, browsing Wikipedia, it seems he's making a little money off Deathworld as recently as 2007 by 'co-authoring' sequel (excuse my assumption that his name is there more for show than for credit).
If neither of them, then what do you think about software copyrights? Take the Linux kernel that's under development since 1991 - when do you think the copyright on it should expire?
If I'm understanding your question correctly each new work is covered by copyright. As time passes the older versions would become public domain after the copyright period expires.
And what would be the period for the software copyright expiration. If 20 years or shorter, an example of what I fear here.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
If neither of them, then what do you think about software copyrights? Take the Linux kernel that's under development since 1991 - when do you think the copyright on it should expire?
If I'm understanding your question correctly each new work is covered by copyright. As time passes the older versions would become public domain after the copyright period expires.
And what would be the period for the software copyright expiration. If 20 years or shorter, an example of what I fear here.
Something more sane, why not observe the Berne Convention, 50 years? I have to say I feel the same way. Although I feel that nobody should be able to successfully claim that multiple different works which were released at seperate times to be identical.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
but it appears that these works do have legitimate owners who don't necessarily agree.
legal != legitimate
Although I feel that nobody should be able to successfully claim that multiple different works which were released at seperate times to be identical.
As long as all it is shown to you is a compiled binary (Linux can still be compiled monolithically) and you have no way of proving that they didn't mis-appropriate a more recent source code (or the way is too expensive for you to verify), then I think yes, they can claim it with pretty good chances that you won't be able to verify (like: what if they use a compiler that's available only for them, in-house developed or even an internal hack of gcc?).
Anyway, 50 years sounds good for me, but... you know what?... ask me again 30 years from now :)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Coming from the other thread to answer this:
No, I don't think so. Maybe nitpicking here and IANAL, but here's a quote from the OP:
A couple of decades from publication to public domain is plenty. If you don't want your thoughts and ideas to enter the public domain then keep them to yourself.
Are you able to guarantee IP lawyer would NOT be able to spin this on the line of:
-Well, the kernel was first published in 1991. 2011 makes a couple of decades from publication, formally I can take the kernel and the bug fixes... you know, there are some bug fixes in 20 years... and use it as I please.
I said this in the other thread but I wasn't explicit. Here, you are implicating that a closed source company is going to take the current version of Linux and resell it as it's own because the original Linux was published in 1991 and "copyrights only last a few decades". This is very disingenuous, there are more differences between the first and last versions of Linux than most song covers and they are still considered new works. And don't pretend this isn't what you meant because that's what you implicated when you said "and the bug fixes... you know, there are some bug fixes in 20 years... "
-If you think I included more than the bug fixes, it is *your* burden to demonstrate.
- No, without a court ruling I'm not going start a discovery process, apologies but we are running a business here, go away kid don't waste our time...
- So, no, once again and for the final time... you cannot see the code from which we compiled our closed source version"?
And how is this different from the current [Life+70] regimen we are under currently? Changing the duration of copyrights to a couple decades wouldn't introduce this problem because RIGHT NOW there are companies selling GPL'd code as their own and hiding behind their compilers.
I was wrong judging you, you *are* a liar, and a a troll.
But... the future refused to change.
Your logic that copyright should last long enough to inherit is ridiculous to me, 'cause Mister Anderson is not likely to rise from the grave an write more, so the value of his copyright "to encourage" him is somewhat limited.
Why should any single act of creativity or performance be rewarded with more than a reasonable wage for the effort exerted.
The fact is that normal people can leave behind what they have saved or produced, provided they _save_ some of it. But that's just for us proles apparently. Somehow we have decided that you do a month or even a year's worth of studio time to make a song, or spend a month to write a short story, or a couple of years to write a novel, and you deserve that time's effort to pay your children and grandchildren 50 years after your death?
Why then aren't the heirs of the stone masons who built the Empire State Building entitled to a share of each months rent for three generations? Their work is just as valid and lasting. Perhaps more-so since people are paying more and more each year to use it.
Now, as an author, I understand two things: (1) I want to be able to control how my words are used commercially and socially because nobody wants to see their "children" exploited or raped; and (2) if anybody is going to be making a profit off of my words I want that someone to be me.
In previous ages that meant cost to copy and copyright because copying was costly. Now I think there should be a deal where some short time after release (e.g. even 20 years, as it can take a long time to make that two years salary for that two years writing) literal and exact copies distributed for ZERO cost on a non-profit basis should be legal. All the transformative rights, such as the right to anthology, the right to rewrite, the right to "make a movie of it", the right to "remake" it, etc should be preserved.
As a caveat of course, DRM is impermissible (because DRM is impossible anyway and) because that would obstruct the legal exact copying mandated.
The goal here is two-fold. (1) REASONABLY reward creators for the value of their creative EFFORT and (2) PRESERVE the creative control, and so the creator's "good name" to allow for a creator to deny the "N.A.M.B.L.A. Theater's All-Furry production of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Bone".
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
There's no place for civil disobedience then?
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
That's your opinion, but it's someone else's rights you are talking about.
Then who will defend that right? If there is no defender of the rights, why argue about the rights of someone who deceased?
The public have a right to retain their culture also. If nobody is profiting from the works, only scumbag lawyer sharks will be interested in further restrictions.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I am under the impression that the public domain portion of copyrighted materials stopped growing in 1999 and will not resume growing until 2019 because of the copyright date on Mickey Mouse. In 1997-1998, Disney and associates spent $6.3 million on campaign donations and got the 20 year extension.
I'll bet they will start spending in 2017 and this time they'll spend 5x as much.
If this happens, I wish the congress would just grant Disney a 1,000 year copyright on cartoon characters and leave everything else alone so the public domain can resume growing.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.html
These works have been forgotten about a long time ago. They should have been in public domain since nobody is profiting from them anymore.
Each of these authors has an Amazon.com home page with at least 50 books in print.
Good luck explaining to a judge and jury how you managed to ignore warning signs as blatant as these:
Poul Anderson 99 titles.
Ray Bradbury 105 titles.
Frederik Pohl 60 titles.
Jack Vance 54 titles.
And a small reminder:
Copyright is a constitutionally protected property right.
Nowhere does it say that a publication has to be profitable to be protected.
You make that argument and Creative Commons, the GPL, etc., goes up in smoke.
So why am I working? I don't get paid for the work I did for my employer for 50 years after my death.
Why, then, do people work?
That brings up an interesting point: what happens if we win? How would open-source be affected if intellectual-property laws were abolished?
But that's not what I was saying. I should have put (Software|Method) Patents, as in Software Patents and Method Patents. Under my plan, software itself would be covered by copyright. This ought not to be a problem for the "release early, release often" open-source community; if one were to build from the public domain release of the Linux kernel, they'd be back at 2.2
My reasoning for allowing software and method patents is actually to defeat them. People will realize a 6-month patent is useless, and try to register it as an invention patent instead. Saying in court that "this patent was filed under the wrong type" is much easier than "this patent is completely invalid", although it will give almost identical effects.
They registered it and extended it.
This would be a good time to bring up the American Library Association's Digital Copyright Slider:
http://www.librarycopyright.net/digitalslider/
Makes it easy to determine the length of copyright in the US. Like, as another poster noted, no works from 100 years ago will be protected by copyright today.
I think you mean your great-great grandchildren. Many people have great grandchildren before they die. With a life expectancy of 78 years your great grandchildren will be dead before the copyright expires. But with copyright of only life + 70 years your great-great grandchildren will lose their royalties about the time they retire.
1) Write a story
2) Sell rights to story to a magazine
3) Forget about the story (because everyone else has) and you got yours, didn't you?
4) Wait thirty, forty, or fifty years.
5) After decades of uselessness someone decides your story is worth reading. They put it in Project Gutenberg.
6) Dig up obscure cases about the public domain and magazine rights.
7) Use cases to blackmail money out of Project Gutenberg
8) $$$
9) Look like a bottom-feeding scum to the world
This is specific to sound recordings in the USA, but it appears that EVERY recording EVER made and sold in the USA is STILL under copyright. I know it sounds incredible, but the upshot of Capitol Records vs. Naxos in 2005 is to affirm perpetual common law copyrights on sound recordings prior to 1972. According to some legal experts, no sound recordings in the USA will enter the public domain until around 2060 at the earliest.
GrokLaw has an old article on this for the curious. http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050412225604578
The Ancient world had the right idea. The library of Alexandria had a copy of EVERY book that they could get their hands on. Libraries should be exhempt from copyright law. There should be a lending library that has EVERY book ever printed (or scanned in electronic form) saved so it is never lost. Everyone should have access to these materials, even if they need to be in the library or connected to it via the web. I'm OK with some form of digital rights protection to keep copy access at bay to view library materials, at least as long as the work is subject to copyright. The important thing is not to let ANY book disappear from this world.
Combined with a reasonable initial "free" few years of copyright protection (maybe 10?), this sounds like a nifty way of running things.
Alternatively, I also favour a "doubling" system of registration fee. A few "free" years, then $1 for the next year, $2 for the next, $4 for the next, etc. Eventually, and really in not that long, even Disney can't afford the registration fee.
Probably get accused of raping somebody!
Software copyrights are still the very basis allowing open-software to remain open (it is the will of the authors and is protected by copyright).
No, software copyrights are the basis of a small subset of OSS licenses restricting how source code licensed under them can be used, particularly in derivative works.
Code released under something like the BSDL would not be impacted should copyright cease to exist.
Take the Linux kernel that's under development since 1991 - when do you think the copyright on it should expire?
The original code written in 1991 ? Absolutely. How much of that do you think still remains in the contemporary kernel ?
Yes, in Life+70 countries that can easily happen. In the US, anything published before 1923 is in the public domain. Anything from 1923 onward requires a lot of research, which sometimes leads to mistakes (as in the Rule 6 clearance referenced above, "The Escape", aka "Brainwave"). Actually, it's not so much a mistake as an oddity in the law. The first publication, as a serial, was not renewed. Only the later republication as "Brainwave" was renewed.
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
Something more sane, why not observe the Berne Convention, 50 years?
That's 50 years after the author's death. Any copyright term that extends past death is neither sane nor justifiable.
Even if it were just 50 years, it would still be too long. Most works make the majority of their income for the author in the first few years after release, many in the first few months.
Ideally, copyright protection for a work would be split into two aspects - attribution as the creator of the work, and the ability to restrict redistribution. The former would be perpetual, and the latter would expire shortly after it had earned the creator enough money to cover the expenses incurred creating it. That's the only way it can be legitimately seen as an incentive.
that she can't make money from her fathers work.
Special interest groups have had their way in the expansion of the copyright laws over the past half century and more. It is about time writers, other artists and their heirs realized that they create only because they stand on the shoulders of all those before them who built the culture, language and experience that they draw from to exercise their craft.
That's entirely too sane and inline with the initial goal of copyright! You must be insane.
Besides, I'd like another two BMWs to fill my five car garage this year for all the process patents I've bought up that I not only didn't design/invent, but I do not use for anything other than leeching off society's progress from royalty fees. This would hurt my lifestyle as a leech far too much, no thank you.
Sincerely,
Upper Management
It's quite possible that these games are 'semi-relevant' again precisely because of emulator projects like MAME, since many of these exist on modern platforms (Android, for example) allowing people to continue to enjoy (but more importantly be aware of) the ROMS. Had the roms been perfectly quashed and not available to anyone, they would have been truly forgotten by anyone who didn't directly experience the games 'back in the day'. And everyone knows how relevant kids find grandpa's stories about the old days.
Quasi-legitimate (legally speaking) though emulators and ROMS may be, they served the purpose of keeping these games alive by allowing people, including newer generations, to directly experience them and grow to love them. Without this interest, IP owners would have nothing to sell that people wanted, because they wouldn't even know to care. Everything is connected, nothing stands truly apart.
Supposing that one writes a very popular piece of art, why shouldn't he/she profit infinitely from it, if there is demand?
There's always a place for civil disobedience. However, those being disobedient have to accept the consequences of their actions.
You're on slashdot. It's a relative certainty that you're not a breeder!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I did not RTFA so maybe this has been mentioned already, but prior to one of the copyright ammendments (either the 1976 one, or a previous one, I'm too lazy to look up a citation) there was a condition in copyright that an author/publisher MUST have a copyright notice on the work otherwise they lose protection. Just look up the story of how Night of the Living Dead lost copyright protections for one example. There's a number of comic books in a huge online archive that rely on this exception to legally post scans of comic books newer than "the Disney copyright term limit".
These works have been forgotten about a long time ago.
That statement is factually incorrect.
They should have been in public domain since nobody is profiting from them anymore.
That statement is factually incorrect.
http://www.amazon.com/Brainwave-Greatest-Masterpiece-Science-Grandmaster/dp/0743474864
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Software/Method patents: Six months.
So software developers should be expected to constantly research exactly which methods/algorithms they can or can't use?
That would make programming any big project almost impossible.
Most people skilled in the art can come up with a similar or identical idea and implement it, but researching if someone else has patented it takes a lot of time, which could be spent programming instead.
In the US, If you come up with an algorithm/method you want to use in your program, but find that it's patented, you'll have to circumvent it in some way, which takes more time.
In some cases, a software patent could actually prevent you from finishing the program, if there's no way to circumvent the patent, and then every minute you and everyone else has worked on that program has been a complete waste.
How would you like to tell your boss that you've wasted half a year on a software project you now can't finish, because of some software patent(s)?
Sure, your company could license it from whoever owns the patent, but if you have to do this several times in just one project, it might very well kill the expected profit from the project.
Or, you could wait 5-6 months, only to find that there's another software patent which your now finished project violates, and wait another 5-6 months, rinse and repeat.
The same goes for free/open source software - why should I wait for some patent(s) to expire before I can release my source code and binaries, if I'm not charging any money for it?
Please get this: software patents are a menace to software developers.
They turn software development into a minefield of patent violations.
(BTW, I can see why lawyers would just love to have software patents be globally applicable. It would be a never-ending smorgasbord of lawsuits waiting to happen).
Privacy begins with
In case you didn't read my thing, the entire point of including the patents at all was actually to make them easier to defeat in court. Nobody is going to waste time patenting something that will be PD before they can even finish the paperwork for a lawsuit. Obviously, then, any corporation that wants to patent a method or algorithm would find a way to make it seem like a genuine invention, and patent it that way. Then, when they start suing people, the defense isn't "the patent office fucked up on this one; the patent is invalid because it's unpatentable", the defense is "this was patented under the wrong form; as it is a software patent, it must be categorized as such, therefore the case is moot because the six-month period has passed. Either that, or this is beyond the scope of the patent; as this is a software product, which is not encumbered by patents on physical systems." While there isn't a difference in effect, it's vastly easier to convince a judge "the paperwork was incorrect" than it is to convince him "the government was wrong". Thus, by allowing software patents to exist but be completely useless, you defeat more software patents than you would by merely not allowing them.
So, you would also propose that if someone steals from you, they should just have to return the items or pay the going rate for said items and not be fined or sent to jail, right?
The irony here is life + 99 years is similar to a prison sentence for murder. Copyright is murder for creative works?
So, offering a screening of Steamboat Willie in a public theatre could be done without paying licensing to Disney, but creating my own Steamboat-Willie-themed amusement park would not. Nor would creating a brand-new Steamboat Willie sequel (at least, not with Mickey Mouse in it, or any likeness that could reasonably be interpreted as Mickey Mouse - putting a cat in its place would reasonably be interpreted as not Mickey Mouse).
Current law: Trademarks can already be renewed indefinitely 10 years at a time, as shutdown pointed out. But after the copyright expires, a U.S. trademark can't be used as an ersatz copyright. Dastar v. Fox. As long as it is clear to the viewer that Disney was not involved with the production of a derivative work first published in 2024 or later, nothing is infringed under current law.
Future legislation: If you want to prohibit derivative works of the original three Mickey Mouse short films (Plane Crazy, Gallopin' Gaucho, and Steamboat Willie) even after the copyright expires in 2024, then you have explicitly perpetual copyright with the equivalent of CC-BY-ND licensing. Even under the broad interpretation of "limited Times" that the Supreme Court applied in Eldred v. Ashcroft, I don't see how this would pass constitutional muster.
Also some people don't like their own early works. They find it embarrassing so they want it out of circulation. That is their right.
How does it benefit the people to make this the author's right?
Landlords.
Not everybody here is in favor of this feudal system.
You want free stuff.
No, I just want to be able to create a work without running a measurable risk of accidentally plagiarizing an existing copyrighted work. George Harrison lost a lawsuit over his "My Sweet Lord".
Interesting concept. For books, renewal value gets trumped by cost at about 10 years into the scheme for a reasonably good-selling work, or at about 13-15 years for a best-seller.
Given that if you really need to make a living at it, series are the way to go, and it can take a series 10+ years to get momentum -- I think 21 years is a good starting point. Gives the smaller-selling authors a chance to get some secondary sales on reprints and ebooks of older series entries, without having to be well-heeled or a corporation to afford the copyright renewal.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Yep, this was the time of '78s. My wife just recorded a song 'Put the blame on Mame' that was based on the '78 recording. Great stuff!
PG wasn't intentionally testing the boundaries. The story in question was part of a novel, serialized in a magazine, and the name of the novel didn't match up with the name of the story so they missed that it had been renewed. PG checked with their lawyer, and he said the Bears were correct and the story was in copyright, so PG pulled it, and will be changing their policy on how they determine whether stories in magazines with elapsed copyrights have also elapsed. Most of the stories from science fiction magazines with elapsed copyrights are not parts of novels, they are stand alone short stories, and if their individual copyright was not renewed, they're now in the public domain. I doubt that there are more than a dozen titles in the PG catalog are at risk.
Well ten years of doubling is still only a $1000 per year, or $2000 or total payments, so an initial free period of 10 years would give a pretty reasonable price for 20 years of protection.
Anyhow, another advantage of this type of system is that there is a central registry to figure out what is and is not protected by copyright, and the vast majority of works would be available in quite a reasonable amount of time.
Trouble is, two grand can be as much as half your revenue for the total life of the book's sales. Remember authors only get a few percent of cover price from the publisher. $5000 worth of income is considered a decent amount of sales for an average book (which is why writing is so seldom a full-time job). You don't want to hurt the little guy to the point that only the big guys can use the system. And the publisher is NOT going to eat it either. So... if it kicks in that early, you've just killed off all the writers who aren't independently wealthy, a situation even more draconian than we have with today's ridiculously extended copyrights.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Well, I'm currently a full-time student, so I don't make a living doing anything. However, I'm training to go into the video game industry, where a) I will have to live off my artistic creations, and b) a 90% piracy rate is considered "pretty low". So I'm at least tolerant of people stealing my work - I probably wouldn't get money from them anyways, it generates good word-of-mouth, and maybe they'll buy another of my games later on.
I'm also not being self-serving: I rarely pirate anything. Seriously. I've torrented a few albums, four movies, and a handful of out-of-print games. Between my open-source work and my mod work, I can sincerely state I have contributed almost as much back to the community as I have taken. Perhaps not as high-quality, but I at least try to plant a tree every time I cut one down, so to speak.
As a brief aside, I think I have a DRM scheme that both sides would like. It does the normal sort of authentication, but if it fails too often (there would be some leeway for various reasons), it shows a short, fourth-wall breaking cutscene, in which the characters guilt-trip you over it, before continuing on to the game. The DRM doesn't make the product worse (hell, some people pay $10 extra for a few more cutscenes); guilt is perhaps a more effective way to get people to pay for something.
Sorry, it was a dirty joke.
I don't know, but could certainly be persuaded otherwise. If $5k is good total revenue, then spending $1k for the 10th non-free year doesn't make much sense, but I suspect that in that case, there is probably not going to be much money in that 10th year anyway. Additionally, if there isn't much money in it for you, there probably isn't much incentive for the "pirate publisher" to swoop in and start printing copies in competition to you anyway, so copyright protection probably does not matter much.
The real question is if we changed the copyright length would we end up with significantly fewer authors? I suspect that most money for most works is made well within the first 10 years of publication, certainly within the first 20, and so the incentive to create new works is pretty much unchanged if we drop back the length to something more sane - having some sort of sliding registration/tax system for longer terms addresses anyone who thinks they are going to create a timeless classic. I don't know how significant the existence of works that do not START to have significant value long after initial publication. If a series author's early work gains value as their later work gains recognition, perhaps these schemes would have some of that early work enter the public domain while there was still money to be made from them - but I think the overall gain to society outweighs these relatively small "edge cases".
I see this all the time, yet I don't subscribe to it.
It's nonsense. Civil disobedience doesn't mean you can't also fight the consequences. Civil disobedience means disobeying. It may fit some strategies to calmly accept censure and imprisonment, but it's not like there's some sort of rule about civil disobedience.
I mostly see this from people who disagree with any sort of civil disobedience and grudgingly accept that if it must be done then 'we' the establishment, get to do what we want with you.