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What Could Have Been In the Public Domain Today, But Isn't
SgtChaireBourne writes "Many works published in 1955 would have entered the public domain this year. Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has an overview of the movies, books, songs and historical works that are kept out of the public domain by changes to copyright law since 1978. Instead of seeing these enter the public domain in 2012, we will have to wait until 2051 before being able to use these works without restriction."
So... is the Study of the Public Domain itself in the public domain (through Creative Commons licencing), or is it copyright too?
"She's furniture with a pulse"
The Sonny Bono copyright extension act, and the DMCA are brought to you be the same greedy evil fucks that are now serving up SOPA / Protect IP.
Looks like the same Capitalism that ended Communism in the 90's will end Democracy in 2012!
It's for your protection.
Think of the children.
Ugh!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
By 2051 the Multinational corporate conglomerates that hold the rights will have paid the politicians and courts to extended it to 3051 or perpetuity. That is if we make it through 2012 first!
Silence is a state of mime.
James Joyce's works are now freely available to everyone.
An interesting thing I noted is that the Irish and UK copyright terms used to be limited to 50, but were changed to 70 to match the Germans.
I find it a bit ironic that media and publishing companies call copyright violations "theft" after having this put in place. In my opinion they are holding our literary and cultural history hostage.
Barring a sea change in Congress' perception of copyright, we'll get another Mickey Mouse Protection Act by 2051. Remember, the Supreme Court already gave Congress permission to continue extending copyright indefinitely.
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U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8: "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; "
I believe in the benefits of copyrights. Most of my Web pages are copyrighted. However, the current state of intellectual law is unacceptable. Extending copyright coverage to 90 years (Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998) violates the concept of "limited Times". The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) stifles innovation instead of promoting it. And the primary beneficiaries of these laws are not "Authors and Inventors" but corporate publishers, movie studios, and record companies who reap the bounty of others' creativity. If you agree that this situation is intolerable, tell your representatives and senators in Congress.
I copied the above paragraph from one of my own copyrighted Web pages (with a slight modification in the second sentence). I hereby grant to the public the right to quote that paragraph at will, in all contexts, and in all media.
Eh, maybe he was working out repressed jealously that no one would ever want to use his work.
Chained Melodies, and Molecules . . .
1/ Most important articles published now are free for read.
2/ Old articles are already in the textbooks if they are worthy, and should be forgotten, if not. Nobody except freaks is interested in what exactly was the wording of Crick and Watson's paper, and everybody knows what it is about.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It seems to be a greedy boomers thing, it will be interesting to see when all the boomers are gone if their "stuff" will be free. Last time I suggested no one under 50 listens to the Beetles so it doesn't matter anyway, I got mercilessly flamed, so I'll refrain from that form of trolling.
My guess is we'll have a new law for greedy-Xers such that everything post 1970 will remain in "perpetual" copyright but everything older will be free. An interesting area of discussion would be transitional era. I'm thinking Scooby Doo and Black Sabbath Paranoid are going to be soundly copyrighted as X-er fodder, but what about Led Zepplin, or the Bee Gees, I'm thinking those two would become free as boomer fodder.
Then once the last of the X-ers die off, everything up to roughly Jason Beiber will probably become free, etc.
This inspired by a recent XKCD implying that christmas music has been "hostage" to boomer childhood sensibilities for some decades now, and a radio christmas music playlist transition in the near future appears inevitable, assuming broadcast radio survives as an industry long enough for the transition to happen.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Are people being jealous of fat useless leach members of "estates"? Let them have their dubious castles and kitschy art collections at the expense of fools who still pay for this old crap.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
2011 was the year super-injunctions were beaten in the UK. Previously, in the UK if you were rich, you could get a super-injunction to stop the media publishing stories about the fact that you cheated on your wife etc. In 2011 that was broken by the fact that 70,000+ people on Twitter decided that they weren't going to abide by it. The law simply can't prosecute 70,000+ semi-anonymous people on the internet.
How about a mass movement to respect the pre-1978 copyright law, but ignore the subsequent changes? Or another line in the sand could be drawn on international lines with the Universal Copyright Convention or the Berne Convention.
Have a lare number of web-sites and/or torrent sites with this material, and only this material.
Established torrent sites aren't the answer, because whilst they do contain some of this material, the also have lots of material that morally should still be copyrighted. Such as last years movies.
Which is why they invented it in the first place.
(Yes, its a soundbite, but we are pressed for time)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Say if you want to keep your copyright after X years pay X fee. That way Mickey Mouse can say out of the PD as long as the fee is payed. But other stuff and abandonware can go free. Also make it pre work or at least some way to stop places buying up lot's of old corporate conglomerates and clamming copyright to lot's of old works with out proof and may it that they have to use / offer the work for sale. The down side of copyrights is dead works and a copyright extension fee / or tax will help fix that.
Getting pleasure from creating stuff yourself is one thing. Getting pleasure from stuff someone else has created is a different thing.
Your suggestion is equivalent to satisfying yourself with masturbation because you can't get sex.
I think the time line for that is comeing up as well and that may lead to some works coming out as well.
If after say 30-40 years from the date of copyright, the material is no longer available for purchase to the common man (Easy to do via digital distribution for movies/songs/etc atleast), the copyright is declared invalid?
Such is the price of progress... Nay, greed.
The fee should have an N^2 or 2^N or N! factor, where N is the number of years since expiration.
No, his suggestion is equivalent to satisfying yourself with masturbation because you can't watch other people having sex.
+1
The fee doesn't really even need to be large. You could probably achieve the same results with no fee at all, actually, just a periodic re-registration requirement. The key is to ensure that the copyright holder still knows and cares about the work, and that others who are interested in doing something with the work can identify the owner.
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The fee should have an N^2 or 2^N or N! factor, where N is the number of years since expiration.
Meh. That might be satisfying, but it's unlikely to be enacted, and it's not necessary to solve the dead works problem.
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The city Alexandria at the time did reputedly the following.
If you entered the harbour you were asked if you had any scrolls with you. If you had then you were to hand the over so they could copy them for the Great Library.Chances were you'd get back the copy. I don't know if that particular anecdote is true but it is one that makes perfect sense. That's how important knowledge was to them. If you could read it you could access it. Copy it. Teach it. Available knowledge was part of Alexandrias wealth.
When the Great Library burned down it was one of the greatest losses to humanity I can ever imagine.
Now most of us can read it but only as far as the rights as granted by the copyright holders allow.
Not letting things enter Public Domain is a catastrophy that is akin to the fire in the Great Library. How many works have been forgotten due to nobody really knowing who holds the rights or because it isn't profitable to publish it?
Wasn't Return of the King first widely published in the 70ies? At least that's when the great craze started.
We burnt Savonarola, could we please do the same to those clowns who actively steal from our civilisation? I find that particular notion heartwarming.
20 minutes into the future
Totally agree!!!!
the extended copyright terms should ONLY have applied to works FIRST registered after 1978 (the date of effect of the bill) and nothing registered prior to that... Imagine the howls of protest if they passed a bill that retroactively extended the sentences of people already convicted of crimes or retroactively extended back a change in tax rate to cover years of income for which you've already paid taxes on? Surely that 1978 bill was unconstitutional in the first place as it was retroactive in effect?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
This would benefit the companies and hurt the individual. Mickey will be in copyright forever, while my fantastic great book I have just written won't be. Then that will be turned into a Disney production, because it is in public domain.
That will then be copyrighted. They have done so with several stories already. The only difference is the fee. The rest would not make any difference.
And you can be damn sure that there will be a group discount and it will be tax deductible and so many other rules that they will pay less for all their copyrights then you will do for just one.
Just make it a max of 10 years. That would mean no need to change anything, except the number of years. If grand-dad dies the day after he wrote his book, I have 10 years to collect on it. If he dies the before, I have 1 day.
Artists can start playing their own music after 10 years f they had problems with their publisher. They can even use their own name again. (Who? Prince! That skinny MF with the high voice.)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Mr Brush or the hand that controls you will get 'renditioned' to the USofA as a suspected terrorist.
you think I'm joking?
Trying to go against the inexorable move to keep the like of a cartoon mouse in perpetual copyright is regarded by some on the left hand side of the pond, as a threat against the core values of the USA such as Mom and Apple Pie.
The original copyright act passed in 1790 just after the Constitution was ratified to create the power of copyright allowed for a term of 14 years, with a possible 14-year renewal. That was plenty. If you can't make money off of something in 28 years following its publication, you probably won't be able to. That's an entire generation who has to pay for your stuff. It also is a good chunk of the career length of an artist. The point of copyright was to encourage future works and time investment by artists, not allow them to live off one lucky creation for the rest of their days. Any revival of your work after 30 years is not going to be something you expected from your initial investment of time and money, which is what copyright law is supposed to pay for.
The correct date for the end of the public domain should be 1984. Not just "From Here to Eternity," but the music of the Beatles, etc. should be in the public domain by now....
You need to account for inflation as well. Add another 2% per year while your at it.
No, his suggestion is equivalent to watching yourself masturbate because you can't watch other people having sex.
Say if you want to keep your copyright after X years pay X fee.
While that would be a nice trick to get a lot of today abandoned stuff into the public domain, I really don't like the idea in the long run, as it would mean that all the big cooperations simply let their lawyers handle things and get copyright protection for as long as the law allows, while the stuff of the little guy will slip into public domain against their will.
I think a much better solution to copyright would be staged copyright, i.e. 15 years of copyright as is, after that another 15 years where the work is free-for-non-commecial-use, then full public domain.
We yearn because this is about _OTHERS_ who sold their work to _NOBODY_. A company is not somebody it's a legal entity designed to restrict liability of individuals for harm they may cause and collect and pool capital investments in an efficient manner. Unlike an author who has a death, an obvious point in time around which which his rights and the good of society can be balanced a company can go on indefinitely and has a inherent disregard for any concerns which don't directly affect short or long-term profitability. The idea that a corporation can own intellectual property without an intellect is not beneficial to our advancement as a species. I've got not problem if the author wants to restrict his/her work for as long as he/she lives. But after they are gone a company shouldn't be able to hold something they didn't create and milk profit in perpetuity. We're talking copyright of artistic works today and that's disturbing enough but when the same concepts and legal tactics bleed into more other areas that affect quality of life and advancement it can be even more damaging.
Released in 1983
Film
Literature
Music
TV
Obviously the above list is far from comprehensive and biased by the idiot who plucked thoe above from the various lists, but I'm sure you get the idea. You might also notice I was slightly biased towards early (and final) works of an artist/series as I wonder how many of these might have seen a renewed interest in the rest of their catalogue now if these initial works were entering the Public Domain.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Public libraries, the subjectivity of fair use, and the arbitrary duration of copyright are all proof that everyone knows copyright is a bad idea but just can't admit it.
Bull. Nothing will ever be allowed to enter the public domain again.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
1) Change state corporation law giving for profit limited liability to companies that have full personhood. The argument the supreme court uses for defending corporate personhood is that the constitution supports "the the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” So you allow people the right of free association so long as they do not hide under the shield of limited liability. One weird bit of law in all states is that you can not usually sue the owners of a company. The company yes, the owners, no. If I buy shares in MegaEvilChemCorp and one of their factories blows up and kills half a city the worst that can happen to me is that MegaEvilChemCorp could go bankrupt and I'm out what I paid for the stock. Even though I am an owner of MegaEvilChemCorp no one can sue me or put me in jail for the damages MegaEvilChemCorp may do even if they blow up or poison half a state. The result of this is that no large company would be an unlimited liability company and they would not have personhood rights.
2) Pass meaningful finance reform. $200 limit per person. Open up the books fully of any entity lobbying or campaigning. No PACS, no bundling, no "issue ads," no corporate or union money. (A union and corporate money ban needs to be bound together or it favors one side or the other).
3) Allow corporations to do the right thing. In most states if you run a company and do anything other than maximize profits you can get sued by any share holder. There is a movement to create corporations that are allowed to take other consideration into account beyond just short term economic gain such as the environment and their community. See http://www.bcorporation.net/ for more information. Very few companies are likely to do this in the near term, but lets at least allow the experiment for those who are interested in doing the right thing.
Choose to not give a fuck about copyright, or use those works that should be in the public domain and don't give a fuck about anyone else's hangups.
Has anyone ever advanced the argument that reducing the time a work is "protected" by IP might actually increase productivity, as creators have to produce new works to make up for works that pass into the public domain?
There are writers alive today who wrote and published in 1955.
Just wondering.
1978, the year that industry realized that "it" was getting out of hand - the year that my Dad gave me a portable cassette recorder as a toy.
Care to justify why copyright should exist in the first place?
If you go for intellectual-property-is-a-natural-right, consider carefully why personal property rights have been recognized in almost every society since the dawn of time, but copyright was only "discovered" 3 centuries ago, after the first information technology revolution swept England.
If you favor the pragmatic argument that it incentivizes creativity, can you show evidence it works? From the beginning, copyright legislation was supported principally by the businessmen of the content-distribution industry who stand to profit in cash, not the content-consuming public who purportedly gain more in new content than they lose to the fat cats' pockets. And where's the book boom in the early 18th century?
Adding in a factor for inflation really is unnecessary. You see, inflation in measured as a polynomial function. What really would be appropriate would to make it exponential! ( Like 2^N. ) N! is also an acceptable idea.
The fee is at the least needed to cover the cost of this system. A second reason is that there won't be a "Copyright Reregistration Service, Inc." where for a one-time low-low-fee the service will automatically take care of all the needed registrations for you! The third reason is that it needs to stop "frivolous" registrations - there needs to be an expected net economic benefit to the copyright and the fee needs to be at a level where the expected benefit is sufficient to warrant payment of this fee.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
(I'm European, so please forgive my ignorance of USA voting system)
In Europe, we try to get a copyright reform by voting for pirate parties: A few members made it into the European Parliament and some more made it into Berlin Senate. That's possible, because both in the European Parliament and in the German parliaments, seats are assigned proportionally.
Now, I don't understand how a third political party could gain any footing in USA politics. I only have a very basic understanding of the situation there, but is this even possible? Why are there only two big parties in the USA and how could a third one become relevant?
Your book would be copyrighted as long as it earns enough to pay for the fee. If it doesn't, why exactly do you want copyright protection for? Preventing Disney out of spite from using it isn't really what it was designed for.
Dilbert RSS feed
Your bargain bin fodder should quickly end up in the public domain.
This isn't about you. This is about society.
Disney screws things up for everyone. If their works are really worth the effort for them to corrupt the laws and the Congress, then let them have their extensions and leave the rest alone. It would be far less harmful in the end.
Get rid of "copyright by default. Require registration for ANY cause of action. Require renewal with some nominal fee to prevent perpetual copyright on unprofitable works.
Let a genuine cash cow be milked and leave the rest alone.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Copyright, trademark, and patents are all different - please don't confuse them, the same people that invented the propaganda term "IP" are the same that would love the confusion to grow.
They have different purposes, cover completely different ideas, and are definitely not interchangeable.
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
One weird bit of law in all states is that you can not usually sue the owners of a company. The company yes, the owners, no.
That's not weird at all. It's practically necessary. The problem is that the owners of a company have little or no direct control over that company's actions. They merely provide the money that is used by the company's board to finance the company's operations, in exchange for which the company periodically pays them a dividend. The limit of their control over the company is that if enough of them agree they can hire and fire members of the board. They have no right to directly supervise the company's actions. They have no right to veto the company's actions. It would therefore seem a little unreasonable to hold them directly responsible for those actions they have no direct control over. The limit of their responsibility should, it seems to me, be the same as they potentially stand to profit from the actions -- i.e. their dividends. Suing a company, therefore, makes perfect sense, as doing so prevents the owners from benefitting from the company's illegal behaviour by applying a financial penalty that will, in the end, reduce the dividend that is paid to them.
Even though I am an owner of MegaEvilChemCorp no one can sue me or put me in jail for the damages MegaEvilChemCorp may do even if they blow up or poison half a state.
Holding shareholders criminally liable for a company's actions would completely destroy corporate investment as we know it. Nobody sane would be willing to invest in any companies, as they would have no way to prevent themselves from being prosecuted for crimes that may be committed in their name without their knowledge. Financing any new non-trivial business would become almost impossible.
I'd agree
Corporate person hood just lets stockholders stay greedy and relatively insulated from the negative side effects of what their company is doing.
When all you see are dividends, it's hard to care how you get them.
Care to justify why copyright should exist in the first place?
I don't think I'm obligated to, but if you go upwards on the page, you'll find my answer as to why copyright needed to exist historically:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2599374&cid=38556710
Note that I have serious problems with the copyright system today.
but copyright was only "discovered" 3 centuries ago, after the first information technology revolution swept England.
No it wasn't. It was created in Italy in the late 1400s. Go read some history instead of the anti-copyright wacko pamphlets. The most direct ancestor of the U.S. copyright system is the British system, which was reformed under the Statute of Anne in 1709 (which, by the way, was a heck of lot better than what existed before then in England). But that's not the beginning of copyright by any means.
If you favor the pragmatic argument that it incentivizes creativity, can you show evidence it works?
Yes, it's called the Renaissance. It happened long before all your English 18th-century fat cats. And it didn't so much provide incentives to authors (who generally were being paid by a patron) as it encouraged publishers' investment in distributing a wide variety of high-quality works.
Oh, and, I don't know, a lot of published work in the 19th century, after the patronage system fell apart and writers actually had to earn money on their own.
I don't deny that copyright has been used for a lot of bad things over the years. But I'm also not going to pretend, like it appears you do, that no member of the public and no creators ever benefited significantly from it.
I'm getting really tired of hearing rants by people about history who don't bother to know anything about it.
then it's time for an "intellectual 'property' tax." Let them have their eternal copyright, but tax the living shit out of it.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
3) Allow corporations to do the right thing. In most states if you run a company and do anything other than maximize profits you can get sued by any share holder.
This notion is based on a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the fiduciary responsibility of the board of a company. You are not legally required to maximize profits. In general, the law does not involve itself in the minutiae of which decisions the directors should make. The requirements are simple:
1. That they act in good faith towards the shareholders
2. That they exercise reasonable care
3. That they have a reasonable belief that the decisions they make are in the best interest of the company
The "best interest of the company" is not solely maximizing profit, and courts will allow directors to make any decision that they have reasonable grounds for (e.g. improving public perception of the company), whether the decision is good or not.
There are a few exceptions to this, but generally they only apply to companies in severe financial trouble where the directors should be anticipating that the company will be declared bankrupt in the near future (at which point they do, in some cases, have a strict duty to maximize profits, as for a company due to be wound up in the near future there are few other considerations that are in the interests of the company).
Typically, directors are only successfully sued when they have acted fraudulently for personal gain or for gain of their associates at the expense of the shareholders.
IANAL, but I have researched this in depth due to getting pissed off with the constant anti-corporate propaganda you get in places like this.
I've decided that if they can ignore public domain, I can ignore copyright.
So I'm ignoring copyright for my lifetime plus 70 years.
Well said. I disagree about the term being tied to a person's lifetime, though. I think it should be a fixed number of years and be inheritable.
No my friend, the system hopelessly flawed. If your solution is that the vast majority of the population needs to change the way they think, that's really no solution at all.
Patents too. It's the only way. In the interim since the current copyright regime is unconscionable, feel free to ignore it if you can get away with it.
Why avoid the central figure responsible? The changes to the copyright law were rushed through mere weeks from the date that Mickey Mouse would have become a character in public domain. Disney is a sognificantly powerful albeit largely unseen political lobby (behind the war tribunal election judgement supporting Bush, Jr. For example) and will probably have nothing to worry about twenty years from now (or so) when the 90-year mark comes up because obviously everything will be owned by the People's Democratic Republic of America.
2051? As if there won't be an unlimited number of copyright extensions before then. The Public Domain is just a fossilized stratum now.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
I can't say I completely disagree. For things like patents I completely agree and it should be a SHORT amount of time. Just enough in fact to make sure a major corporation can't swoop in a beat you to market because they've invested in manufacturing rather than research. Just because you innovate once doesn't mean others shouldn't be able to use the same ideas once you're had time to commercialize it, however. If two guys can independently invent calculus why can't two guys make a better mouse trap independently and why do they owe money to anyone who has ever worked on a mouse trap.
Copyright of artistic works is a bit different. I'm not sure just anyone should be able to sell a Bob Dylan recording because he recorded it x years ago or sell a Melville book because he wrote it x years ago. I think for artistic items it may be hard to legitimately take away control from the creator while he or she lives. If I'm just profit whoring then I'll still publish but if I'm an art for arts sake kind of guy and I don't care how widely it gets used I might not publish just to maintain control of my creation. That's not the effect I would want to promote. Since copyrighted material is a specific arrangement of words or notes or paint I have less of an issue with the though shall not profit from copies logic. That said conceptual things and ideas should not be subject to the same protections.
That really isn't the problem of corporate personhood, it's a problem of personal apathy. How much did you donate during the last election? Probably none.
Look at what happened in Obama's election campaign......he made over half a billion from individual donors. That is not easy for corporations to match. In politics, the reason corporations have so much power is because people complain about money, but they don't care enough to actually donate to the person of their choice. Corporations win because of apathy.
That is the important point: it doesn't matter WHAT kind of campaign finance laws you have, as long as their is widespread apathy, the corporations will still win.
Also, you completely misunderstand corporate personhood. If a person in a corporation behaves negligently, they can still face criminal charges, for example, like in the BP oil spill.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The requirements are simple:
1. That they act in good faith towards the shareholders
2. That they exercise reasonable care
3. That they have a reasonable belief that the decisions they make are in the best interest of the company
Isn't this what the charter and articles of incorporation are for?
Google's weird corporate charter is what lets them get away with so many things that irked Wall Street.
If the corporate charter says that the environment is more important than maximizing profits,
(and the owners keep 51% of the stock) there's nothing that anyone can do to change the direction of the company.
/If the owners don't keep 51% of the stock, the shareholders could hold a revolt and try to amend the charter.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You might be right from a legal perspective, but the reality is that the way that corporations are set up, their only goal is to maximize profit. The key part behind that is the legal immunity that corporate officers have from prosecution. Granted, it is not absolute, but it is good enough that people can get away with behavior that would get you personally thrown out of any social circle you're in. Add in the fact that the only metrics that count internally are almost always related to how much profit you made the company, and suddenly, you have corporations who act exactly like a sociopath bent on maximizing profit at all cost.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The center laments that works published in 1955 aren't being released. But in fact, the public domain won't expand at all, except through explicit renunciation of copyright.
Here's why.
Works published before 1923 are in the public domain.
Works published between 1923 and 1963, provided that the copyright has been renewed, are copyrighted until 95 years after publication-- 2018 at a minimum.
You might expect that the works of Virginia Woolf, for example, would be freed from copyright,as it has been 70 years since her death in 1941. But her post 1923 works will not enter the public domain until 2019. Provided, of course, that the copyright terms are not further extended in to the far future.
The fee is at the least needed to cover the cost of this system.
That's reasonable.
A second reason is that there won't be a "Copyright Reregistration Service, Inc." where for a one-time low-low-fee the service will automatically take care of all the needed registrations for you!
That's not actually a problem, as long as the registration service also keeps track of who the current and correct owner(s) are so that it can file correct registrations
The third reason is that it needs to stop "frivolous" registrations - there needs to be an expected net economic benefit to the copyright and the fee needs to be at a level where the expected benefit is sufficient to warrant payment of this fee.
Maybe. I'm not so sure that really matters. As long as there's some cost and some effort required, truly "dead" copyrights will be allowed to expire.
My perception is that copyrighted works fall into one of two categories: Works which someone actively cares about, whether or not they're actively exploiting them at the present, and works which are basically forgotten. IMO, one of the biggest problems we have right now is the non-emptiness of the second set, and I think setting even a very, very low barrier for copyright retention would fix that.
Note that I don't have any objection to schemes which dramatically shorten all copyrights, or that make it prohibitively expensive to maintain them long-term. I think both of those make perfect sense. But I think the problems they solve are much less important than the problem of dead works, and they'd obviously be harder to implement.
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The studios claim they need these long copyright terms to safe-guard their profits with the reasoning that hurting their profits will stop them from making more content. Putting aside the notion, for a second, that letting them earn $2 billion instead of $3 billion will result in a massive drop in content creation, I've got to wonder how much this older content is earning them. Yes, Lady and the Tramp gets released from the Disney Vault every so often (are they up to the Super Extreme Platinum edition now?), but how much does it bring in? What about The Seven Year Itch? The End of Eternity? Blue Suede Shoes?
It's probably not possible, but I'd love to see a breakdown of the earnings of the MPAA/RIAA by year of release. I'd be willing to bet that most of their earnings come from works released in the past 20 years. Content 21 years or older probably doesn't constitute much of their earnings. In fact, I think that either way, they lose the argument. If older content isn't earning them much, then why keep it locked under copyright? If it is earning them most of their money, then obviously their copyright control isn't getting them to create new content like they claimed they needed.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
but I'd be surprised if Disney hadn't trademarked the term "Mickey Mouse" and his likeness. That's what prevents you from creating your own Mickey Mouse cartoons
In which country? In the United States, Dastar v. Fox rules out the use of a trademark as an ersatz copyright. It's analogous to the functionality doctrine for trademarks and patents.
How is that possible when the copyright lobby controls which candidates get any press?
It doesn't give you the trademarked character designs.
In my country, a trademark cannot be used as an ersatz copyright after a copyright has expired. Dastar v. Fox.
Copyright should only be 3-5 years anyway. Afterall, if you're not making money on something after that point, it's time to reconsider your career.
The argument for long copyright expressed in an amicus brief by Dr. Seuss Enterprises is that the author of a work should have the privilege of sharing in the profit from an adaptation of the work to a medium invented after the work was published.
The supreme court effectively killed campaign finance reform by declaring corporations as having free speech rights.
You talking about the Citizens United case?
I was never comfortable with the government telling us what kind of political speech was permitted. Citizens United is basically a bunch of people getting together to run ads that they couldn't afford individually; I don't see why that should be prohibited.
And even if you think a big company like GE shouldn't be allowed to donate money (like all the money they gave to Barack Obama) the reality is that they find ways to donate no matter what you do. The best you can do is to require them to do it out in the open and publicly declare how much they donated and to whom.
Pass meaningful finance reform. $200 limit per person. Open up the books fully of any entity lobbying or campaigning. No PACS, no bundling, no "issue ads," no corporate or union money. (A union and corporate money ban needs to be bound together or it favors one side or the other).
Okay, you pass this. Now all the major TV networks pick some junior Democrat guy from Chicago that we have never heard of and relentlessly push him as our next President. How do the Republicans fight this? Under your proposal they can't get together the money to run TV ads.
Better have the government start regulating the content of the TV news! Let's set up a panel of censors who will decide what speech is acceptable and what is not. Except for one tiny little problem... that's massively unConstitutional, and a horrible offensive power grab to the government, and we won't stand for it.
And my example of all the news media lining up to push a Democrat, while taken from recent history, might sound good to Democrats. But you have to imagine that your worst enemies somehow gain the upper hand and then see how much you like the idea. You guys always seem freaked out about Fox News. What if Fox News was watched by 75% of households and had serious power to influence public opinion? Would you be happy to have rules in place that made it impossible for you to afford to run TV ads to counter this influence?
I agree. Never mind our wildest fantasies about completely destroying copyright or whatever; politics is the art of the possible.
I think it is possible to set up a system where a corporation (or an individual) can keep renewing the copyright forever, but if they fail to renew the work becomes public domain. Then Disney will keep "Steamboat Willy" locked up forever, but obscure works by long-defunct companies or individuals will lapse into the public domain.
Even this would require a huge push. For example, games companies don't want all the old abandonware to become actually legal to use; if there is a really decent shoot-em-up you can grab for free, will you buy this year's hot shoot-em-up? But I think this is possible, and it is the best single thing I can think of that is possible.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I'd love to see the pirates and the producers sit down and actually compromise on this whole creeping copyright problem, by going back to the mid-20th century terms. A while back I set up a web site http://pd56.org/ to spotlight works that would have gone Public Domain by now under the old copyright laws. Unfortunately I haven't had time to keep at it, and kinda lost hope that anyone would support the idea.
but copyright lasts forever. If you thought the tech companies and drug companies were bad, the extensions to copyright are worse. Patents expire in a relatively short time frame, but copyright just gets extended. But I don't make a living out of writing stories.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
The Constitution has copyright in it; how can a mere law change it so greatly without requiring an amendment?? This isn't like putting free speech into a cage; this is changing the actual number by "extension" which makes the number basically replaced but using lawyer games to defeat reason. Its more akin to saying corporations are people when corporations (as they are today) never existed when citizen and people had simple clear obvious definitions.
they will change copyright law again so that they don't get into public domain
Mendacem Memorem Esse Oportet
No, his suggestion is equivalent to masturbating because somebody else copyrighted having sex and you can't afford the license.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
If you really want to understand US copyright and what it really serves (not authors!) simply read "How To Fix Copyright" by William Patry. No, I don't have any financial interest in this or any book or publisher, I simply hope more folks become better informed.
One weird bit of law in all states is that you can not usually sue the owners of a company. The company yes, the owners, no.
That's not weird at all. It's practically necessary. The problem is that the owners of a company have little or no direct control over that company's actions.
So they have about as much power then as a voter in a democracy. Yet we are forced to back all the rampant government spending. In fact almost everyone I have talked to has said it would be immoral for the Greeks not to pay their government debts.
And what requirements this case violete?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Company
> we will have to wait until 2051 before being able to use these works without restriction
Don't even think it. Every time Mickey Mouse approaches public domainhood, Disney lays more money on Congress and gets an extension, and they will certainly continue to do so, and Congress is certain to continue to do so. Copyrights are effectively permanent. That's what Eldredge was all about.
So get a job and you'll be able to afford to masturbate, you damned dirty hippy!
True, many of the treasures of 20th century culture are locked up behind copyrights, and will remain so for decades to come. But 21st century? Not as much. So many things are already being given away. Linux? No problem, you're already free to use it, share it, and create distributed works from it. Millions of people are doing so, and society benefits enormously. Wikipedia? In a different age, that would have been a company's crown jewels, something to be tightly controlled, but instead it's given away for free (both in terms of money and freedom). Countless software products, books, audio recordings, data collections, and other works are being given away under open licenses, and that trend is likely to keep growing with time. Companies are starting to open source their products because it's the only way they can compete with the existing open products.
If you believe copyright law is messed up and hurts society, the single best thing you can do is create things and give them away under open licenses. The more that is available without unreasonable restrictions, the less valuable the restricted works become.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
We yearn because this is about _OTHERS_ who sold their work to _NOBODY_. A company is not somebody it's a legal entity designed to restrict liability of individuals for harm they may cause and collect and pool capital investments in an efficient manner. Unlike an author who has a death, an obvious point in time around which which his rights and the good of society can be balanced a company can go on indefinitely and has a inherent disregard for any concerns which don't directly affect short or long-term profitability. The idea that a corporation can own intellectual property without an intellect is not beneficial to our advancement as a species.
Whoa. What about Apple's IP? What about Google's IP? You sound like you're advocating that Google be forced to release the source code to their search engine, and that Apple give up its copyrights and trademarks. Do you plan to post this advocacy on the next /. article on Google?
Or maybe (my guess) you're just trying to justify the illegal downloading habit of many college kids and twentysomethings. It was a poorly thought out argument. But here on /., the mods give you a score of "5, insightful", while the rather cogent post that you responded to became "Troll, -1" so that nobody would read it. Talk about a monoculture!
I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
With X years no matter what as opposed to death-based:
no particular incentive to have creators killed, no skewed term length if creators die for other reasons or live unexpectedly long
no need to determine which death(s) to count for multi-creator works.
easier for other people to plan to do stuff with copyrighted material as it becomes PD
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The Baby Boomers seemingly split into two camps (with individuals sometimes crossing over) in the late 60s:
Group A transformed their hippie-era beliefs into volunteering, donating, helping others, etc. after getting regular jobs & having kids.
Group B is known for the "greed is good" pro-corporate mentality; they were the ones eventually referred to as yuppies.
The two can look identical on the outside, hold the same jobs, and live as neighbors, to be clear -- it's how they acted out their political beliefs that makes all the difference.
Apathy Sucks, Nobody for President!
Thanks, Sonny Boner ...er, Bono.
And thank Jesus for that tree.
I'm referring only to copyrights, not trademarks or patents.
I'm a bit torn on the idea of taking away control while a person is still alive but I think some people may, uh, live too long. The other problem with tying copyright terms solely to the author's lifetime is that a person might publish one day and get hit by a car the next. Shouldn't his wife and kids inherit the rights to his work?
I don't think you can just address copyright. I think the concept of owning an idea or at least the right to commercialize it is key to setting the context of the argument for all legally protected intellectual property. That said, for the purposes of a simpler slashdot discussion I'll limit it to copyrights of artistic content.
Good question on the hit by a bus thing and I don't have a good answer. The standard method is to do an either/or sort of thing with the longest running one winning out. I'm not sure that's a good or a bad answer.
I'm not sure his wife and kids should inherit anything given that their only claim to the thing is that they're related to the creator. What makes the claim of a great,great,great,great,great,grandson any less valid than that of a son if blood ties are the argument for it. Can an item only be inherited once? Can it only be inherited by relatives or can friends get willed IP? Is it on the creator to make other provisions for his scions such as life insurance once he has a commercially viable work? Should legal protection of artistic works that have been published be inheritable since they derive their value from the interaction between the creator and the public? Should the creator have any say in the matter at all after he is gone?
I don't have the answers but I think someone should take a hard look at the questions and figure out what we're trying to accomplish with IP laws and concepts and how to achieve those goals because what's happening now does not appear to be achieving said goals and seems to protect and support corporations rather than creators and consumers of artistic works.
Now you know why there are no new jobs.
stagnate as swamp water.
I think it's reasonable to deal with copyrights, trademarks and patents differently because, despite certain common factors, they are different. And I don't limit my ideas about copyright to artistic materials. Technical journals and manuals should, IMO, be handled the same way but possibly with different term lengths.
I lazily used "wife and kids" as an example because they are the usual beneficiaries. I should have said that the author should be able to will his copyrights to whatever legal entity he wants, including the public domain. By the same token he should be able to sell them before he dies. But, no transfer should change the fixed term.
Corporations are supposed to fight for profit, but within the laws. They're not meant to influence the laws themselves. Laws are supposed to be determined by politicians, on the basis of what their constituents want.
Precisely. Elected representatives serve their constituents. Ordinary persons like you, me, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Enron, and Disney Corp..
-- Terry
It's the popular works in particular that need to become public domain. Should the Tolkien estate lord over adaptations of the professor's works for all eternity?
Play Command HQ online
The case is irrelevant - it is old law, and not representative of the current legal situation. It is also widely misinterpreted, because Ford's reasons for withholding dividends are often misattributed to a desire to do public good -- he wanted to do no such thing, but rather starve the complainants (the founders of the Dodge motor co) of resources that they were using to set up in competition to him.
See notes here, paying particular attention to the "significance" section: http://www.enotes.com/topic/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Company
Capitalism requires the lack of government interference in the market, not the presence of it. You've got it backwards, chief.
You've misunderstood. Yes, Mickey Mouse will be copyrighted forever under a pay-to-play scheme, but currently, they're gaming congress to pass unconstiutional retroactive copyright extensions to make sure that happens, anyhow. Their desire to hang on to Mickey is what has caused our unnecessary problem with abandoned works being lost.
So this is the compromise... if they want longer protection for a given work, they have to pay for it. The fee needs to be substantial, and increasing every year longer they want exclusivity. Big companies won't have to be subject to public domain right away, but they'll have to pay a hell of a lot of money for the privlidge. And if that means Disney, Universal, Sony, WB, and others are paying so much in copyright extension fees that our income taxes can be redcued, then we all win, including the independent author.
Like it or not, it's a clever hack to give everyone what they want. It's fine to say you'd prefer a fixed term of X, but it will absolutely, positively never ever ever happen. Entertainment companies have far too much money riding on it, and will use all their political capital to squash any such thing becoming law, so you might as well be talking about building codes for fairie apartment complexes.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I get what you're saying, I just think we need a more systematic ground up look at the whole IP arena. To be clear I'm not saying they all need to be handled the same, I'm saying they all need to be considered with how they affect each other and the laws rewritten with that in mind. The idea of professional journals is a prime example of why. If it contains research but the copyright and possible patents are way out of sync then what good does it do to reform one without the other.
I'm not actually against your idea for copyrights. It may be the perfect answer but I don't think it is as easy as you make it out to be and solving it in a vacuum worries me that we'll end up in the same place again after a short period of time. But then again I could be wrong. At least I got a good slashdot conversation out of it for the first time in a while. =)
If I build my own house, no one says that upon my death, it should immediately be available for anyone at all to use it. No one minds that upon my death I can transfer ownership of it to my kids in order to give them a place to live, or that I should build houses or other physical things and expect not to have a right of ownership and distribution that I can transfer at will. Even if I choose to open my house to the public, by giving tours of it, no one would say upon my death my house should immediately become free for all and neither I nor my heirs have any say in it. If I rent my house to people, no one argues I should instead give it away for free, or that all house rentals should be free and people should only rent houses on the side as a hobby.
But we have this double standard with artistic works that can be digitally reproduced. Intellectual property is somehow weaker than physical property despite being more or less the same in terms of time and effort to create and the same need to make a living off of it. I don't see why if I can pass on my house to my kids, I can't pass on the rights to my written work. Or choose to sell those rights to another to make money I might need (especially for end of life or crisis care, considering how poorly most non-A list authors are compensated in general.)
Big companies won't have to be subject to public domain right away, but they'll have to pay a hell of a lot of money for the privlidge.
They won't. If you don't want to force every independent author into the public domain, copyright extension has to be extremely cheap and easy, which means all cooperations can extend the copyright on all their work for essentially free, as whatever the fee will be, it will be to tiny for them to care about.
The independent author on the other side will run into issues all the time, as even with an easy and cheap system, the overhead to register every blog post, twitter post, images on flickr and what ever will be to much to bother with.
Rather dense, aren't you? This is incredibly obvious, and furthermore, I specifically mentioned it in my previous post. It's a simple matter of having a graded system. Sure, we'll start with a free first 5 years of copyright just to be safe. Then after 5 years you either pay or lose it. Then in another 5 years, the fee doubles. 5 more years it doubles again... and again, and again. Independent authors get their automatic 5 years, and a nice cheap extension to 10. At the 15 or 20 year mark, if your work is a smash hit and still selling well, then you can afford to pay the increasing fee... if it isn't, then you let it lapse, and hope it won't become a valuable property later on.
And that's just one option. Others have suggested requiring appraisals for any copyrights a company is holding, and taxing them on the estimated value. This would also make sure independent publishers wouldn't be unduly burdened, while companies kept paying to maintain exclsuivity on their higly valuable properties.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Extending the copyrights is a whittling away of fair use, a little at a time. When the current copyright expires, they will find a way to extend it in perpetuity. And the rules will be grandfathered in.
Pretty soon the Bible will be copyrighted. King James descendants will be entitled to royalties.
I have certain dislikes against the copyright laws that are prolonged. Corporations can last 100 years and they do not want to lose the milk cows. Should a published work be owned forever? Here is what will happen if you say yes.
You will eventually encounter the disappearance altogether of copyright laws allowing any fair use. Can you imagine libraries will not be allowed to permit borrowing of material, unless you pay a royalty for eacn library loan? Corporate greed makes this all come to pass.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Then in another 5 years, the fee doubles. 5 more years it doubles again...
Yes, and in practice that means individual authors get 10 years of copyright while cooperations get 70 years (or whatever). I simply don't see how such a scheme could end up not punishing the individual author and have little to no effect on big cooperations.
At the 15 or 20 year mark, if your work is a smash hit and still selling well, then you can afford to pay the increasing fee...
And again, I just don't see the benefit. As that's exactly the opposite of how things should be. Why should the already successful work be the only one that gets even more protection? It already was successful and made it's money back. Copyright should encourage new works, not companies milking past successes.
Others have suggested requiring appraisals for any copyrights a company is holding, and taxing them on the estimated value.
In theory that sounds like a good idea, but in practice that could turn into a heap load of paper work, which again, won't bother the big cooperation with it's staff of lawyers much.
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.
Very true, and while I hate some aspects of corporations, they are necessary. They are bad in that they separate the owners from the means of production, and this are inherently anti-capitalist, but that could be fixed while still allowing their function.
I think their personhood needs to be removed, but limited liability is, as you say, necessary to progress. Almost nothing would get done otherwise.
"Instead of seeing these enter the public domain in 2012, we will have to wait until 2051 before being able to use these works without restriction."
I suspect we will have to wait a lot longer than that! I am sure many more extensions will be added before then. I believe the ultimate goal is to never allow anything to enter the public domain ever! Then they can work on removing what's already there!
I see what you mean. The main thing is that something needs to be done to break the dynasties that are being built by a few at the expense of the many.
Then in another 5 years, the fee doubles. 5 more years it doubles again...
Yes, and in practice that means individual authors get 10 years of copyright while cooperations get 70 years (or whatever). I simply don't see how such a scheme could end up not punishing the individual author and have little to no effect on big cooperations.
Depends where the fee goes. It could be set up to fund small/independent arts programs, for example.
Living is no laughing matter: you must live with great seriousness like a squirrel, for example- I mean without looking for something beyond and above living, I mean living must be your whole occupation. Nazim Hikmet
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