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What Could Have Been In the Public Domain Today, But Isn't
An anonymous reader writes with an article from Duke Law on what would have entered the public domain today were it not for the copyright extensions enacted in 1978. From the article: "What could have been entering the public domain in the U.S. on January 1, 2013? Under the law that existed until 1978, works from 1956. The films Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, The Best Things in Life Are Free, Forbidden Planet, The Ten Commandments, and Around the World in 80 Days; the stories 101 Dalmations and Phillip K. Dick's The Minority Report; the songs 'Que Sera, Sera' and 'Heartbreak Hotel', and more. What is entering the public domain this year? Nothing."
And Rick Falkvinge shares his predictions for what the copyright monopoly will try this year. As a bit of a music fan, excessive copyright hits home often: the entire discographies of many artists I like have been out of print for at least a decade. Should copyright even be as long as in the pre-1978 law? Is the Berne Convention obsolete and in need of breaking to actually preserve cultural history?
...All the stuff that made it to the public domain that was retroactively clawed back after Congress extended copyright and didn't grandfather stuff that had already lapsed.
I don't mean to sound rude or ignorant, but really...who cares? Will the foundations of society crumble because someone can't get out that ONE GOOD Hamlet remake where everyone dresses like they're in present times, but speak in Shakespearean language? We should focus on the REAL issues of copyright and that's the lack of ownership of digital copies or something serious.
The the UK, publishers started printing new works from living authors without giving them anything and without permission. That is why copyright was created. It was never intended to restrict private citizens, just to prevent commercial exploitation that made authors starved.
Seems to me we have reached that point again and copyright is only a perverted shadow of what it was intended as. Dropping it completely for non-commercial use and 8 or 12 years for commercial use would have tremendous benefits society as a whole.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This old rule made more sense if you ask me. And notice that, despite copyright covering only 'the work' itself rather than particular instantiations of it, the music industry was still able to grow huge and make tons of money under the old law.
The software equivalent would be to hold source code copyrightable, but not binaries. And this would make even more sense.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Then it should be treated like your house.
Taxes paid on it.
You must maintain it or have it reposessed.
If you don't evict squatters after a time they become the new owners (effective abandonment)
Public gets rights to access.
Pay tax on your "property" and if you let it fall into ruin, you lose it.
This is the obvious way to make it not matter at all what they lock down for 100s of years. Laurel and Hardy used to be on every Christmas when I was a child. I haven't seen any of their films now for a long long time. Probably they're all sitting in a vault somewhere turning to dust. I guess it is a reminder than in 10^3, 10^4, 10^5, 10^6 ... years eventually it will all be lost. So, we lost all our culture early because of greedy people. Well let them have it. I'm happy to opt out of their world. What was our culture for anyway? We seem to have lost the point of it. Meanwhile at street level human creativity remains unstoppable. Those with the itch to create something will create it no matter what.
You only need to go as far as the MAME, or the (S)NES libraries to realize copyright is broken. Licensing issues or lame owners prevent at least 80% of these titles from ever seeing the legitimate light of day ever again. Copyright has become a cultural lockup, nothing more.
no new movie, has been made in the last 30 some years because of these copyright laws
no new book has been written
no new music made
You missed a major consequence: we don't see a lot of old movies, old books, old songs. Because no one knows who the copyright belongs to, so no one dares reissue or adapt them in case they get sued. Or the owner is known but doesn't think it's profitable to release, so no one else can ever do so either.
crazy, the only movies are the old copyrighted ones
no new movie, has been made in the last 30 some years because of these copyright laws no new book has been written no new music made
we are forced to keep on buying the same old movies over and over
It's not about being able to create new stuff. It's about ensuring unhindered access of our culture and knowledge to our children. Just imagine the possibilities if you can search, catalog and read/view/listen through hundreds of works by artistes who're dead for years, and build upon them. The current copyright law only benefits the greedy corporates, so much creativity is lost just because of that.
If you don't get source, the binary is not expressive and cannot be used to advance the state of the art, therefore should not be copyrightable.
I think that most people would agree that if you had the source code (and it WAS the source code) for the binary sold, then this could be copyrighted together since the binary is merely an operable version of the source code.
But if you don't have source, you don't get copyrights on either the code (it is a trade secret) or the binary (it isn't copyrightable on its own).
Remember: just because JK Rowling's books are "Open source" (if you can read the language it is written in), this neither stops JKR making money off the work nor means people can just make a new "Barry Hotter and the Chamber of Commerce" if it would be too much a rip-off.
It's hard to detect sarcasm on the internet, so I'm going to assume you're serious. :-)
we are forced to keep on buying the same old movies over and over
Quite. Only the big studios can afford to license the old films for remakes.
So Disney's big break was with a film based on a folk story written down by the Brothers Grimm - it was out of copyright. Nobody to pay, nobody to clear changes with... Does the modern film-maker looking for a break have such luxuries?
Can any new film maker do what Disney did? Modern copyright probably makes it very difficult indeed, and somewhat risky as there may always be someone who crawls out of the woodwork to sue you after you've done the expensive hard work...
So we are forced to see nothing but franchises and remakes of old films, as they are "safe" in copyright terms.
A great pity.
The Berne convention isn't just obsolete, it should never have been adopted in the first place. Its most odious aspect is the prohibition of registration requirements, creating the large orphan works problem we have now.
The irony about the Berne convention is that Europeans pushed for it thinking that they would be the largest beneficiaries under it because Europe had traditionally been so culturally productive. But it turned out that it was instead a boon to the US movie and music industries, and they have learned to play the copyright game very well. Now, Europeans are crying foul even though they are responsible for the mess in the first place.
Actually, shortening it would reflect the changes in technology and society.
The original copyright (IIRC of 7 years) was adequate for the time when it was invented. It took a creator a long while to get his works into a format where it can be reproduced easily, reproduction took quite a bit of time and making the item known to create a stock of customers took even longer. Those 7 years was pretty much what it took to get the item produced and sold.
Today, creation, reproduction and advertising can be done in mere hours, maybe days. A copyright of about 7 months would reflect the reality of today.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, thank you. I would puke having Mickey Mouse danc8ng with 101 Dalmatians to the Queens "we are the champions" in the new, exciting corn flakes ad. Seriously, ladies and gentelmen: copyright is evil and im fine with this.
affect the ability of authors to make a living from their work.
This is the mistake. In 1991 I helped change the contaminated hydraulic oil in an industrial cardboard bailer/press. It was a 100% success. No one thinks it unusual that I was paid up front in one lump sum for my labor at that time of dumping in uncountable bottles of hyd oil rather than 10 cents every time someone uses that cardboard bailer for the remainder of my life plus the next 74 years, or whatever it is.
If you shrunk the copyright duration down to roughly how long it took the author to write a book, it would hardly result in the downfall of western civ. Lets give them a decade. That sounds realistically fair. For example, I'm going to cough up $15 for Stross's next book, not wait ten years. In fact I buy all his books on the day of release, so a 1 day copyright wouldn't realistically affect his income from me.
If you eliminated it completely, Stross would either have to live on a pre-order bounty system (no more laundry series until he gets $50K in the bank!) or speeches / book signings, or just apathy. Most likely it would result in the death of the middlemen. Yes I could buy a copy from a cheater of the equivalence of those shady copied DVD sellers, but in the modern internet era its no challenge anymore for anyone in the world to buy a copy of the book directly from Stross. In fact I'd throw in an extra $20 for a personally autographed copy, which under the current middleman system, my extra $20 probably represents his share of about 1K sales.
Would I buy a copy of HP Lovecrafts work from one of his heirs? Hmm hard question. God knows they don't deserve the money merely for having the luck of being born to the author. On the other hand if they guilt tripped me by maintaining an museum or using the money for a touring exhibition of artifacts or even something like a tuition scholarship for young wannabe authors, well, yeah, they'd be doing enough good work to deserve my cash.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If houses were like IP, those bricklayers would be rich, after all, they could charge everyone living in the house, even 70 years after they died.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Seems to me we have reached that point again and copyright is only a perverted shadow of what it was intended as. Dropping it completely for non-commercial use and 8 or 12 years for commercial use would have tremendous benefits society as a whole.
Are you saying that I as a professional composer should let companies use my older music for free in commercial contexts, to benefit society? How could that possibly benefit anyone except the companies that already are completely nickel-and-diming freelancers like myself?
This is an interesting idea. While I'd rather see copyright abolished completely, what about this:
* if you hold copyright on work X, you declare how much it is worth
* a periodic tax is levied, based on the value you declared
* at any moment, you may declare a higher value. It can go up but never down (valuable works that are no longer profitable should go public).
* at any moment, you may abandon the copyright, irrevocably putting the work into public domain
* anyone may buy the copyright from you for the listed price
* if the other party intends to buy it to keep (as opposed to freeing it to the public), you may instead raise the value [1]
* the tax rate increases with time
[1]. You could have immediately bought it back for the same price, this rule merely resolves such a loop for the benefit of the old holder.
Such a scheme would ensure any copyright is taxed based on its fair market valuation.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Sure, pre-internet, that would work. Now authors can release and sell books without the publishers help.
It's pretty clear to me that nothing will ever again be allowed to enter the public domain.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Taxes paid on it.
Dead people earn a lot of money, and pay taxes on it: http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2012/1024_dead-celebrities.html
And no, you can't take it with you, unfortunately.
Vampires are undead, who live off the living. In the case of celebrities, there are living people who are living off the dead.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
In the case of celebrities, there are living people who are living off the dead.
Ghouls, in other words
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
There's another side of the coin, since that means that software protected under GPL would loose its protection
GPL is designed to protect users from companies who would take free software, add compelling features to its own product, and restrict users of the improved product. Under a 14+14 year scheme like that of the original Copyright Act, such a company would have to replicate the existing 28 years of improvements before doing that.
In my opinion it's much better if copyright holders voluntarily decides to contribute their work to the common good, rather than doing that by force.
Some people claim that allowing people to "voluntarily decide[] to contribute their work to the common good" destroys the market and then go and successfully sue anybody who makes another program that performs the same function as their own copyrighted program.
Sure, you wouldn't want to wait ten years to buy the book. But suppose the publisher waits ten years to publish a book, so they don't have to pay the author anything?
Then add up to the first 25 years of unpublished status to the term. (This is what the U.S. already does for works made for hire and pre-1978 works.) So assuming the ten-year copyright term proposed by vlm, the publisher would have to wait thirty-five years, by which time the publisher's exclusive option on the manuscript will likely will have expired several times over and the author will have pitched it to other publishers.
I wonder how long it will take the music companies to start suing over those [short] strings [of notes].
They already are suing over these strings. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, for example.
Um..."the economic life of the work to the author" is about as long as there's a copyright term. Choosing that term is based in part on the curve of sales tapering off over time, but if it were merely a consideration of the author's economic future with a work, copyright would never end. Further, the idea that today's society consumes older works in general is very preposterous except in that re-implementation of very old Greek works keep popping up. Of course, as you note, people used to have a lot less leisure time long ago. Yet oddly people still did a lot of reading and then, like now, it was centered on the popular works of the day with few people really reading classical works.
No, the copyright system is to protect society's interests; that's why copyright terms end at some time--late enough to create an incentive to authors but short enough to hopefully allow society at large to prosper from the new ideas introduced. Having said, the very point is that one can't borrow or purchase a lot of works precisely because the copyright term today is so long that surviving copies of a work are often incredibly rare and because the ownership of the copyright is often enough in dispute there's often no clear legal means to make more copies.
Which is why, I presume, you support all authors paying royalties on plot ideas from the Greeks, words and grammar from the English, and religious, moral, musical, and cultural themes from Mesopotamia. It's not like authors create all those things out of whole clothe and so they can't expect "to get something for free". Oh, right, at some point it's recognized that to create indefinitely copyright or patents or trademarks on things is actually a bad thing.
Yep. Because we all know fairy tales, which were heavily copied by Disney and a large basis for its economic success, were all sourced from one creator who created them perfectly in their original. It's not like a lot of oral copiers took fairy tales, "made it better" when they told the story, and the very fact that actually better stories were more likely to be copied meant those versions were the ones we know more today... Oh, right, what you're talking about is people who are wholly consumers. Gee, I wonder why, in a system in which copyright lasts a lifetime and then some, people would be less inclined to take existing ideas and experiment with them. It's almost like they've been trained to believe they either have to (a) consumer soley, (b) be sued if they try to create upon an extant idea (fan fiction is a starting place for a lot of writers, programmers are more inclined to clone an extant game first to learn, etc), or (c) be very good at changing the window dressings on a story to avoid (b) given how very little really new stuff there is to create.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html
I got the idea earlier from someone's slashdot sig around then which I saw in passing -- wish I could figure out who. The sig was something like: "If it is intellectual property, why isn't it taxed?"
In the variant I proposed, anyone could pay the money to put the copyright into the public domain (not purchase it for themselves).
Lawrence Lessig proposed something simpler -- a small ($50) tax after fifty years to re-register a copyright. That way at least all the abandoned works would become public domain when the tax was not paid on them (which would be a matter of public record). So, even some simple steps could be a huge step forward.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Are you saying that I as a professional composer should let companies use my older music for free in commercial contexts, to benefit society? How could that possibly benefit anyone except the companies that already are completely nickel-and-diming freelancers like myself?
It benefits society to have multiple sources for copies of works, and to have various sorts of copies of those works. You can go to a bookstore and buy copies of Shakespeare, and some of them will be of high quality, and others will be cheap, and you can go online and download the same works for free.
It benefits society to have derivative works. Other composers can create works based on yours without having to get permission (which may be withheld) or having to meet your standards of quality (which they might not even want to do, due to differing tastes), and other authors can use your works as soundtracks for films or such.
It benefits society to have works publicly performed. A commercial but low-budget orchestra or venue might be able to afford to perform your material based on ticket sales, selling ads in the program, etc., but might not be able to pay licensing fees as well. If the material is in the public domain, it might reach more people.
And it benefits you to have a thriving public domain, since unless you're some sort of weird ascetic, you're likely to listen to more works than you create, and the cheaper they are, the easier this is for you, all else being equal. And if you don't have to seek permission or pay licensing fees, you're freer to create derivative works based on those works.
Just because something benefits companies that are hostile to you doesn't mean that it can't benefit everyone. Those companies benefit from taxpayer-supported police, and fire departments, and judicial systems, and so forth, as we all do. Dismantling them out of spite would just harm ourselves more.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
So if I'm writing a song, what steps should I take to make sure that I don't accidentally infringe the copyright in any of the millions of copyrighted songs under the control of BMI and ASCAP? To make the example more concrete, what should I do to keep another Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music from happening?
In benefits society because it's an incentive for you to write even more music, which benefits us all.
The incentive would be for companies to not commission new music, but instead use the free ones from a vastly bigger pool. I'm barely making ends meet as it is, but I do it because I love this work. However if production companies were offered the amazing windfall profit of free contemporary music, I'd have to get another job. That's the cold hard math. The rich composers would just make a little less. But they don't really have to care. I do.
I have to say I feel really sad reading stuff like this. I feel a big kinship with the geek culture in general, having grown up loving my VIC-20, C-64, Amiga, tinkering with open OSs, and in general just being strongly anti-DRM and pro open source. My music background is strongly influenced by my demoscene work, freely distributed of course, like a lot of my other music. But I feel completely alienated by the pro big business turn the discourse has taken. I've been a strong advocate for file sharing and consumer freedom in general, but I've started to feel I've perhaps made a mistake. Because it seems the only groups caring about my right to tell a company not to put my music in a shitty TV ad that they profit off immensely are the same ones suing people for file sharing.
It's almost like there's no one who cares about the little guy anymore. It's just big technology interests like Google and Netflix that would love free content and keep all the money to themselves, versus the big media interests that also would love to keep all the money to themselves. I'm clearly in neither camp. I hope my impression is wrong and the silent majority in the open source movement still believes in protecting the little guy even if he happens to only create content for a living.
Because you'd be free to use other people's older music to make derivative works.
Considering the completely recycled nature of most of today's music, I really hope it doesn't become even more derivative. However, for wider use interesting mashups, sure. But that seems like a niche benefit compared to the immense harm I see in screwing over people like this. Note though that even the existing legislation is too weak to protect the original artist here, because the big business interests are so powerful.
I think the next copyright extension will be very hard to pass. Back in 1976 and 1998 when copyright extensions were passed, it was not very obvious that out of copyright materials were easier to obtain. Project Gutenberg existed in 1998, but it was not very well known. Now, most people know about Project Gutenberg or Google Books. It will be much harder for the copyright term extension lobby to argue for term extension when the downsides are so obvious. I guess we will what happens before 2018.
Now for some software if you need a old ver for say an older os or even older cpu's (think mac 68K and even ppc) and they don't sell the older ver any more. What can you do download it? try to find it on e-bay?
also there is a lot of abandonware that you can't buy at all.
By the same token though, if the original publisher waits until the copyright has expired there's nothing to stop a competing publisher from immediately duplicating it and selling at half-price. If you know the original publisher is completely ripping off the author anyway, why wouldn't you wait a few weeks longer to get the half-priced book? More to the point, why would the author sign a contract with a company that behaved in such a manner? They might be able to screw over one author once, but then they're out of business. Better all around if a company with such aspirations plays it straight and simply purchases an exclusive royalty-free license outright. They'd have a hard time attracting market-proven authors, but the (presumably) larger up-front payment might actually be attractive to many more niche authors.
And that of course is ignoring the fact that we no longer live in a world where publishers are a necessary intermediary - digital distribution, e-readers, and print-on-demand means that book publishers are entering a situation not unlike music publishers have been struggling with. The big difference being that book publishers haven't built their business around artificially inflating the careers of a few superstars and completely screwing over their contracted artists, so an equitable solution may actually be possible.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The Finnish state provides a number of means of support for composers that help insulate them from market forces and filesharing. Even if recordings of your work were massively pirated (or no one bought recordings because they are provided free in our country's excellent public libraries), your bills would still be paid. Thus the arist is supported but music listeners do not need to be hassled about where they get their music from.
But I see from your website that you do not write art music, but rather scores for foreign lowbrow cinema and the like. If you have chosen to forsake public funding and work in a corporate milieu, than filesharing should be the least of your worries about exploitation, as your creative energies are already entirely at the manipulation of corporations.
No, the Berne convention isn't "better", it merely sets minimum requirements. All European members have stronger requirements than the minimum set by Berne. The reason the Berne convention isn't more severe than it is is probably that the US opposed it.
I think that would be good. But I think the most disastrous part of the Berne convention is the fact that it makes registration requirements impossible; registration requirements would eliminate a lot of the legal problems with copyrights: orphan works, takedown notices by people who don't own the rights, verification of ownership, etc.
The copyright term was intended to reflect the economic life of the work to the author
Not at all.
In the modern world, the economic life of works is usually pretty short after each publication in a different medium.
A morning newspaper, like a mayfly, runs through most of its economic value in just a few hours.
A typical book has a lifespan of 6-18 months in hardback, and 6-18 months in paperback; a book that still has notable sales after a couple of years is rare. You may think it happens a lot, if you think about the many classic books you see at the store, but really it's minuscule when you consider the vast number of books that don't stay in print.
Movies have short lifespans per publication, but get republished a lot (taking publication in a broad sense inclusive of performance). They come out at first run theaters, and last a few weeks, maybe a month, but usually every week after the opening weekend gets worse and worse; it gets fewer showings, and at worse times, and is steadily displaced by newer movies. Finally it leaves the first run theater and goes to the second run theater, where the ticket prices are less and so are the revenues. Eventually it's out of theaters entirely, and goes to tv. It'll be on pay-per-view, then it'll be published for home video and hit the rental market, where it has a similar spike of popularity and then sells less and less (unless there's a format switch, but Bluray hasn't been a smash success, and we may be seeing the end of that sort of thing). It goes to premium cable channels, then basic cable, then major broadcast networks, and before you know it, it's the Saturday Afternoon Movie on some little independent tv station. The whole process can be stretched out over years, which is impressive, but the original box office take is generally a lot more than the licensing fee that a UHF station will pay.
Textbooks for subjects that don't change a lot -- math, high school science in places without religious nuts, grammar -- may also enjoy unusually long lives, but it's a pretty limited market to begin with.
And going back to the beginning of it all, the 14+14 terms from the Statute of Anne have nothing to do with the economic lifetime of works in the early 18th century. Fourteen years was the term that a patent monopoly could be granted back in the old days, and one monopoly being like another, the term length was adopted for copyrights. The choice of 14 years IIRC was twice the length of an apprenticeship at the time, the idea being that a master with a patent could train a couple of sets of apprentices with the new arts. So it's all fairly arbitrary, really. Certainly no one was doing careful analysis of what was best.
The copyright system is to protect the creator's interests
Utterly wrong. In the US, at least, copyright exists to promote the progress of science -- a public benefit. It doesn't exist for the benefit of authors at all.
The consumers already have a legitimate way to obtain the work -- purchase it or borrow it from a library or a friend.
You might want to check out the Kirtsaeng case currently before the Supreme Court; the publishers are trying to prevent people from legitimately borrowing copies from libraries and friends. No surprise there; publishers hate libraries.
Copyright consumers don't add anything to society as it pertains to artistic works beyond their ability to pay for it.
Copyright consumers are society. Immersion in our culture, and access to our learning, history, and arts is vital for a healthy, active, educated society.
Personally, I don't have any sympathy for people wanting to get something for free.
So you are saying that authors should be obligated to pay for their copyrights, and that they shouldn't just be granted them automatically?
Personally, I wouldn't say that I have sympathy for people who want thin
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Apparently yes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Case in point: Muppet Babies. Go try to find a (legal) copy of that anywhere. You might be able to find some old VHS tapes on Amazon, but no DVDs, Blu-Rays, streaming, etc. Why? Because the show used music and clips from movies. To put the shows on DVD, you would need to get rights to every single movie clip and song snippet they used. Even if said snippet was 50 years old. The complexity of this is so overwhelming that there is no Muppet Babies DVD out there.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
For a patent you don't get grace so why should you for copyright? If you come up with a great idea and spend 20 yrs raising the money and building the factory that is your problem but come up with a new jingle? Take your sweet time finding the perfect label to sign with and wait for Christmas before you launch it, no problem. There is even more expiry on a lot of copyright stuff anyways though especially non-fiction and software. Word 98 anyone? ... Anyone? How many people are reading Borland C++ books, or books about the dotcom bust? A lot of books start smelling like month old cabbage quite quickly they either got to publish it or let it go. This is probably why a lot of books get advances upfront because few top notch people are going to bother spending 6 months to right a book about the latest flavor of OS X only to have a couple month window to try to get published sell it before the next version is getting hyped.
That was UK, and long, long ago.
Copyright in the United States was intended to serve the public (it even says so in the Constitution) by encouraging new works by granting creators an exclusive right to their works for a limited time. That limited time was originally 15 (or 17?) years, same as patents.
I argue that it should be the same now. Certainly no more than 20 years.
Are you saying that I as a professional composer should let companies use my older music for free in commercial contexts, to benefit society?
Well, depending on HOW OLD that work is, that answer varies from no, to maybe, to a definitive YES - something that was very much true of copyright laws back when the term was considerably shorter.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
I make computer games in my spare time. I put them for free on my website as a portfolio and because I'm a generally nice guy.
That is nice.
In your case I'm required to pay extra taxes because I've created something that I want to share for free under my own terms.
Well, I'm not the earlier poster, I can't comment on his proposal, but mine is probably not too different.
Provided that no one else has a copyright or patent that would prohibit you from doing so, having a copyright doesn't help you. A copyright isn't a right to share a work; it's a right to prevent other people from sharing a work. If your work is in the public domain, you can still host your games on your own website, you can put a credit in the game, and you can ask for feedback.
A copyright is only useful if you want to keep other people from hosting them as well, making modifications, etc. If you would've created and published your games even if you couldn't control what other people do with them, why do you feel a need to? If you wouldn't've created and published it without that control, that's fine, but if you're getting power over other people, some sort of quid pro quo is hardly too much to ask.
I think that for published works, copyrights should only be granted if the rightful applicant registers the copyright with the Copyright Office. Further, the copyright term should be quite short, with a number of renewals available (depending perhaps on the type of work), provided that the rightful applicant files for a renewal in a timely fashion. And there should be some fee associated with registration and renewal, though it should probably be fairly modest; the idea is simply to present an easily-jumped hurdle so that the applicant has to think about whether or not he wants a copyright, without actually being a prohibitive amount.
Patent fees can vary depending on whether the inventor is a small or large entity (e.g. a single person working in a garage or IBM); perhaps the fees for copyrights could vary depending on the applicant's ability to pay (although again, they should still be large enough even for the smallest author to have to stop and think).
This is all because copyrights are intended to be an incentive to authors to create and publish works which otherwise would not have been created and published, all in order to increase the size of the public domain as fully and rapidly as possible. If an author would have created and published a work regardless of copyright, he didn't need the incentive, and shouldn't receive it. Since we can't read minds, the best way to determine who should get a copyright and who shouldn't is to have them identify themselves. If an author cares about copyright, he will take action to get one; if the author does not care, he will take no action at all. Thus it has to be an opt-in system.
A modest fee helps to keep applicants from just mindlessly getting copyrights even when unnecessary. After all, even the internal memos and papers generated by a company in the ordinary course of business are usually copyrightable. If they can automatically get rights over them that they don't otherwise care about, they very well may, just to cover their asses. But if it affects their bottom line, they won't bother unless it's worth it on a per-work basis. In fact, we even know from our long and distinguished history with copyright registrations and renewals that most works won't be copyrighted, and most copyrighted works won't be renewed -- getting them into the public domain all the faster because no one actually cares enough to keep them out when it comes down to time, effort, and money.
(People usually like to object that this is onerous for photographers, but we already have procedures for registering multiple works under a single application now. There's no reason to think that photographers would have a hard time of it, though I bet that as a rule they too would not bother with copyrights for most of their photos
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I would also like to add that every time anyone uses the word "consumer" it denigrates everyone whom they're referring to. Consumers have no rights, dignity, or free agency. They exist solely to be exploited.
Citizens, people, customers, et. al. are better words to use rather than consumer. The consumer concept is destroying us and our whole way of life.
"However if production companies were offered the amazing windfall profit of free contemporary music"
Are you seriously labeling music from 1956 "contemporary"? That's a stretch. In 1956, my parents weren't even born yeat and my grandmother wasn't allowed to Vote in Mississippi. We hadn't even been to the moon yet.
I understand where you're coming from, but no offense intended: I seriously think you are overvaluing your artistic contributions if you're willing to label something from the late 50's as "contemporary".
And that sort of music is actually fairly movie-specific. It's not like you can film another movie and "lift" the score from another to use it - it's completely wrong and generates the wrong mood, etc.
Scores are very source-specific and are designed to fit the theme, mood and action in the movie. Sometimes a movie trailer will use another movie's score (I think the very early Robocop promo trailers used the Terminator score), but that's just a 30 second clip.
At best, a composer will use a score written by someone else for inspiration for a sequel - but that's because the themes are identifiable to that series.
People who are into soundtracks use them as a way to :relive" sequences of the film - a score by a good composer will evoke the same feelings that happened in the movie. In fact, a score is often the primary emotion manipulator in a movie - take it away and the movie will feel lacking. But take away the pictures and the impact of the movie will still be there.
The only worry as a score composer? The current era of Hollywood remakes where they take 15+ year old films and remake them, at which point the new composer will draw inspiration from the old score.
I do not get paid for work I did 8 years ago and I don't think you should either.
Did you take a loss on the work you did 8 years ago as an investment in its future value?
Why would a single entity pay a composer up front for the months or years it takes to create a symphony, when as soon as the work is release it has no financial value anymore? The composer or author works unpaid for long periods time as an investment for future earnings. I agree that it shouldn't be 70+ years, but a decade or even the author's lifetime really is reasonable. Extending that to a corporation's lifetime, or to heirs, it excessive to the point of being offensive.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
There is no universal law that says copyright was granted in the U.S. for the same reason as it was previously created in England. They are separate laws, created under different conditions, by different people.
You can believe it is bullshit if you like, but your opinion does not make it so.
This is why I like the idea of an escalating fee schedule for copyright. First 7 or 14 years, very small fee. And then double it every 7 years. You could renew copyright indefinitely, so long as it was financially viable for you to do so, but when a given copyright became unprofitable for you, then you could let it go into the public domain.
Copyright was never intended to be permanent for any work.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
In the current legislation, if I don't claim copyright on my creation anyone can download it, edit it, change the credits screen, repost it and claim it as their own.
More accurately, assuming you're in the US, you'd have to specifically disclaim copyright and place the work in the public domain. It's an affirmative act, not a passive failure to claim a copyright (which would have no effect). That is, copyright is currently an opt-out system. You're automatically opted in even if you take no action.
Without copyright I can't control if I get credits for it,
Well, if this is important to you, would you be willing to pay a registration fee, with periodic renewal fees, in order to maintain that control? I'm not interested in trying to wring money out from you, or in penalizing you. I just think that all works should be in the public domain unless they are both copyrightable and the author (or other legitimate claimant) wants a specific work copyrighted. The fees are basically just to prevent people from casually saying that they want everything copyrighted. I want them to think about it, and to think about whether it's worth it to them.
An other example, if I post a photograph I've taken online, without a copyright system, Hallmark could take that photo and make a christmas card out of it and sell it without any credit or other requirements.
Yes. So what? If you, the author, don't care about it enough to pay, say, a dollar, annually, why should I care if Hallmark uses it? It's better that someone uses it productively than that no one does. By all means, use it yourself, or license it to someone who will. But I absolutely don't understand the desire to not only fail to make commercial, copyright-related use of a work oneself and to deny others the right to do so. It strikes me as being very miserly. I don't see why the law should enable this behavior.
it's to protect the citizens
But you aren't being hurt!
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
a newspaper has considerable value as a historical record.
Indeed! But not so much economic value from this that can be realized by the newspaper and used to support itself. Newspapers rely on advertising, classifieds, subscriptions, and individual sales (e.g. at newsstands, vending machines, etc.). I'm sure that they do make a bit of money from sales of bound copies (or far less preferably, microfiche) to libraries, sales of individual back issues (or reproductions of them) to individuals seeking a momento, and online access to online archives. But these are likely dregs, which amount to only a teeny tiny fraction of the copyright related economic value of the rest of the paper.
A typical book? What about the classic (i.e., well-written books)? Are we going to penalize the better writers because the books of poorer writers don't have long economic lives?
First, let me assure you that there are lots of very well-written books which aren't classics. In fact I daresay that there are more perfectly well-written books than you could read in your lifetime, which are not classics and which are largely forgotten. Whether a book is well written is basically a matter of skill on the part of the author; whether it is a classic is basically a combination of the reception the book gets by its audience (thus, a matter of taste) and how long its popularity holds out (which may eventually owe a lot to marketing, in fact).
Second, no one is penalizing anyone. This is because no one is entitled to a copyright. Society, acting through its servant, the government, may or may not choose to encourage the arts as is its whim. Copyright is a subsidy, and while it can be a good one for an important purpose, it is not obligatory. Neither is any particular configuration of copyright law obligatory. Having our copyright policy based around what is normal, rather than what is unusual and exceptional is no more punishment than the failure of your town to build you a highway from your house to your job for your private use. Granting copyrights incurs a cost to the public. It can be worthwhile, but we should nevertheless be frugal and efficient and secure the best deal possible for the public.
Don't confuse the words of the U.S. Constitution with the real reason.
Well, setting aside that the Constitution is going to be the final word on the matter in the US, that is the real reason. It shows up elsewhere too -- the Statute of Anne called itself "[a]n act for the encouragement of learning." Always copyright is an infringement on free speech, which encompasses the mere repetition of the speech of others. The great importance of this right, to which copyright is inherently antithetical, should serve to warn us that copyright had better be intended to serve some important public purpose and had better both actually fulfill that purpose as well as not go an iota farther than necessary in doing so.
Still, if you think that copyright exists for some other reason, feel free to tell us what it is. Of course, if it doesn't provide me, a member of the public, with more of a benefit than I'd enjoy otherwise, why should I tolerate it? You may want to factor that into your answer.
An author actually had to CREATE something to obtain that right.
And if he created some ham, he could have a ham sandwich if he created some bread. Creating a work is not, in itself, sufficient to justify copyright.
For example, suppose you'd like to have someone paint your house. You could hire me to do it, we'd agree on some price, and your payment to me would compensate me for my time and materials. That's a perfectly fine arrangement. And if we cant agree on a price, we each go our separate ways. Now what if instead I had just showed up on your door, and offered to paint your house for free. Now it would be wasteful for you to pay me. Generous, maybe, but unnecessary. Maybe you can afford to be generous with your
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.