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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.
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.
plenty of people care. you could have pretty bitchin digital libraries of education materials without the extensions.
also libraries would have plenty of print on demand things for really cheap.
and mickey remixes. gotta have them.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I don't mean to sound rude or ignorant, but really...who cares?
So what you're saying is Que Sera, Sera? If copyrights never expire then there will never be anything close to resolving your assumed legal ownership of that digital copy of whatever. Why? Because if current laws can be tweaked, misused and altered for the benefit of the copyright holders then they'll never have to get around to something serious.
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.
to quote TFA : "[If they had entered public domain as they should have ...] You would be free to translate these books into other languages, create Braille or audio versions for visually impaired readers (if you think that publishers wouldn’t object to this, you would be wrong), or adapt them for film. You could read them online or buy cheaper print editions, because others were free to republish them"
That's why you should care.
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.
Everyone should care, because creative works rarely happen in a vacuum.
As I write this, the other replies have focused mostly on long copyright terms affecting availability - digital libraries, Braille editions, audiobooks, etc.
But creativity often builds upon what went before. The longer we lock up works with copyright, the more expensive it can become to create new works - because you suddenly find yourself sued by someone who did a similar thing before you were even born, and believes you stole their plot. Or character(s). Or world.
And yes, people really do sue over these kinds of things.
Imagine a future where only the largest companies can create, because they have "creativity cross-licenses" where they've agreed not to sue each other. Sort of like we have for patents.
Now look at the mess that sloppy implementation of ever-further-reaching patent law has gotten us into.
That's why you should care.
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.
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.
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.
Probably, but you can do something: Help keep backups online.
I've found myself become the (apparent) sole custodian—i.e., the only persistent, public seeder that I can see—of a number works. When that happens, I feel an obligation to keep my copy available indefinitely. I consider the personal risk in doing so to be less serious than the risk of one of said works becoming permanently unavailable.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
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.
minority report is $1.99 on the kindle
And if it were in the Public Domain, it would be available for $1.99 less than that - both free and libre.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Well, I guess we're heading into a new "dark age" when it comes to our culture and art. We will of course have all the documents and historians of the future will have no problem discovering what politicians ruled where, what wars were fought and why, but what music we listened to, what movies we saw, will be lost.
Lost due to incompatibility and formats that nobody can read anymore. How many items from earlier times do you have on VHS and Beta that you digitized so it won't be lost when that VCR dies? No such luck with BluRays. Once there is no player for it anymore, those discs are mighty shiny coasters, but that's pretty much it.
Creating a big "national archive" isn't really going to solve the issue either, at least if we don't think in decades but centuries. Remember the great library of Alexandria? It did contain pretty much all the knowledge of its time, and all of it was lost in the big fire. All it takes is some civil war or some religious nuts taking over and declaring the whole crap as "heretic" and we being better off if we just destroy it.
Though blaming just the religious nuts is maybe a bit short sighted, considering pretty much the same happened with a lot of religious iconography in Russia when the Soviets took over, so ... no matter what radical idea takes over, anything in government hands is prone to destruction.
Historians often have to rely on "private" archives that nobody but the original owner knew about, because such archives are usually much safer from deliberate destruction. But just these archives will not be available to future historians.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
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.
What society do you refer to? A society in which everyone, and everything is measured by it's value to a corporation? If changing copyright back to about fifteen or twenty years should cause that society to crumble and fall, then we should change it. No other reason is needed to do so.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Or we could ask the copyright holder to release it under such license. No need to force anyone.
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.
Or we could ask the copyright holder to release it under such license. No need to force anyone.
It is my understanding that this would be a waste of time, that all major publishers have a policy of blanket refusing such requests.
I don't understand this lack of a line of logic. Congress was granted the authority to protect works of art & science for the sake of their authors. They were also charged with doing it a manner that actually furthers the ENTIRE country's artistic & technical development. Patents are only good for 20 years...Did you cure cancer? That'll be 20 years that your work is protected...Did you invent Disney? That'll be 90?! That is thoughtless, and indefensible.
Copyright infringement penalties of $150,000 PER INSTANCE or there about are absurd in a age where I can make millions of copies in minutes by clicking a button.
Patenting molecules for drugs that we have negligently released to the market without adequate testing it preposterous. Drug PROCESSES should be patented, NOT the molecule, as this would actually spur innovation to find a more efficient process, as well as encourage companies that have a modicum of pride in their work to test the molecule perhaps more thoroughly, as they could sell it too...
Patenting genes, and then getting to sue farmers that have copies of these genes on their land (Monsanto), because the wind you know carries things is no small mix of absurd, criminal, ludicrous, unhealthy, and apparently dreamed up by those with no respect for reality.
Anyone who actually bothers to take anything close to a fair & balanced review of our current system regarding Patents, and Copyrights will find nothing short of a full blown kleptocracy.
Alot of people do not seem to understand the reason Congress was granted this authority in the first place. It was to balance the need to protect the creator of the work, with the need for the public to have to access to it. Another example of this is that Patents MUST contain enough detail about the invention that 'anyone similarly skilled in the art can recreate it', otherwise the work is unpatentable, and is to be rejected as such. The Authors have no more right to protection of their work than we have the right to demand it for free to further the good of all. It is a balance between the two, and it is currently quite broken. As congress has engaged in nothing approaching due diligence in the matter.
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
What that means is that when future generations look at our culture all they will see is free/open source software and creative commons since everything else will either be long gone or happened to be good enough that it survived.
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.
There's another side of the coin, since that means that software protected under GPL would loose its protection,
OMG! Evil corps like Apple would be able to grab all the GPLd pre-1956 UNIVAC apps and take them closed source!
Developers would need to pay an annual fee just for the privilege of developing iUNIVAC apps in Objective Fortran. Apple would be skimming huge percentages off of all the apps in the Punchcard Store. Then Apple would probably give everyone compatibility headaches by unilaterally switching CPU architecture from UNIVAC to IBM 650. And for yet more planned obsolescence, they'll seal the mainframe cabinets in welded Lexan, so end users can't replace bad vacuum tubes.
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.
You have to copy pretty close to get sued
George Harrison begs to differ.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
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.
You just shrugged off a whole lot of early jazz and blues recordings and the golden age of science fiction.
"Force"? You drank too much of the kool-aid. Copyright is a privilege we (society) grant to authors - such as myself - and which can be canceled when we want.
Dilbert RSS feed
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.
Congress was granted the authority to protect works of art & science for the sake of their authors.
Not so:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The end was to promote progress. Securing rights for the artists is just the means.
While I agree with most of what you say it's important to to keep the order of things in mind. Confusion on this point is the Copyright Cartels' main weapon.
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.
Nevermind "creating" a school play. You can just PERFORM a school play without forking over money YOU DON'T HAVE. These "consumers" just don't get it. You can't even train the performers and composers of tomorrow without creative works of the past. They need to perform something in order to learn their craft.
If you make this prohibitively expensive, you undermine future creative activity. This is a problem not just of "high art" but also of commerce. The RIAA and MPAA need future actors and musicians to exploit. They are threatening their own labor pool.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
James Cameron too.
If you think that James Cameron "ripped off" Ellison then you clearly have not seen the original dreck in question.
Harlan Ellison is the perhaps the single best example of why the law should not give ammunition to has beens. It gives them legal standing to harrass the new talent.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Future generations will look at our software with shock and envy: "they had general purpose computers that anyone was free to program for? Even write a new OS for it? What a Wild West".
Coding etudes
It's not a question of them not wanting to share their works. The works were published but the original ownership documentation is lost or just not accessible and so it's practically impossible to determine who actually owns the rights to the works at the present time. Publishers won't touch them because they aren't willing to risk the big lawsuit if and when an owner actually shows up with the paperwork.
The epic journey of Nina Paley and "Sita Sings the Blues" through the copyright system is the best example I know of.
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.
The loss of our culture is both bad and distressing.
There are people who would give and arm and a leg for just one of the lost plays of Shakespeare, much less the 100+ lost plays of Sophocles, or the full contents of the libraries of Alexandria the Cotton Library, or the lost works of the Aztecs or the Maya.
Works should never be lost, and should never be forgotten. Many works will be unpopular and ignored, that's true. But they should nevertheless be preserved. Someone thought they were important enough to create. The least we can do is to keep it intact. And in the future, who knows; perhaps someone will want it, and perhaps it will be of value. No one has a right to deny literally everyone who will come after. No one has a right to destroy our culture and erase our history. We're better off when people don't burn books. Even if an author wants to burn his own books, it should not be supported, and when possible should not be permitted. No one who loves such things could countenance their destruction, even if it is merely through greed and sloth.
tl;dr: Fuck you. You're the worst person I've seen or heard mention of today.
-- 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.
Easy solution.. Violate the copyright and wait for the lawyers to come-a-knockin..
I met a guy who is a music distributor, and I asked him what to do about orphan works. That's what he said.
Apparently that wouldn't be willful violation, and all you'd have to do would be pay royalties. (One of the sticking points is, how much royalties? If I distribute an unpublished collection by T.S. Eliot for 99 cents a copy, and the estate of T.S. Eliot finds out about it, can they decide that each poem is worth $1, and I owe them $10 a copy?)
That works until you have to get clearance from somebody's legal department.
Common scenario: Independent film producer makes a documentary, shows it at film festivals and gets great response, looks for a big distributor to handle it and show it on TV, and none of the big corporations will touch it because they can't get copyright clearance for snippits that are incorporated into the documentary.
Michael Geist has many examples, including the one where the stagehands behind the stage during a performance at the Metropolitan Opera were watching The Simpsons on a portable TV.
The Tasini decision turned the New York Times archives into swiss cheese.
Under that decision, in order to include stories from certain years in the NYT dtabase, they had to get permission from each individual author. The National Writers Union recommended that each author charge the NYT the same amount for reuse as they paid for the original story. That meant that the NYT would have to pay their entire freelance budget from those years, again, to include the stories. The cost would be prohibitive. Some writers let the NYT include their stories free, some decided not to, some didn't get around to it.
As a result, a friend of mine was writing an article about investments and asked me to find an article in the NYT magazine on that subject which would have saved him a lot of work. After some difficulty, I realized that the article had been deleted from the NYT database. I told my friend to go to the library and look it up on microfilm.
It was a nice feeling to sit down at a terminal at the library and realize that I could find almost any article I ever read in my life, in their databases. Now, after the Tasini decision, you don't have that any more.
Is it ever going to be important to you to find a particular article?
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.