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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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
"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.
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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.
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 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.