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Public Domain Day 2014
An anonymous reader writes "What could have been entering the public domain in the US on January 1, 2014? Under the law that existed until 1978.... Works from 1957. The books On The Road, Atlas Shrugged, Empire of the Atom, and The Cat in the Hat, the films The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and 12 Angry Men, the article "Theory of Superconductivity," the songs "All Shook Up" and "Great Balls of Fire," and more.... What is entering the public domain this January 1? Not a single published work."
its not like thousands of new works of art, literature and music haven't been made in the last 40 years
most of them are a lot better than the post war crap i grew up on
See, if those works had entered the public domain, the private owners would never profit off of them.
And that's very important you know. Look how much money that Atlas Shrugged movie made for Ayn Rand!
If Disney didn't push through another copyright extension, Audrey Geisel just might.
IIRC, U.S. courts recently decided that public-domain works could have their copyrights reinstated post facto.
If anything from Disney did ever accidentally enter the public domain, Congress would fix that in short order.
I just downloaded Theory of Superconductivity from the APS website.
"Theory of Superconductivity"
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v108/i5/p1175_1
Can we take away all the excessive copyright time spans assigned to new works, and tack them on the end of Atlas Shrugged's?
It would satisfy her disciples' hilarious beliefs for her descendants to collect royalties from this toilet paper until the end of time, while creative people would benefit from a return to sane copy right law.
Actually, Sherlock Holmes is finally in the public domain. It took a court order to shake it loose, though.
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-new-sherlock-holmes-copyright-20131230,0,5610784.story
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
At least we are safe from a bunch of pseudo-libertarian amateur filmmakers creating their own personal "Atlas Shrugged" movies.
He's buried here..
You can go and hire Ms. Cleo and do a seance and complain to him since he sponsored the legislation.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
"Hurry!" Dagny Taggart moaned. "Before he gets any smaller!"
The strange cat in the hat grabbed the incredible shrinking man, who struggled mightily, but, being the size of a Barbie doll, could put up little resistance. "I'm gay, don't do this to me!"
"Tough shit, little man! I know it is wet and the sun is not sunny, but we can have lots of good fun that is funny.” He took him and and slowly eased him feet first up ins
GOD DAMN IT, this stuff is not public domain. Nevermind.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It may still be illegal to download these things, but it's now much more difficult to argue that it's unethical to do so. Distributing these works should be considered an act of civil disobedience.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I think the universe would implode.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Thanks to Disney and others, the very idea of works EVER entering the public domain will eventually become a relic.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/25/15-years-ago-congress-kept-mickey-mouse-out-of-the-public-domain-will-they-do-it-again/
Is there a concept similar to the BSD software license, where others are entitled to use the work as they see fit, but are required to make attribution to the original author and copyright holder? Also, derived works should clearly indicate that the original author(s) were not involved in the new work; for example, in a mixed anthology of original and new-fangled Sherlock Holmes stories, it should be clear which is which without having to do google searches.
capitalism, in this form, is utterly flawed
The entire purpose of copyright was to serve as an incentive for creators to add to the public wealth of knowledge and art. It was mutually beneficial: they get public protection for their work, and the public receives high quality art.
The corruption of copyright by the likes of Disney and other mega-conglomerates has polluted that purpose. Now, copyright is a legal bludgeon used to deprive the public of its culture while perpetually forcing them to pay to get it back.
If they want perpetual ownership of their work, they should lose any public or legal protections of it: it's quid pro quo, and if they are unwilling to hold up their end, they should be required to hold up both.
It is not like you can't access the works, unless they are in public domain — you just have to pay for it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
He's buried here..
You can go and hire Ms. Cleo and do a seance and complain to him since he sponsored the legislation.
See, even the trees opposed copyright extension.
I am not a crackpot.
If I weren't sooo lazy, I'd work a bit harder and BOOM! I'd be RICH! Why, if I weren't so lazy, I could get another job on top of my other two, and work some more! After all, I'm only working 80 hours a week and who needs sleep and recreation!
And we all know that the billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Buffet and all them got where they are by working hard and being honest and forthright people! Anyone can do it!
We all know that all it takes here in the states is to work hard and wealth is guaranteed! Well, if it weren't for the government regulations.
I had a chemical disposal business and the fucking EEE, PEEE, AYE stopped me from disposing in the local trout stream! How the hell is one going to make a living with these communist basterds?! And this bullshit nonsense about children getting cancer and whatnot - why there's St. Judes to help them! Business and profits first and health and well being is just a socialist value! Anyway, cancer was created by socialists to punish the hard working creators and rewards the takers!
And this bullshit of "you didn't build that!" why, the private sector could do just fine building roads and highways and edukating us!
If you're poor, it's all because of your character! Yes sir! If you worked hard have decent values, you wouldn't be poor!
Poor people have poor character and they are stupid! It's all their fault! If they would just pull themselves up by their bootstraps like I did, all would be well!
I tell you, the values in this society have deteriorated. Way back when, those people would be left to starve - as they should - and it allowed for us makers to achieve and better society.
You can't expect your unelected Jewish 'masters' to actually WORK for a living, can you? Don't you know that Jews benefit from the change in the law? Who controls the entire media? Why, the eternal Jew...
The best argument I've heard for changing the laws dealing with public domain in the USA is that in these days of federal budget cutting and decreasing spending, if these copyrights are so valuable then why are they being renewed for free automatically? It would seem logical to make a change where those who want their copyrights to be extended could pay a fee, perhaps fairly large, and fill out some paperwork to get the copyright renewed. If they forget to fill out the forms in time and pay the fee in time, too bad. That's how it was some years ago. If you forgot to renew your copyright in time, you lost it. Congress could enact a sliding scale where the renewal fee increases exponentially. For example, say that all works get an original copy right period of 50 years. Then if renewal is desired, the copyright holder could pay $500,000 for a renewal period of 10 years. If they want the works renewed at the end of that period for another 10 years, the fee goes up to $5 million. The next 10 year period is $50 million. The one after that is $500 million, then $5 billion and so on. Eventually the cost will get prohibitive that nobody will pay it any more and works will enter the public domain. I really do not get how if these works are so valuable that they must be renewed that Congress has to let it be done for free and virtually forever. Unfortunately to date the US Supreme Court has basically ruled "We're not saying that we think that extending copyright is a great idea, but the Constitution does permit it. As long as the termination date is less than 'never', any extension is probably legal." Why is Congress giving away money in renewal fees if these works are truly so valuable that they must remain in copyright longer?
I can wait a little while longer.
I'd like to see copyright law changed to make orphaned works available to the public. A simple way to do that would be to require a periodic registration (with fee) after an initial implicit registration period. For example, works that are over 20 years old would need to be registered every 5 years at a cost of $100 or they would revert to public domain. Then, services which make public domain works available online would be able to access the registry to determine whether an old work is in the public domain.
That sort of thing seems politically feasible because it wouldn't disrupt the powerful corporate interests, yet it would release works into the public domain which have been abandoned or don't generate enough income to justify the registration fee.
The buggy Slashdot mod system made me mod "overrated" by accident.
This post will undo it.
I see a parallel with the Snowden revelations of an out-of-control national security apparatus, which has created a vigorous and still growing push-back against flagrant abuse of the the government's powers (search warrants anyone?).
The corruption of the law and legal process by corporations to create a copyright regime that defies the U.S. Constitution* has created a widespread (and growing) view that copyright as it now stands is simply wrong - it is straight-out theft of public property for private gain. With corporate ownership of the lawmakers -- and the lawmakers own institutionalized corruption* - there is no immediate prospect of being able to undo this through legislative action. Before that happens there will likely be many more give-a-ways to corporations that will need to be undone.
Perhaps over the next 20 years we will be able to create movement that restores the rights of the broad public against the spies, CEOs, and Wall Street firms. Trust busting in the Progressive Era was effective only because the leading politician of the day (Teddy Roosevelt) was solidly, vigorously behind it. Without a powerful ally the going will be slow.
The national security abuse case is a little easier since "only" privacy is at stake, not money. Most congress folk aren't raking in money from spying.
*Did they amend the Constitution to change the limited copyright explicitly specified therein? Noooo....
**There are effectively no restrictions on Senators or Congressmen directly profiting from the laws they write; every Senator has a "leadership PAC" slush fund - a legalized bribery vehicle created to nullify anti-corruption laws.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Here's an idea: amend the constitution so any law whose authors die automatically expires. Congress would have its hands full re-passing only useful laws and junk statutes that forbid whistling at ladies after midnight would be long-gone.
A strong case can be made that we all have a moral obligation to break copyright and patent laws. The term private has been stolen and distorted. That which is private is held back, kept secret and not published or broadcast or performed in public. The trick that has been pulled is to create confusion in weak minds by combining the word private and property to form an irrational concept. America had a built in concept that forbids nobel ownership or nobel use. In other words all things can to some degree be regulated and shared if they touch the public space in any way. Before cars we had laws that controlled how a horse might be used. Traditionally laws even regulate where a man might step and they still do. But none of these notions touch the issue of art, literature or commercial products put in play before or among the public. Copyright is a twisting and perversion of our legal and moral heritage. Perhaps society has been overly tolerant of such laws.
The only reason copyright has been extended so long is so Disney Corp can protect Mickey Mouse.
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
And the real irony is that Disney built its animated empire on stories in the public domain
- Bambi? Nope, they stole that one too, from a 1923 work of Felix Salten
It is never wise to take anything a geek says about Disney at face value.
In 1933, Sidney Franklin, a producer and director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, purchased the film rights to Felix Salten's novel Bambi, A Life in the Woods, intending to adapt it as a live-action film. After years of experimentation, he eventually decided that it would be too difficult to make such a film and he sold the film rights to Walt Disney in April 1937. Disney began work on crafting an animated adaptation immediately, intending it to be the company's second feature-length animated film and their first to be based on a specific, recent work.
Bambi
Philip Pullman's Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version retells fifty of these classic tales in a four hundred page book. Call it eight pages on average per story.
That is barely enough material to sustain a one-act stage play.
The truth is that the adaptation becomes memorable through its embellishments, its richness in detail. ''Hansel & Gretel'' at Columbia Marionette Theatre: A Sweet Artistic Triumph
It isn't a generic Sleeping Beauty the geek wants to appropriate from Disney, it is Maleficent.
UK Law allows broadcast TV to enter public domain 50 years after broadcast. As such the first few episodes of Doctor Who broadcast in the Fall of 1963 become public domain Jan 1, 2014. Of couse there are many other shows from 1963 and before that are or will be public domain.
It's not a bad idea to place a time limit on laws. That will really emphasize repassing the ones that matter (e.g, not murdering people, or not hauling them off without a warrant to be tried in absentia in a secret court under secret laws). I'd like to see it also applied per clause or something, so we don't simply repass The Big Book of Laws Law. Also, tying it to a person's lifetime is unsafe. Think of the corporations!
If those go public domain, every Ron Paulite will be posting them everywhere.
We will die in a flood of one-dimensional characters and cardboard-cutout dilemmas.
Please make sure they never get into the public domain.
Futurist Traditionalism
I was thinking more "English as a second language", given the French-like spaces before question marks and the French-like spelling of "gouvernement" [sic].
You disagree that ownership of copyright in a work of authorship implies "ownership of the work" in any useful sense. But what is ownership? Wiktionary defines "owning" something as "hav[ing] rightful possession" of it as property, and its first non-circular, non-real-estate definition of "property" is in term of exclusive rights in a particular thing. But I understand that not everybody agrees with Wiktionary definitions. So to avoid us talking past each other, try telling me how you prefer to define "ownership" and "property", and I'll help you understand why people speak of "ownership of a work".
Characters are meant to illustrate IDEAS
English plurals have ambiguities: did you mean "each character illustrates one idea" or "each character illustrates ideas"? Either way, ideas are like onions in that they have layers. So if you have an ogre character with ideas, your ogre likewise needs to have layers.
Atlas Shrugged [has] 645,000 words (and fewer than 100 characters), about 80,000 more than War and Peace
And both have more words than The Lord of the Rings (481k), which is so long it initially had to be split into three volumes.
The Bible alludes to copyright (1 Timothy 5:17-18) but also to fair use (Leviticus 23:22) Any Bible translation publisher who doesn't consider a quotation like DoofusOfDeath's to be a fair use isn't putting the ministry first.
Only some things of value were lost.
I'm not sure the United States is allowed to require such a formality under the Berne Convention, which forms part of the WTO treaty. One loophole suggested soon after the Supreme Court decided Eldred v. Ashcroft was an intellectual property tax, where people who didn't keep copyright registration up to date would be considered tax evaders. It's the same loophole that makes the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate legal.
Standard Slashdot operating procedure would seem to dictate that this story shouldn't be posted for at least another 4 weeks.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Nice, but Maleficent isn't Sleeping Beauty, generic or otherwise.
Eleanor Audley (1905-1991), actress, Sleeping Beauty, 1959, Maleficent, Cinderella, 1950, Lady Tremaine. (The Wicked Stepmother)
you always fall for the rascal
When the Disney version of a fairy take supersedes all other adaptations of the story, it is no small part due to the voice and presence of a vividly realized and compelling villain.
For double irony, we can transfer ownership to the Communist party...
Futurist Traditionalism
The article made a mistake. There are exactly two groups that benefit from copyright: the United States government benefits by way of taxes from overly large corporations who can sue the hell out of other corporations, and the overly bloated corporations themselves. The question *you* have to ask yourself is this: If I cannot have access to any knowledge created in my lifetime, then it will become uneconomic to continue the pursuit of knowledge. You will die of whatever your parents or grandparents (or great grandparents) died of because its not economic to pursue anything new. Likewise electronics, physics, farming, music, literature, ....pick. The US government has hamstrung the current generation. They have sold the future to the highest bidder. In truth, a generation should benefit from the previous generation. Instead, the generation just born (newborns in 2014), will be able to benefit from your grandparents research and knowledge when they are middle aged (unless the corporations and government screw them over too). Its odd how the US government has become so completely dysfunctional. Its affecting the US economy, US society, and US standing in the world. Its the Chinese century. The US will lose to China. The Chinese don't even have to work hard at it: America has shot itself in the foot, and copyright is the bullet.
Leaving the Berne Convention would require leaving the WTO. Leaving the WTO might cause the trading partners of the United States to impose import duties or quotas on goods manufactured in the United States. This would hurt not only the entertainment industry.
You don't own copyright, you hold copyright.
The text of the U.S. copyright statute (Title 17, United States Code), consistently refers to "the owner of copyright" in a work.
Without copyrights, Ted Turner wouldn't have bought all those movies and colorized them. See, since he owned the original, creating a derivative work AND locking up all the original releases can basically extend the copyright as needed.
So, assuming a 75 yr copyright, every 70-74.5 yrs, a slightly modified version of each of those films will be released. It doesn't need to be modified much, just being "different" is enough. With the older films unavailable, nobody would be able to release the public domain versions, so the new copyright will be effectively as long as the company feels that re-re-re-re-re-releasing makes financial sense. Then those films will be lost.
I do not believe this was the intent for copyrights. Protecting profit indefinitely was NEVER the intent.
Trademarks are another issue. Disney trademarks everything, which do not expire ... ever.
We need a solution and the best one that I've heard so far is having a registration fee for re-copyrighting a work periodicly. I like a rising scale as time goes on.
* 0-25 yrs - free
* 26-50 yrs $10,000 (raised annually by CBO estimates)
* 51-75 yrs $1,000,000 (raised annually by CBO estimates)
* 76-100 yrs $1,000,000 annually
* 101+ yrs public domain regardless of trademark.
After all, shouldn't a creative business have to actually create something new every 100 yrs?
I come from the camp of people who are paleoconservatives, neoreactionaries, new righters and traditionalists.
We think the Nazis were amusing, but too far left for us. Also tended to engage in pointless behaviors like murdering Jews, losing wars to Russians and failing in diplomacy with the tea-drinking English.
Futurist Traditionalism