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Happy Public Domain Day: Works That Copyright Extension Stole From Us In 2015
Jennifer Jenkins, Director of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, points out what could have entered public domain in 2015 but won't and why we need to use the upcoming Public Domain Day to focus on the importance of copyright reform. She writes: "What could have been entering the public domain in the US on January 1, 2015? Under the law that existed until 1978 -- Works from 1958. The films Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Gigi, the books Our Man in Havana, The Once and Future King, and Things Fall Apart, the songs All I Have to Do Is Dream and Yakety Yak, and more -- What is entering the public domain this January 1? Not a single published work."
"Attack of the 50-foot woman" might be interesting. The problem is that the copyright holder is not showing this movie anywhere - going public domain would fix that.
i refuse to buy books, movies and music anymore
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Attack of the 50 Foot Woman? Try the Lion King and Pulp Fiction. Works from 1994 should be in public domain. Twenty years sounds fair to me. Intellectual property is supposed to protect works, giving an ability and incentive to produce new works, not act as a perpetual revenue stream for whatever entity owns the rights to older books, music, games, and film. This life of the universe plus a month nonsense is completely counter to what IP should be.
Wait, longer movies? Have you sat through any major film lately? Poor Bilbo Baggins already suffered through 8 or 9 hours of Peter Jackson, and you want to send him back for more?
Or we could just go back to the original Copyright law.
It was more than adequate to give an incentive to the creators.
The suits on the other hand, are gonna be pissed because it will take away an avenue for rent seeking; which means it will never happen because suits own Congress. They get away with it because the electorate is stupid and easily manipulated with sound bites and bumper sticker reasoning.
Which given the excuses for this stuff is really telling.(Since the whole "You're stealing from the creators" is one of the arguments you hear about this shit.) So these days you have shit like Hollywood accounting and things like the author of Forrest Gump literally not getting paid royalties for the movie.(Because it supposedly didn't make a profit.) Of course there's the whole thing screwing of musicians by record labels. Basically if you record an album don't expect to get any profits at all. If you make any money it will be off touring. Here's one, just to show how much of a bunch of scum bags they really are. https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
As much as piracy is difficult to justify. It is rulings like this that make it hard to ultimately argue against.
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so we can make new works using them. You know, Disney didn't write the story in the Lion King, right? It's an age old story. They don't write _any_ of their own stories (even Lilo and Stitch was just something they bought because they thought they could get 626 toys out of it).
The idea was that copyright and patents encouraged people to share information so that it wouldn't be lost. The entire point was to get the works into the public domain at some point. We've turned it into a rent seeking scheme. If it started out this way we'd all be paying royalties to some Nords and a few Egyptians who claimed ownership of stone tablets from 200 B.C..
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No corporation should own a copyright which outlives the creator(s) of the work plus a decade.
How does this work when there are hundreds of people working on a project, like a film? Does the copyright expire ten years after the first death, or the last? If the former, then pretty much any movie more than ten years old will be in the public domain. If the latter, I guess we're going to start seeing a few dozen babies somehow contributing to every new project, all of them selected from families who seem to live unusually long.
Also, what constitutes "death"? What happens if a member of the crew is cryogenically preserved and later brought back to life? Does copyright get reinstated? And what happens if people stop dying? It doesn't seem at all unlikely that within the next few decades we acquire the ability to keep a human body alive indefinitely (though I'm not sure if the brain is up to remaining useful for much longer)?
I think tying copyright to human lifespans is a bad idea. I prefer ever-increasing copyright maintenance fees. If Disney is willing to pay a billion dollars a year to keep Mickey, fine. But for most works, the copyright owners will eventually decide that it's better to release it into the public domain.
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That's a completely different situation, because both the patent holder and the generic drug maker are on roughly equal footing in terms of their ability to exploiting the property. A drug company can make a drug and can market it readily; that's what they do. An individual who writes a book cannot realistically make a movie version of that book, because A. they don't have that kind of money, and B. they are not likely to have the required skill set.
By definition, any permanent license is a work for hire. So no, they couldn't do precisely that. However, the law would need to specify a maximum contract duration beyond which those limits kick in so that companies wouldn't license it for [lifetime of copyright minus one day].
It would be far easier to simply tax the past income from the work as part of the copyright fees. Actual income tends to be a good indicator of the value of a work.
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So other poor artists can use them for their own creative works, for example.
The artists can easily make original content, which would create more interesting art anyway, than some reheated old stuff.
Until other, more established artists take the poor artists to court, claiming that the purported original content is not in fact original but instead substantially similar to the more established artists' work. Accidental copying is still infringement. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music.
i refuse to buy books, movies and music anymore
Then books, movies, and music will continue to be produced and shaped for those who do buy them.
Disney has been taking chances with projects with serious geek cred like Guardians of the Galaxy and Big Hero 6 and been rewarded handsomely in return. You will excuse me if I share some doubts about the geek's commitment to the boycott.
Without patents, the information wouldn't be lost, it would be tied up as trade secrets, forcing every competitor to reinvent the proverbial wheel
Patents are routinely issued on inventions that are obvious to one skilled in the art of reverse engineering. For example, contributors to FFmpeg have disassembled and documented plenty of video codecs.
rather than simply paying a small royalty to the first inventor and going on to invent the next improvement
And in a lot of cases, the royalty isn't "small" at all because the inventor wants to exclude a category of products from the market entirely. Think of when the late Steve Jobs promised that Apple was prepared to go "thermonuclear" on Android.
Without copyright, art would only be created under patronage systems where the wealthy commission works that they want
We have working patronage systems now.
In addition to restricting the number of works, this would also restrict the number of viewpoints, as only those wealthy patrons' desired works would be created.
It doesn't take "wealthy patrons" to produce a work expressing a viewpoint. Anyone who owns a personal computer and a year of Internet access can self-produce and self-publish a work in plenty of forms, such as the written word, a podcast, an animated video, or even a video game. Net neutrality is in theory orthogonal to copyright, though this is complicated by the co-ownership of XFINITY and NBCUniversal by Comcast.
The "hysteria" is about a perpetual monopoly on our cultural history. If every piece of art created in our lifetimes is locked down, then we don't have the freedom to create anything new. Everything we do is built upon the ideas of the prior generations that we are exposed to through our culture.
Ultimately, infinite term IP ownership is unsustainable. Our technological and cultural development will stall. Imagine if someone (ie a corporation or estate) still held the patent on the transistor or the lever. Those companies would control the markets for basically every electrical or mechanical device. Do you think we'd even be able to have this discussion? And why wouldn't the same effect occur with copyright once there's nothing left in the public domain to draw from?
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yes 100%. one thing that america has proven over through 200 years of history is that the profit motive does not create the best country on earth /s
Why should copyright have anything to do with the creator's lifespan? The goal of copyright is to encourage people to create, not to set people up with lifelong income streams.
Want to encourage the creation of creative works?
It's well known that creativity flourishes with experienced adversity. The irony of the copyright system is that it's actually discouraging this creative seed. Artists are way too comfortable, living off royalties, to knuckle down and start producing stuff.
I say we cut copyright to a bare minimum. A year at max. That'll get those lazy artists off their collective arses, and provide plenty of encouragement to create something at least once per year.
Remember kids, nothing speeds productivity like poverty.