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."

Comments

Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

"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 vote with my wallet

[FudRucker]

i refuse to buy books, movies and music anymore

Re:i vote with my wallet

[Anonymous Coward]

down with the capitalist pigs!

Re:i vote with my wallet

[spire3661]

Copyright is a social bargain. WE THE PEOPLE grant limited exclusive licenses, with the expectation of payment via Public Domain when the work's copyright expires (limited time). The copyright side of the equation has spent the last hundred years shoring up their position to the point where limited has come to mean anything less than infinity. Its time to dial them back. EVERY citizen has skin in this game. You cant have maximal copyright in an Information Age, it is simply impossible.

And that's still too long

[ChromeAeonium]

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.

Re:And that's still too long

[itzly]

someone who has never created a single patentable invention in his life? Or written a best-selling novel? Or composed a symphony? Or written a screenplay?

That's 99.99% of the population.

I'm sure it does sound fair to parasites who think they are entitled to other people's work without compensation.

You mean the people who inherit the copyright after the author's death ? Or the people who take stories from public domain, adapt them for the movie screen, and then get to keep all the rights and money forever ?

Re:And that's still too long

[optimus2861]

Does it sound fair to someone who has never created a single patentable invention in his life? Or written a best-selling novel? Or composed a symphony? Or written a screenplay?

It sounds plenty fucking fair. Architects & engineers don't get paid royalties for years & years on work we did ages ago. We certainly don't continue to get paid after we're dead. And if we fuck up, things fall apart. People can get hurt. People can die. If a screenwriter fucks up, nothing of any consequence happens.

I'm sure it does sound fair to parasites who think they are entitled to other people's work without compensation.

If you did the work 20 years ago, tough shit. Welcome to the world of everybody else.

Re:And that's still too long

[itzly]

So other poor artists can use them for their own creative works, for example.

Re:And that's still too long

[dgatwood]

Twenty years sounds fair to me.

Twenty years from creation (copyright is currently defined as starting at creation) is way too short. I'm about to publish a trilogy of novels, and I started on the first one in 2001. By your standards, six years of profiting from my works should be enough. That's laughable.

Twenty years from first publication might be reasonable, but it is still problematic for works of fiction, because it is a short enough period of time that a film studio wanting to make a movie would be sorely tempted to wait out the copyright rather than paying the author for the use of his or her work.

On the one hand, you have individuals creating works, and on the other hand, you have big corporations creating works. The former need a lot more time to exploit their works, because they have fewer resources for doing so. The latter can adequately exploit their works in just a few years, after which, they're essentially leeching off the public domain. A reasonable copyright scheme needs to consider both of those situations and treat them differently. For example, you might set a twenty year limit for works for hire, but make the duration be 75 years for copyright owned by individuals. Or you might require the copyright to be renewed every fifteen years at 1% of the property's total gross revenue, so a movie that brought in $40 million pays a $400,000 renewal fee every fifteen years, but a book that made only $7,000 pays a $70 renewal.

Either way, a flat twenty years is absurd.

Re:And that's still too long

[AthanasiusKircher]

I completely agree with you that 20ish years is plenty before a work enters public domain. The original 1790 statute which had a default period of 14 years was also plenty.

However, I think there are some things overlooked in your arguments...

It sounds plenty fucking fair. Architects & engineers don't get paid royalties for years & years on work we did ages ago.

That's because you have a choice to get paid up-front. Most artists/creators don't. If someone offered you a contract: "Hey -- you can design my building for me, and I'll give you X% of the rents for the next Y years, but I'll pay you nothing now," would you do it? What if the building was in the middle of nowhere in a completely untested market? What if your design was also very unconventional and you didn't even know if it would work?

Those are the kinds of things a novelist or even a non-fiction author, say, has to deal with all the time. They invest their time and effort spending months or perhaps years generating a work, often with no money up-front. And unless they're an established author, they're often breaking new ground, perhaps trying out something new which may or may not sell well.

I suspect most architects and engineers here wouldn't take such a risky deal. They'd prefer to actually get paid when they do their work, as do most people. Most creators take much bigger risks in the hope that MAYBE some day down the line they might recoup their expenses and time.

And -- of course -- the vast majority DON'T. For every creator who makes millions of dollars off of their books or songs or screenplays or whatever, there are thousands of creators who never really make a profit. But they try anyway, and maybe they get something back.

We certainly don't continue to get paid after we're dead.

I don't know why everyone is so obsessed with deaths of authors.

Look -- copyright is broken, but it's effectively a contract between creators and the public. If you signed onto a deal like I offered you above, where you got no money up-front, but I said you'd get a share of the rents on the building you designed for 20 years, that contract generally wouldn't void at your death. The rents would be paid to your estate or your heirs for the original term of 20 years.

Why should it be any different? The few creators who do actually make money often have kids to feed. If I spent a year writing a novel and with my family suffering without enough money expecting X years of possible revenue from my novel, why should they not get the expected years of revenue if I drop dead from a heart attack the minute after my book is published? Copyright terms should be fixed and short -- whatever they are. The death of the artist is irrelevant.

And if we fuck up, things fall apart. People can get hurt. People can die. If a screenwriter fucks up, nothing of any consequence happens.

Not sure what this has to do with anything. Are you saying that we shouldn't pay anyone anything if they don't do something "essential" enough or something? Why the heck do we pay sports players or actors or whatever? Most people spend significant portions of their days listening to music, watching TV, etc. Just because something is viewed by you as "entertainment" or something doesn't mean that it isn't hugely important to you or society -- and if we don't have a system that rewards creators, art gets worse. Good artists choose to do something else with their time. And there are also writers who contribute significantly to new ideas, knowledge, etc. -- if these people won't get compensation, they may not choose to do it. That's potentially "somethign of consequence" happening.

If you did the work 20 years ago, tough shit. Welcome to the world of everybody else.

Again, I think most artists/creators would LOVE to take a deal like most people and get paid up-front.

Re:And that's still too long

[spire3661]

Copyright is a SOCIAL BARGAIN. Its a two way street. Consumers do not have to be creators to have a stake in the game. The Consumer side of copyright is getting fed up with infinite copyright and e have every right to speak out about it. Take your righteousness and shove it.

Re:revolutionary idea?

[daremonai]

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?

Re:revolutionary idea?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

And the creators still get screwed

[NotSoHeavyD3]

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...

No

[rsilvergun]

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..

Re:revolutionary idea?

[swillden]

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.

and no one gives a damn.

[westlake]

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.

Re:revolutionary idea?

[BoberFett]

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.