Slashdot Mirror
Lawsuit Claims Buck Rogers Is In the Public Domain
An anonymous reader writes: As reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a court will decide whether Buck Rogers is in the public domain. The Buck Rogers comic strip first appeared in 1929. Team Angry Filmmakers claim that Buck Rogers entered the public domain in the mid-1950s, and they want to make a Buck Rogers movie called Armageddon 2419 A.D. They filed a federal suit this year in Los Angeles against the trust claiming ownership of the name, and the trial has been moved to Pittsburgh.
Hey, the descendants of the descendants of a creator worked hard to be born into a family that had someone come up with a good idea once 2 or 3 generations ago and they deserve to get paid for it!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Even without that argument the writer has been deceased for 75 years so the extensions should not apply either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Francis_Nowlan
1) Hollywood producers want to make new Buck Rogers movie based on his very first book appearance. Announce it at Comic Con.
2) Trust that says it owns the character threatens to sue producers.
3) Producers try to reach deal. Trust apparently refuses to reach a deal. They simply don't want the film made.
4) Producers are now going to try an argument that Buck Rogers is actually already in the public domain, so screw the trust as they don't need their permission anyway.
there is no "mouse protection rule". There is an often cited "rule" that anything after steamboat willie is in eternal copyright protection, thanks to Disney. The reality is much more nuanced and the one thing that can be said about the various copyright reforms is that the system was very complex and simplifying it was a good thing. Simplifying it by return to the original rules for terms would have been nice, but the public wasn't the one paying for the reforms.
One (of the many) complexities is that you used to have to file extensions. Since doing so cost money, many unprofitable properties were allowed to lapse into the public domain. Consequently, even when dealing with simple copyright (non-serialized written work appearing in novels whose printing dates are well documented) you can run into oddities like a novel by an author written in the fifties being in the public domain while another written in the twenties is still copyright protected.
And it gets worse. The movie Heavy Metal was a compilation and as such required permission from a wide variety of copyright holders, both graphic and sound artists. This resulted in the inability to legally sell the movie for some time.
As another example, serialized works can be problematic in tracking down their dates of publication. Documentation of assignment of copyright is often problematic. Different media has different rules. Until the DMCA "statements of fact" (such as the plans for a ship) could not be copyrighted so a work might be copyrighted (for the "arrangement of facts"), but the material contained therein be in the public domain (recipe books fall into this category). Where something was "set into tangible form" made a difference as well -- one of the reforms was aligning this so that (for example) an author's work that is copyrighted in the United States will also be copyrighted in Australia.
This particular twist makes things difficult for Project Gutenberg where something written in 1935 might be legal to distribute in New Zealand, but not in the United States. Such balkanization was somewhat tolerable in the 20's and 30's when it required significant resources to achieve global distribution. Obviously these "loopholes" are more problematic today.
Not really. This becomes the textbook definition of "a derivative work". If they want to make a derivative work of a public domain story (which includes the characters within that story) then they should be free to do so.
This is why the Disney thing becomes key, because any new work featuring Mickey Mouse is -- technically -- a derivative work of Steamboat Willlie, whether that work is created by Disney Corporation or (at some future point, after Steamboat Willie falls into the public domain) some new animation house.
You had a perfectly good argument without needing to bring up the Jews. Now you just sound like a Nazi (Godwin be damned).
The two original stories are in the public domain in the US. Here are Project Gutenberg links.
Armageddonâ"2419 A.D.
https://www.gutenberg.org/eboo...
and
The Airlords of Han
https://www.gutenberg.org/eboo...
Of course no where in the stories was the name Buck Rogers used. That name didn't start until the comic strip.
I think you are confusing copyright with trademarks. Disney might lose the copyright of the Mickey Mouse character, but they would still have a trademark restricting others from marketing said character. Water is free to market and distribute to anyone, but you can't put "Dasani" on the bottle unless you are Coke. You also can't put it in a Coke shaped bottle as that is trademarked too.
Thus you'd be able to freely modify the stories and the character of Mickey Mouse as well as distribute without royalties, but you probably couldn't sell merchandise or run say a theme park with the trademarks.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
This is demeaning to all other cultures that hated or currently hate the jews.
The expiry of 70 years after the end of the calendar year in which the last surviving author died applies in Europe. It also applies in the United States to works of individual authorship first published in 1978 or later. But Buck Rogers was first published before 1978, and U.S. copyright in pre-1978 works follows the rule for works made for hire, expiring 95 years after the end of the calendar year in which the work was first published.
Here's a summary of the U.S. copyright term: