
Paywalling the laws of the universe - Jerry2
https://www.authorea.com/users/101586/articles/124967/_show_article
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Houshalter
I'll link this comment I wrote yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12374642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12374642)

It's ridiculous that copyright lasts so long. At least for nonfiction works,
copyright should expire after a relatively short amount of time. There is no
benefit to society by looking these great works behind paywalls.

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djoldman
I am not a lawyer. Boltzmann died September 5, 1906. The US copyright on
anything for which he was the author expired on September 5, 1976 as I
understand it. Similarly, all Euler's works should be public domain.

~~~
tzs
Euler's work is in the public domain. You can download the 1755 publication
with Euler's transformation from the Internet Archive here:
[https://archive.org/details/institutionesca00eulegoog](https://archive.org/details/institutionesca00eulegoog)

That and much more is also downloadable from the MAA's Euler Archive:
[http://eulerarchive.maa.org](http://eulerarchive.maa.org)

Note that Euler generally did not write in English. His math was usually
published in Latin. If you want to read it in English, you need a translation.
Although the underlying work is public domain, the translation may still be
under copyright. The particular translation that the site links to was done in
2000, and so is still under copyright.

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iaw
This is a super frustrating phenomenon given that more recent work was
typically funded publicly in some way...

Nit: I'm not sure if I'd call Black-Scholes a law of the universe

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kmm
I'm not entirely sure how copyright works, but does this imply someone has the
exclusive right to Boltzmann en Schrödinger's articles? 142 years seems way
beyond any term limit

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Houshalter
It's the life of the Author plus 70 years. So in theory, if you wrote an
article when you were 20, and died at 92, the copyright would last 142 years.
Also it gets extended every so often to protect the mouse, so for all intents
and purposes it's indefinite.

That said, Boltzmann died in 1906, so even under this ridiculous system, it
should have expired by now. However that doesn't mean it they can't put it
behind a paywall. You can charge money for public domain works.

~~~
tzs
> Also it gets extended every so often to protect the mouse [...]

I'm not sure twice really counts as "every so often".

The first was part of the Copyright Act of 1976. That extended the term from
28 years with the possibility of one 28 year renewal to life of the author +
50 years, or to a fixed term of 75 years for anonymous works and for works
made for hire.

While Disney certainly was in favor of this change, the driving force behind
the 1976 Act, and its term extension, was to bring US copyright law into
closer agreement with that of most of the rest of the world in anticipation of
the US joining the Berne Convention. Berne required a minimum of life of
author + 50 years.

Many (most?) other countries don't seem to have the notion of a "work for
hire" in the sense that the US does. In the US, when an employee creates a
work as part of their job the employer is the author for copyright purposes
and is the sole owner of the work. Outside the US, the employee is the owner
of the copyright, and all the employer might get is a license to use the work.

Because the author, not the employer, retains copyright, most of the world
doesn't need a separate term for corporate works. In the US, where the
corporation is the author, life + 50 years could be indefinite since the life
of a corporation is indefinite. Hence, the need for a fixed term for corporate
works. If you want that to approximate the effective term of corporate works
in the rest of the world, 75 years seems reasonable. I would guess that most
of the time it works out to shorter than it would be if it were life of the
human who actually made the work + 50 years.

The second was the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which changed the
term to life + 70 years for non-corporate works, and for corporate works to
either 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation (whichever was
shorter). Disney pushed for this change, although a big part of what sold it
to Congress was again bringing the US into alignment with others, specifically
with Europe which had gone from life + 50 to life + 70 with the "Directive
harmonising the term of protection of copyright and certain related rights" in
1993.

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kfrz
Sure but I can just go to the Wiki page for Information Theory and see the
relevant information.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory)

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Sam_Harris
I guess "Paywalling" means click a link that says "paywall" and view the
entire pdf for free.

~~~
PeterisP
Are you accessing them from e.g. an university network that is quite likely to
be included in their subscription agreement? The links I tried there
definitely require payment to obtain the full articles.

~~~
iaw
I just confirmed that the PDF links for Boltzmann prompt me for a sign-in.

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S_Daedalus
I understand that this is the law, and seems like a law to be worked around
and a fine time for piracy to do something useful.

