
What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2011? - follower
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/pre1976
======
ajays
The current copyright law is a prime example of the impotence of the
electorate in the face of the power of Big Money. It is in the public interest
to have works move into the public domain, so that others can build upon them
(I'll refrain from linking to the myriad talks by Lessig and others about how
the current copyright system is broken).

And yet Hollywood keeps buying the legislators and perpetuates this broken
system.

~~~
javert
There is a compelling natural rights justification for intellectual property.
It typically gets ignored (e.g. by people like Lessig).

Basically: The product of a human being's work is rightfully his property;
that's part and parcel of living in a civilized society. Doesn't matter if
that work is entirely "intellectual" or not. The fact that it's physically
easy to steal intellectual property does not make it right.

People who make arguments about natural rights typically also think that if
people's natural rights are not respected, that is going to ultimately be a
net loss for society. I agree with that in the case of intellectual property.
If people's intellectual property rights are not respected, it will not be
profitable to develop intellectual property.

Although we shouldn't shun abstractions, it's also important not to shun
concretes. In this case: you claim that it's important for the public good to
move works into the public domain. Well, how is it good for the public to move
Horton Hears a Who or Sports Illustrated into the public domain? Much less
Waiting for Godot.

~~~
donaldc
_The product of a human being's work is rightfully his property; that's part
and parcel of living in a civilized society._

This argument is only considering one side of the equation. The other side:

Pretty much all products of a human being's work in a civilized society are
built on top of previous products of other people's works, in both a material
and especially in an intellectual sense.

Giving such an unreasonably long time for copyright protection is breaking the
chain. It argues, wrongly, that it is ok to build on the previous products of
civilization while effectively locking up anyone from building on yours for
100-200 years.

~~~
javert
You're correct that we build upon the previous efforts of others, but I don't
think that's a counterpoint to what I've said. For one thing, copyright
doesn't prevent you from building upon previous intellectual and material
gains made by civilization; it just prevents you from, for example, making a
movie of Lord of the Flies without permission from the owner of the copyright.

Separately:

There's a legitimate discourse to be had about how long copyright protection
should last. But I disagree totally with people who claim that it should be
nonexistant.

~~~
jorgem
But copyright can prevent you from accessing less-famous works. Some of these
works are out-of-print, so you can't get them and the copyright owners are
nowhere to be found. These lost copyrighted works are essentially lost.

~~~
grav1tas
IANAL. If a copyright holder doesn't effectively exist like in this scenario,
how can they charge you with copyright infringement?

If a work is out of print and not findable, and the copyright holder is gone,
how would you know that the work existed, and how would anybody go about
printing said work again?

I also think that your statement implies that society is somehow entitled to
peoples' copy written works at some point. I think it might be the prerogative
of the copyright holder to discontinue (and possibly destroy) his or her work
before the copyright's lifetime ended. What then?

~~~
prodigal_erik
Just because you can't find the copyright holder doesn't mean they don't
exist. If your derived work is a big hit, some corporate lawyer somewhere
might realized they acquired the rights two generations ago, and bankrupt you
with an infringement suit. This is why projects go through the whole
clearance-of-rights licensing nightmare, and whenever clearance fails, society
loses because those projects never see the light of day.

~~~
grav1tas
"If a copyright holder doesn't effectively exist like in this scenario"

I was surmising a scenario where one did not exist to point out an issue with
the parent post. Of course this situation would almost never occur in reality.

------
cookiecaper
Copyright law is really disappointing here. How do such long terms contribute
to the progress of sciences or the arts? The writers and main contributors to
most of the pieces named are dead. The publishers have made their cash time
and time again and now most of these pieces are by no means "hot sellers",
though they may be of cultural or historical interest. And, there's 40 years
left before the copyright expires.

All this does is allow two extra generations to leech off of the creativity of
their fathers without actually contributing anything themselves. Same goes for
the two subsequent generations that fill the publishing houses that originally
print these works.

Do we really believe that Lord of the Rings or Lord of the Flies would not
have been written or published if the copyright term was only 28 years (in
fact, they _were_ published when the copyright term was 28 years)? It should
be evident that cultural experiences will be generated even if the money
doesn't flow down for 100-200 years (not that there won't be money anyway --
they'll just have to do something useful with the property, just like anyone
else).

The whole thing is just patently ridiculous. What do we gain by refusing to
allow free commentary or contribution on Lord of the Rings? Tolkien is dead
and gone and made a comfortable existence on his work I'm sure. If he was
concerned with ensuring his posterity and publisher would have money from his
work, he could have taken various measures to do so, like divesting large
amounts of money to them in his will.

It is ridiculous that all of society and culture has to suffer because of
corporate lobbyists that don't want Disney et al to lose money. It's not like
the publishers are being robbed here, they've made more than enough money on
these properties and now it's time to share. Intellectual property was never
meant to trap ideas -- it was meant to make their sharing plausible and
reasonable (before the internet, there was significant overhead involved with
publication and wide dissemination of such material). Now we just have leeches
looking to ensure their own fat paycheck at the expense of free culture.

I would be very happy to see a copyright law of 28 years since publication or
less with no extensions, applied retroactively to all works under copyright in
the United States. I don't see why life of the author should be considered --
if someone writes a good story, that's great, but 28 years of unlimited
monopoly on that is quite enough. And note that public domain doesn't mean the
copyright holder can't make money anymore -- it just means he has to provide
something that the market deems valuable, instead of standing as a gatekeeper
and profiting off of everyone else's imagination.

~~~
griftah
Why having Lord of the Rings in public domain is so important?

~~~
patio11
This is a _good question_. LOTR is being actively commercially exploited and
the commercial exploitations are _darn good_. Meanwhile, it's cultural impact
hasn't been noticeably blunted by copyright -- that novel launched at least
one _industry_ , to say nothing of being repurposed by virtually every book in
adjacent genres.

~~~
chc
I don't see what that has to do with anything. Public domain works can still
be commercially exploited. The only difference is that LOTR wouldn't have sat
in preproduction hell for years because of squabbles over the rights. Peter
Jackson could have gone ahead and made his very fine movies — instead,
copyright almost got him forced out of The Hobbit.

~~~
MessagePad2100
Another possibility: Instead of squabbling with the publisher/Tolkien Trust,
Michael Bay could have simultaneously made a movie as well to compete with
Jackson's vision of the movie.

~~~
chc
I don't understand your point. If you mean he could have made a LOTR movie, I
still don't see how that's relevant, given that:

1\. That wouldn't happen, for a large number of reasons.

2\. That happens even in the current system (see "The Exorcist: The Beginning"
for an example in the movie world).

3\. Michael Bay already had movies in competition with the LOTR franchise —
copyright does nothing to prevent that. It just requires that some people
distantly related to people who paid some money to Tolkien get paid if you
want to use the LOTR names and characters.

------
praptak
The deal between copyright holders and society was changed retroactively in
favor of the former. Why then should the latter uphold their end of the deal,
i.e. not pirate?

~~~
gridspy
The issue isn't getting a copy of the original work for free. Of greater
concern is the penalty for creating derivative works - so we can't have
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_and_Zombies>

~~~
profgubler
Actually, I would believe you could have had that even if it was in copyright,
as it would be considered parody. Would it not?

~~~
nitrogen
It probably depends on how much of the original text and plot were used in the
parody. It would certainly be considered illegal to write Harry Potter and the
Zombie Hallows now, just by virtue of using the same characters as the
original.

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xenophanes
About copyright in general: Micky Mouse is still in active use. Can anyone
tell me some reason that Warner Brothers should be allowed to make a Mickey
Mouse movie just because it's old now?

One other example: sales of Ayn Rand's books currently help fund the spreading
of the ideas from the books, after her death. That seems fair enough to me.
Why shouldn't books sales be able to fund promotion of the book's ideas as
long as people keep buying the book?

~~~
avdempsey
I'll bite. I don't care if WB makes a Mickey Mouse movie. Walt is dead. We're
not talking about the state stealing "Rearden Metal" shortly after its
invention. Generations have grown up with this character and it seems just as
outrageous as state-based exploitation to hold this character captive forever.

How does inifinite copyright extension do anything but favor the sad
corporatism you oppose? Entire generations will never re-sow the seeds of
these cultural works. If you're on this planet to tell the next great Mickey
Mouse story then you better be lucky enough to get the right spot inside
Disney.

So I don't see any compelling Randsian arguments here. Each generation should
get a shot at profiting (or simply engaging publicly) with the _cultural_
fruits of a prior generation. Creators will be fine.

~~~
blasdel
I wouldn't even consider Mickey Mouse to be a character - he hasn't been used
that way by Disney for at least 50 years, and never had much character
development to begin with even when he 'starred' in minstrel cartoons.

Mickey Mouse is a logo, deserving of trademark protection and nothing more.

~~~
pavlov
Mickey is an actively used character in European-drawn Disney comics. He's
usually either a serious detective protagonist, or just a friend of Donald or
Goofy.

For all his detective skills, he somehow has never figured out that Goofy is
the same person as Super-Goofy (there is a peanut plant in Goofy's backyard
that turns him into a Superman-style hero).

------
mrleinad
I'd like to know what DID enter the public domain, more than getting sorry for
what did not.

~~~
gojomo
Unfortunately, because of discontinous extensions, no published works are
entering the US public domain again until 2019:

<http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday>

Of course, whether any actually enter the public domain then depends on
Congress not retroactively extending copyright terms again. Perhaps Congress
will choose a term of 'heat death of the universe, plus one day' — which the
courts could still uphold as technically 'limited' per the Constitution.

------
julius_geezer
"Under the pre-1978 copyright law, you could now teach history and politics
using most of Toynbee's A Study of History (vols. 7-10 were first published in
1954) or Henry Kissinger's A World Restored, or stage a modern adaptation of
Erich Maria Remarque's A Time to Love and A Time to Die for community
theater."

As far as I know, you can teach a class using Toynbee or Kissinger; the
students just have to find copies. As for community theater, they put on works
far more recent--one friend appeared several years ago in "Dancing at
Lughnasa" (1995), another in "Lips together, Teeth Apart" (1991; or whichever
MacNally play gave him a chance to shed his clothes--"Love! Valor! Etc" of
1994 maybe). What the terms are, I can't say; but it doesn't seem to run
anyone broke.

I do agree that the copyright extension gone beyond reasonable bounds. The
critic Hugh Kenner made an interesting case that the extension of copyright in
the United Kingdom about 100 years ago had a dramatic effect on the public's
impression of what literature was, creating a discontinuity in perception that
made the modernists' work appear to have come about without its actual
context.

------
follower
I wonder if anyone has ever considered that existing copyright legislation
puts authors' lives at risk by making the term: date of death + N years?
There's a short story in that at least but now I'm too afraid for my life to
write it. :)

------
Sukotto
According to Rufus Pollock of Cambridge University, the optimal copyright
length is 14 years.

[http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/research-
optimal-...](http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/research-optimal-
copyright-term-is-14-years.ars)

[http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optimal_copyrig...](http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optimal_copyright.pdf)

------
bhickey
Why was Eldred v. Ashcroft argued on 1st Amendment grounds? There seems like a
relatively straightforward argument from the Takings Clause.

~~~
woodrow
Lawrence Lessig explains how he "lost the big one" here:
[http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-
April-2004/story_le...](http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-
April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp)

------
2mur
<http://publicdomainday.org/node/37/>

<http://www.publicdomainworks.net/stats/year/2011>

Edit: Oops, meant that to be a comment to mrleinad

------
forensic
How do international books fit into this?

Lord of the Flies and Tolkien among others are British books. If they enter
the public domain in Britain, does that enable Americans to use them even if
they are still copyrighted in the US?

~~~
a_m_kelly
That's an interesting question. My [minimal] understanding of copyright law
suggests that whether the book's in public domain in Britain has no bearing on
the rights granted to Americans to use it.

If it is in the public domain in Britain, that doesn't give you a free license
to start photocopying the book and reselling it here in the US. Those rights
are assigned to a party here in the US. (and thanks to some oddness in the
publishing world (or laws that help curb uncompetitive practices, the same
company can't own the rights to a work in both the UK and US.)

I don't know enough about this to speculate on your importation and use of a
book in the public domain elsewhere. I suspect personal use of the materials
is fine. You could likely import a public domain copy of the work from England
and as long as you don't adapt, resell, translate or otherwise re-purpose the
work you'd be in the clear. I've got a friend who works for a company that
does a lot of international rights work in publishing. I'll ask him and post
back here, since now I'm curious.

(these sorts of byzantine international arrangements are one of several ways,
along with translations, that authors of books have been able to make a
reasonable living, selling the rights to the same book several times and being
able to quickly drum up a blog post for slow news days with pictures of the
Czechoslovakian cover of their most recent book.)

~~~
barrkel
This "interesting question" is, as I understand it, the basis for the usual
ratcheting up of copyright terms. One side says "we must harmonize with the
other side", but they go a little further, and then harmonization happens on
the other side, and so forth.

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panacea
The 'public domain' hasn't been what's acceptable to share according to
lawyers for quite some time now.

------
jleyank
I might be mis-remembering, but doesn't (L)GPL rely on copyright law for its
status? If so, then there's at least one bit of IP that's "properly protected"
by copyright law.

~~~
follower
Yes, you remember correctly (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft>) but GNU
would have an issue with the term "IP". :)

I don't have a link but my impression is that part of the need for the GPL to
exist in the first place is due to restrictions of copyright and the GPL uses
copyright to enforce itself as a way of reacting against the system which it
would rather not exist.

~~~
Jach
I have a couple links:

<http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/> <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html>
(Why IP is a bad term.)

------
leon_
At least our dark lord Cthulhu is public domain.

