
For First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter Public Domain - ingve
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/first-time-20-years-copyrighted-works-enter-public-domain-180971016/?preview
======
yason
The sheer length of timespans involved in copyright make it very detached from
the actual reality a lot of people grew up with.

A copyright of a few years would better reflect what has been going on in the
daily life since 70's-80's. If you grew up then you would see films of only
few years back on TV at which point you could tape them for yourself and your
friends. Anything that was broadcast immediately became effectively free:
there was always someone who had a copy you could borrow or copy yourself.
This gave the industry a lot of time to milk revenues from the cinema and then
home video until everyone had it from broadcasts.

With a few notable exceptions, I don't see content from five years back making
a huge cashflow, not to mention ten years. Thus copyright could be a paid
privilege.

You would get the copyright for the first year for free. Then it would cost
more each year to maintain the copyright for one more year. Let's take a small
percentage of the first year's total sales for a given piece, make it the cost
of copyright for the next year and for the following year, add the same
percentage to the previous cost of copyright.

We would therefore effectively be taxing the practise of hoarding content
under copyright.

At the same time income from the content would fall so the markets would reach
a point where it would cost too much to keep the copyright in effect. The
content business could make their own decisions per each piece of content.
They would extend copyright on the most popular films and music while let go
of the ones that don't sell too well.

All this would benefit everyone and make the copyright monopoly vs people's
rights closer to a balance.

~~~
gaff33
Part of the problem is derivative works. I don't think even Disney cares too
much if people stream Steamboat Willy - but if MGM Studios wants to create a
new Mickey Mouse film that could be a problem for them.

Still I have little sympathy - it's hard to argue that endless Twilight fan-
fiction did the franchise any harm. And there's plenty of non-canon James Bond
films that have no impact on the main franchise.

~~~
leephillips
I can think of two: the _Casino Royale_ with Woody Allen, and _Never Say Never
Again_. Any others?

~~~
goto11
Those are properly licensed. They are not derivative works or "fan fiction"
any more than the Broccoli produced installments.

------
walterbell
From Creative Commons and Internet Archive,
[https://creativecommons.org/2018/12/05/join-us-for-a-
grand-r...](https://creativecommons.org/2018/12/05/join-us-for-a-grand-re-
opening-of-the-public-domain/)

 _> Join creative, legal, library, advocacy communities to celebrate the
public domain growing again for the first time in decades, and come network
with an amazing lineup of people and organizations who will help us welcome
this new class of public domain works. Presenters include Larry Lessig,
academic, political activist, and founder of Creative Commons, Corynne
McSherry, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cory Doctorow,
science fiction author and co-editor of Boing Boing, Pam Samuelson, copyright
scholar, Ryan Merkley, CEO of Creative Commons, Jamie Boyle, the man who
literally wrote the book on the public domain, and many others._

~~~
cocacola1
I'm going to that event. Looking forward to it.

------
cogman10
Here is what I see happening. Companies stop worrying about the copyright law.
Why should they? With youtube they have effectively proved that they can shut
down any video they like without any negative repercussions. And now that
piracy is way down due to streaming services, what do they gain by maintaining
their copyright?

We've extended copyright so long that there isn't even a reason to extend it
further. And now, the mechanisms to enforce copyright are so biased towards
large corporations that, even without infringing, they can make your life a
living hell if you cross them.

Don't believe me? Look at just about any youtube content producer. Basically
all of them have stories about their content being pulled because some mega
corp hears them mention something that might be theirs.

~~~
epmaybe
Are you saying that you believe corporations will continue to submit DMCA
takedown notices on content that is newly found in the public domain, with no
liability? It seems as if you are trying to look at the move of some
copyrighted works into the public domain through the lens of the DMCA, without
considering that a content creator who receives a DMCA takedown of works that
are in the public domain has _hard evidence_ to counter said notice, which
isn't necessarily the case in the setting of "fair use".

~~~
cogman10
No, I'm saying that, today, copyright holders are submitting DMCA take down
notices on content that does not contain copyrighted material at all. Not even
under the fair use clause.

There is hard evidence to counter those notices, but ultimately nobody ends up
taking it to court because it is too expensive.

See: [https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/youtube-copyright-
claims-t...](https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/youtube-copyright-claims-
thefatrat/)

~~~
derefr
You don’t need to “take it to court”; if the recipient of the DMCA complaint
says to the host that they disagree with the DMCA takedown notice, the host is
required by the DMCA to put the content back up (or, at least, return it to
whatever state it would be in if the DMCA takedown notice didn’t happen), and
it is then the responsibility of the _complainant_ to take the other party to
court.

Which _the complainant_ will never do, in these cases where it’s obvious that
it was just an overzealous algorithm flagging things it shouldn’t have—because
actually pursuing damages for those situations are exactly the type of thing
that make a judge issue contempt-of-court charges.

~~~
SpaceManiac
Most YouTube copyright complaints are not actually DMCA complaints. The
complainant is just asking YouTube nicely (whether that be manually, automated
on their side, or automated on YouTube's side) and YouTube is complying of its
own volition. 4J of their terms: "YouTube reserves the right to discontinue
any aspect of the Service at any time."

~~~
kevinwang
I'm pretty sure that if YouTube did not "comply if its own volition" for these
kinds of claims, they would be in violation of DMCA.

~~~
cyphar
ContentID doesn't operate through DMCA notices. People often conflate the two,
but in the case of ContentID there are no legally mandated remedies like there
are with DMCA notices.

------
stormbrew
Meanwhile in Canada, a bunch of stuff will be leaving the public domain thanks
to the renegotiation of NAFTA synchronizing Canadian copyright to American.
Yay?

~~~
ezoe
Japan too. Copyright shall be abolished now or our generation's precious
culture will be lost forever.

~~~
Crosseye_Jack
I don’t believe copyright should be abolished, I believe an Author of a
creative piece of work should have the right to protect their work and exploit
it for profit how they see fit. I also don’t believe that copyright destroys
culture.

But I will agree that the time limit on such copyrights has gotten out of
control and should be rained in. Disney had and exploited the benifits of
copyrighted works entering the public domain. It’s only fair (IMO) they allow
others to have such benefits available to themselves too.

~~~
emn13
If copyright lasted (say) a year or two - maybe. But even then, it's a
terrible tool with huge social costs and limited upside. In any sane world,
given the increased pace of information exchange and cultural change,
copyright terms should have decreased over the years. That's not exactly what
happened, now is it?

It's completely laughable to assume human culture would cease to develop in
the absence of copyright; which is essentially it's stated aim. Evidence: the
entirety of human history. The idea wasn't the brightest from the get go: this
was lawmakers simply trying to be too clever.

But what bothers me most is the framing of "authors of a creative piece of
work should have the right to protect their work"; when in fact it means
"anybody or any organisation who made even rudimentary changes to almost any
kind information can limit the rights of every other human on the planet".
It's an absurdly blunt regulatory tool that's eminently vulnerable to
regulatory capture, and oh hey; that actually happened many times over the
centuries - and not just in terms of durations; it was expanded to
corporations; penalties became more severe; exclusions were reduced; scope
crept in the form of anti-circumvention measures; reach expanded by population
growth and international cooperation.

Copyright and derivative laws in its modern form has to be up there as one of
the _worst_ forms of regulation, with huge economic and social costs, yet no
good way out and no practical sunset clauses because of extremely entrenched
habits and vested interests.

~~~
dtech
Copyright is there to help the creation of new works. Why should an author
write a book or a studio produce a movie if literally everyone can freely copy
it? (i.e. Book printers, DVD producers, Cinema's wouldn't have to pay the
original producers). Producing creative work would be economically unviable.

That said, that's also its only justification, and current terms have long
reached beyond that. There isn't a book that wasn't written in 1923 because it
would be freely available in 2004, and if we shortened terms to 50 years it
would have zero effect on the production of new works. Not a movie less will
be made because its copyright expires in 2068 instead of 21xx.

~~~
isostatic
That argument was blown out of the water when copyright started to be
retroactively extended.

------
cocacola1
Finally. This is probably one of the more significant events of the decade.
The culture that's locked up behind copyright could have a major societal
impact down the line.

~~~
philwelch
> The culture that's locked up behind copyright could have a major societal
> impact down the line.

This stuff is almost 100 years old. It was written for a society very
different from our own.

~~~
cocacola1
The beauty of the public domain is that it enables people to update that stuff
for the modern era. That it can now be widely disseminated is the first step.

Look at King Arthur. A thousand year old legend that’s getting another variant
next month - The Kid Who Would Be King.

------
NeoBasilisk
I wonder if we will see another extension since Mickey is getting close to the
chopping block again.

~~~
Asooka
Disney have Marvel now, which is printing money. I don't think they've done
anything Mickey-related in a long while, they might actually let him enter the
public domain. There would probably still be many restrictions on his use, his
iconic shape is probably some form of trademark as well.

~~~
runn1ng
Many Marvel characters go back into the 30s too. The most popular ones are
indeed "silver age" \- Spider-Man, F4, X-Men, Avengers, etc, which is 60s so
Marvel is safe there, but Marvel has a lot of characters from "golden age"
from the 30s/early 40s - for example the original Captain America is 1941,
Namor the Submariner is from the 30s, original Human Torch similarly.

But it's true most of modern Marvel IP is from 60s, and also it's hard to make
an interpretations of the characters not based on the modern interpretations,
and Marvel has trademarked everything from head to toes, including all the
character designs and names (and even the term "super hero"), so... yeah who
knows

------
kccqzy
This definitely will have a great impact. In high school, there was a school
directive that basically adds extra hoops to jump through if a literature
teacher wants to assign as a reading some work published in or after 1923. The
motivation was that the school was worried that poorer students might not be
able to afford those works since they have to buy them. In the end almost
everything I was told to read in the high school literature class was
published before 1923.

~~~
grawprog
Really?? So there were no libraries either at your school or in town?

I dunno when I was in highschool we read things from lots of different time
periods, including things after 1923, and there was no mention of copyright
worries in the slightest.

~~~
scrooched_moose
What library has 25+ copies of any book lying around, for an entire class to
check out, for at least a month?

~~~
grawprog
Well every book I did a report on in highschool was either provided by the
school or taken out from the library. If it was a book the entire class was
expected to do, we would be provided copies. If we got to choose it was up to
us to get them. I was poor and couldn't buy books for school. The library
always worked for me. I did alright.

------
jacques_chester
I feel it should be permissible to extend copyright indefinitely, so long as
there is an extension fee, increased for each year of registration, without
upper limit. Maybe first 35 years (~1 generation) free.

At year 36 you pay $100 to extend. By year 70 you're paying several million to
extend. By year 90 you better hope that The Mouse is worth the twenty two
billion dollars you owe.

~~~
toyg
Not a terrible idea, although it obviously penalises individual authors vs big
business. I would argue that it should only apply to businesses and
inheritors, so that an author could still behest his IP as a worthy
inheritance. However, I fear it would result, in practice, in another
immediate bonus extension for existing IP (i.e. the Mouse would continue to be
owned by Disney for free until 2060). After all, it wouldn't be fair to tell a
company they have to find an extra $22b per year from next January.

~~~
scrooched_moose
Yeah, the only way it remotely works in theory is if the fee is some
percentage of the revenue you earned off the IP in the last year.

Practically it's an unenforceable nightmare that is so prone to "Hollywood
accounting" type gimmicks that doesn't work at all.

~~~
earenndil
I don't think making it a % works. If that % is less than 100, then you never
have any incentive not to pay it.

~~~
Bonooru
Revenue != Profit. There are costs associated with making money off of the IP.
You'd stop when those costs and the cost of renewing are greater than the
revenue taken in.

------
shmerl
So, Mickey Mouse curve is finally starting to crumble? Current copyright term
is insane, it should be significantly rolled back.

------
giancarlostoro
How long for awesome video games to enter public domain? If only companies
would open source games more often after about a decade when the game will
likely sell in insane bundles on Steam.

~~~
toyg
Pong was released at the end of 1972, so let's say 1973 minimum. That's 50
years from now. In practice, the "awesomeness" we remember wasn't really there
before the '80s, so it's more like 60 years.

~~~
zanny
Poor, starving Nintendo and their substantial revenue stream from Super Mario
Brothers 1 might be three generations from now Disney when it comes to
copyright extension.

------
netcan
There are different reasons that get out forward for copyrights, but the main
one is generally money, incentivizing and compensating creative works. That
reason can't credibly (imo) support these long timespans.

Few works produce revenue 50 or 100 years after publication. But even assuming
a work dies, once you discount for time, revenue in 100 years is basically
worth nothing now. Reducing or increasing copyright length by a decade would
have almost no effect on working authors and _can 't_ financially incentivize
their work.

~~~
bediger4000
Agreed: the ridiculously long copyright we've got now can't financially
incentivize authors' work. Therefore, something else is motivating arbitrarily
long copyrights. What is that motivation?

I would suggest just plain control freakery. Even in USA, control over
employees and resources, even to the detriment of the corporation, seems to be
prized.

~~~
nybble41
I would guess that the main financial motive for ever-increasing copyright
terms is strictly anti-competitive, in the sense that the studios are
attempting to avoid competing with their own back-catalogs. There is more
decent entertainment out there already than any one person could properly
appreciate in their lifetime; the only way the studios can ensure a market for
their more recent works is by banning all the older ones.

------
andrewla
It might be that in order to have a coherent discussion about this we need to
separate the concept of copyright into two areas.

One is the right to exclusive distribution of the original work. The other is
the right to make derivative works from that work. In both cases the
commercial/non-commercial distinction may also make sense, but I think these
are the gross categories. Let's call these two new rights "cloneright" and
"adaptright"

Since we lump them together, these two things get mixed up.

Cloneright addresses concerns about the ongoing availability of a work (or
translating the work to a different format) causing problems -- old video
games, old films, old music, out-of-print books, things like that being lost
or hard to obtain because making electronic versions of them is not possible
without the approval of the copyright holder. It seems reasonable that this
should lapse on a relatively short time horizon.

Adaptright is a different matter, and is harder to quantify. I don't think it
would be acceptable for other authors to write sequels to an author's books,
or studios to adapt them without the original author's permission, for a
longer timeframe than cloneright makes sense for. Saying that the lifetime of
the adaptright is tied to the author's lifetime makes sense here. It can take
a long time for a book to be adapted into a movie, and it makes sense to have
the original author to have some say in that (unless they choose to forfeit
that right).

It might make sense to break this further down by commercial/non-commercial
usage, or even by type of copyrighted work (relatively few songs, for example,
are successfully adapted to movies or books, so adaptright might have to mean
something else there) but I think this is a better framing of the copyright
discussion than lumping the two gross categories together.

------
_ph_
In my eyes, copyright should be limited to 50 years after the first
publication or the death of the author. This would still allow for proper
commercial use of the works by the author, yet put realistic limits on how
long a copyright holder can block access to copyrighted work. Because beyond
direct usage of the copyrighted work, it always creates a risk for genuine new
creators that their creations are percieved as infringing on some random
copyrighted piece.

For figures like Mickey, which are actively used, rather trademark law
applies. While the early cartoons might expire in copyright, that only gives
the public the right to use those cartoons, not to create random "Mickey
Mouse" products. That is a reasonable differentiation in my eyes.

~~~
benj111
Why 50?

To my way of thinking, copyright should be set to the minimum required to
induce/allow creators to create. I can't think of any creative medium/industry
that would look more than 10 years out (except maybe Disney with their Marvel
and Star wars factories, but I think that supports my point).

Copyright is a government granted monopoly. We have pretty beefy laws
regarding virtually every other kind of monopoly because its generally against
the public interest. The only reason to offer the monopoly in this case is to
encourage content creation. So the period of monopoly should be no longer than
necessary.

~~~
mikro2nd
10 years might be good enough for software, maybe movies and TV, but 50 is
certainly a lot more appropriate for a book.

I know of one case where a guy wrote a book -- a gardening book -- which was
quite popular for its territory and niche. Then the author died. Fortunately
for his widow the copyright protects her now primary source of income. But for
copyright existing beyond the author's life she'd be destitute. Books _are_ a
writer's pension plan.

~~~
benj111
Pensions should be a writers pension plan.

Replace the Author with someone with a normal job. Do their widows have some
right to ongoing payment based on their partners work?

It just seems bizarre reasoning to me, that doesn't seem to be applied
elsewhere. And it doesn't even work that well. The Paul McCartneys of the
world are rolling in more money than they and their relatives will ever need.
Mean while there are actual creators that need paying jobs to continue doing
their creating.

Why does one creators widow/child/grand/great grand child have more of a right
to a living than another actual creator?

If we want a paternalistic system where we look after creators, then fine, do
it fairly. If you want a somewhat free market where we attempt to maximise
value for all parties then fine do it fairly.

Edit to add: Copyright should allow/encourage creators to create. I'm not
saying writers should have to churn out pulp fiction to make ends meet. I also
don't think there should be an expectation that you can retire after one
gardening book. The writer that retires after one book is a loss to society.

------
ksec
Off Topic Question. So can Public Domain be consider an open source license
now? Previously I read there were lots of argument about it being now
applicable to software.

~~~
mikekchar
In the US, if you put your software in the public domain it is in the public
domain. It is not a license. With a license, you are retaining your copyright.
You're just allowing someone to use it in ways not ordinarily allowed by
copyright. If something is in the public domain, you do not have a copyright.
You can't even issue a license because you have no legal claim over the work.

In many other countries, it is not possible to voluntarily put works in the
public domain. In those countries, you need to have a license. This is where
something like CC0 is useful. CC0 has not been approved by the OSI as an open
source license, but that's not really an issue. However, CC0 does _not_
contain a patent grant and so it's probably not the best choice for software
if you are looking for an open source license.

~~~
beefhash
> However, CC0 does not contain a patent grant and so it's probably not the
> best choice for software if you are looking for an open source license.

Patent license scares are greatly overblown and really only a realistic danger
in case of corporate code. People tend to have the decency to point out that
the algorithms contained in the code are patented. A license containing a
patent grant might actually be dangerous because it creates a false sense of
security for the receipient, thinking they have a valid title, only to find
out later that corporation X _actually_ had a patent on this algorithm.

Additionally, if you're sitting in a European jurisdiction, a patent license
is completely pointless. Because software patents don't exist there. There's
literally nothing that could possibly be licensed.

~~~
mikekchar
That's great if all the people who might use your code are in Europe, but for
those in places like Canada, Japan, etc, they can't use your code without
exposing themselves to risk. It's great if you say, "I won't sue you", but
best to put it in the license ;-)

------
mymythisisthis
What math and electronics textbooks where published in 1923?

------
sbhn
Who cares about copyright, i consume all my content from archive.org

~~~
solarkraft
archive.org kind of has to care.

------
soperj
*First time in more than 20 years in the US.

------
linkmotif
Why doesn’t this happen every year?

~~~
dlbucci
Copyright length has been increased several times over the past century, so
before any copyrights can expire, they get extended. "Oddly enough", each
time, the extensions "coincidentally" tend to happen right before the Mickey
Mouse copyright expires.

~~~
tzs
The only copyright extensions that affected Micky Mouse were the 1998 Act
mentioned in the article, and the 1976 Act.

------
deytempo
We’re coming for you Mickey Mouse

------
munk-a
> At midnight on New Year's Eve

Don't count your mouse ears before they hatch, there's still time for Disney
to step in and demand we support the poor artists by extending copyright
terms.

~~~
OscarCunningham
They've got until 2024 before _Steamboat Willie_ enters the public domain.
Until then we're just going to be getting the years from 1922 to 1928.

I wish that Congress would just say "Everything before _Steamboat Willie_ is
public domain, everything else has copyright in perpetuity". Just give us
everything they can afford to lose while still getting paid.

~~~
TheRealPomax
How about instead we say "everything is death of the artist + 20 years, except
for Disney, who will pay the government $50mm a year to keep that deal in
place" and then if people want to fight a Disney battle, no one else has to
care.

~~~
zanny
Why exactly do artists need copyright for 20 years after they are dead, again?

... why exactly do they need copyright, again?

~~~
tonysdg
IIRC, the idea is to help the (dependents of the) Kurt Cobains of the world:
artists who die young and still have loved ones who can now depend on the
revenue from the copyrighted works for at least 20 years. But IANAL, so I
could be way off.

~~~
DEADBEEFC0FFEE
Why should children of artists get more help than say, builders, or doctors,
or anyone?

~~~
sparky_z
Builders and doctors have regular salaries (or at least are paid in full upon
completion of the work they do). The value of a creative work is in the income
stream it creates over time. If you need the money now, you can recoup that by
selling the rights. But it's hard to sell rights to an income stream that
could disappear tomorrow if you were hit by a bus.

~~~
zanny
I'm pretty sure about 90% of professional creatives (artists, animators...
programmers fall under almost all the criteria, too) are paid a salary as
well. They work for DC, Disney, Amazon, etc. _Tons_ working in either direct
ad agencies or in the marketing departments of all kinds of business. All on a
payroll.

~~~
sparky_z
Yeah, but they aren't who we're talking about here. That's called "work for
hire" and it doesn't fall under an author's-life-plus-X-years rule. It has a
fixed term.

Can you imagine the chaos if, every time someone died, everything they did for
every company they worked for immediately fell into the public domain?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire)

------
zelphirkalt
Funny, a website with a "hall of shame", but it tries to use Google Analytics
and Twitter, two things known for tracking their users everywhere at every
step. Is it itself on its "hall of shame"?

The "hall of shame" does not even load properly, when you block Google
Analytics and Twitter, as I usually do. So you are forced to be tracked, if
you want to see the content. That is another bad pattern, I would say.

~~~
fiala__
I suspect you wanted to comment on this?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18722952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18722952)

