
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2017 - shawndumas
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2017/pre-1976
======
acabal
I've mused on this idea elsewhere, but it's applicable here too:

I can't help but feel today's absurdly draconian copyright laws and lengths
are going to make our century a terrible cultural black hole for our future-
human descendents.

The vast, vast majority of creators who produce culture--books, movies, music,
visual art, etc.--don't see widespread distribution, success, or fame in their
own lifetimes. This is true today and it was true in the past too.

Today, we have people like Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and
others, volunteering their time and energy to lovingly archive, curate, and
distribute out-of-copyright works. Many of these works get a cultural second
life: people today can freely discover and read a book published before 1923,
whose author might have died penniless and unknown in their day. Their work,
their name, their ideas, and their legacy lives on 100 years after their
death, even if the world they lived in overlooked them, because volunteers can
freely update and distribute those works.

Can we say the same about the vast majority of work produced today, for whose
creators don't attain widespread fame or cultural influence? Everything anyone
produces, from a smudge on a piece of paper to the Great American Novel, now
automatically gains a copyright that can last over a century, and that has
almost never failed to be extended. As one of the many everyday creators who
never see significant success, how would you feel if your work was not only
ignored today, but for all time too?

Our future-human descendents are going to think culture from 1923-2100
consisted of almost nothing but the 400 comic book movies, the 75 Star Wars
movies, and Harry Potter. Everything else will be too unprofitable for a
megacorporation to distribute, and illegal for anyone else to.

~~~
cryptarch
There's a reason the takedown of a good private tracker is seen like the
burning of the Library of Alexandria all over again.

It was very sad to see What.CD go down recently. They had every release of
every LP, EP and demo, of every obscure artist you could possibly imagine. The
curation and amount of content made commercial services like Spotify and TIDAL
look barren in comparison. Best of all: there was no DRM on the content and
you could freely use your VPN.

I just hope enough libraries survive for the content to last.

~~~
Klathmon
why don't these kinds of sites distribute their database in the same way they
distribute their content?

At least that way if shit goes south the information is still out there even
if the curation and "updates" to it will no longer happen.

~~~
pervycreeper
I think it boils down to the culture of those kinds of sites, which reportedly
encourage an elitist secret club type of mindset over one which encourages
preservation or dissemination of information.

~~~
orik
You can try to critique the culture of What.CD but the truth is that WCD did a
better job at preserving music than a community with the express purpose of
'preserving or disseminating information' would have done.

The mindset cultivated seeders with the fear of getting kicked out if one was
a bad peer / leech; ratios, bounties and freeleech items created a
gamification for uploading material and seeding otherwise unpopular items for
other users.

~~~
joeberon
Yeah but now that is all for nothing. They could release the torrent database
but they're not gonna are they? There's just too much pride attached to it to
let it go.

~~~
legatus
Well, the database contains data about users too... doing so would put users
at risk. An interesting concept is ZeroNet [1], which allows entire websites
to be shared in a peer to peer way.

[1] [https://zeronet.io/](https://zeronet.io/)

------
Houshalter
I wrote this on another thread a few months ago. It's in the context of
paywalled science, but it applies more generally:

Copyright law is ridiculous. Nonfiction and scientific work should be treated
differently than fictional works. I don't really care if Mickey Mouse goes
into the public domain. But it's crazy that 100 year old scientific works can
still be under copyright and illegal to distribute. These objectively have
value to society, and the argument for the existence of the public domain is
much stronger.

And why on Earth should copyright last last so long to begin with? How many
works are worth anything after 10 or 15 years? I believe 99% of all works make
99%+ of their revenue in the first few years. Having copyright last a
lifetime, let alone much longer, is just crazy. Creators benefit exponentially
less for every additional year of protection. And only the very successful
ones even benefit to begin with - the vast vast majority of works are just
forgotten by that time.

Put a cost on renewing copyright. This is actually how it used to be. Half way
through, you could pay a fee to have copyright extended. Very few people paid
this fee (because most works aren't economically valuable), so most works went
into public domain much sooner. Journals charge $30 to access obscure ancient
papers. But I bet they wouldn't pay even $30 to keep the rights to those same
papers.

Don't put everything into copyright by default. And again especially works of
nonfiction or scientific papers. If the authors want that, then sure. This
wouldn't fix the issues with big journals that demand it. But it still seems
like a sensible idea to have copyright opt-in, not opt-out.

~~~
int_19h
Rather than a renewal fee, why not basically just go all the way with
"intellectual property", and start treating it as such? You can own it if you
want, but please pay the property tax. Or you can always surrender it to the
public domain, if the taxes get too onerous.

I'd even go one step further, and make it a progressive tax proportional to
the duration the work has been copyrighted. Initial grace period of a few
years is free, then a very modest rate, but after a couple of decades it
starts to ramp up really high. If it's _that_ valuable, you can keep paying it
off the profits as long as you want.

Same thing with estates. Inheriting a copyright? Fine - but there's a tax on
that (with the usual applicable caps etc).

And said tax receipts could be specifically allocated to, say, fund libraries,
free public Internet, and other forms of storing and distributing information
and works of art for the benefit of all.

~~~
Spivak
If you care about such things this word be a death sentence for basically all
Free Software licenses like Apache, BSD, GPL, etc. -- basically everything
except MIT and WTFPL since it would be progressively more expensive to
maintain the requirements of the license.

~~~
imtringued
Assuming a 14 year copyright that would mean gcc 3.0 enters the public domain
but the current version obviously has it's own duration. I don't see why they
should get special treatment. Do they really need copyright of 14 year old
versions of software and monopolise it? Are they that scared that someone
takes some old version of gcc and uses it for a commercial application? Also
nothing stops you from taking a public domain work (even your own) and
slapping a new license on top of it if all you care about is the license not
the monopoly.

Also the way the current copyright system works means those free software
licenses are already "dead" by your definition. It's just through pure chance
that the duration keeps getting extended retroactively. The only difference
between the current system and the proposed system is in the duration and the
fact that in the old system all works had effectively the same duration again
through pure chance because it's based on the lifetime of the author.

~~~
belorn
Reading RMS opinion, he said either 10 years or a escrow for source code (so
that proprietary software really do end up public domain).

14 years seems plenty enough that its really shouldn't have any real impact on
copyleft. Bugs, security patches, and plain reality changes makes 14 year old
software kind of unusable. Many applications that is 14 years old won't even
start on modern system and hardware.

------
fjarlq
Website overloaded... here's a cache.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fweb.law.duke.edu%2Fcspd%2Fpublicdomainday%2F2017%2Fpre-1976)

"What books would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978
copyright laws?"

    
    
      Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
      John Updike, Rabbit, Run
      Joy Adamson, Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds
      William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
      Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty
      Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties
      Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval: The Age of Roosevelt
      Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
      Scott O’Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins
      John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
      Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique
    

"Consider the films and television shows from 1960 that would have become
available this year."

    
    
      The Time Machine
      Psycho
      Spartacus
      Exodus
      The Apartment
      Inherit the Wind
      The Magnificent Seven
      Ocean’s 11
      The Alamo
      The Andy Griffith Show (first episodes)
      The Flintstones (first episodes)
    

Also listed: songs from 1960 (e.g. Elvis's "It's Now or Never"), and
copyrighted scientific research from 1960 still behind paywalls (e.g. 1960
papers on the structure of hemoglobin and myoglobin).

------
starseeker
The current copyright system is probably inevitable if you view monetization
as the sole valid means of creation incentivization. There are also those who
want to preserve the "integrity" of their work indefinitely and avoid any risk
of what they would consider degrading or inappropriate reuse. If you come at
this from either the monetization or the indefinite integrity camps, the
public domain is entirely a negative proposition. This is unfortunate, since
from a socitial standpoint there are many overall benefits to the public
domain (renewal of interest in what would otherwise be lost works and lost
effort, lowered barriers to entry for those needing older work on which to
base new efforts, etc.) Unfortunately, most of those gains are also net
negatives to those working within (and benefiting from) the current system,
and consequently the public domain is unlikely to have advocates with the
resources to sway the powers that be in its favor. I suppose a sufficiently
broad and strong wave of public opinion might do the trick, but I don't know
what the prospects of that are (I suspect dim in the short term, more
difficult to calculate in the long term if copyright terms keep getting
extended indefinitely.)

~~~
kagamine
The "integrity of the work" argument has always been an oddity to me. As a
Brit who grew up with ska (the original and the revival) I have been aware for
a long time that the island music, rocksteady, ska, reggae etc, flourished due
to weak and often ignored copyright law in Jamaica.

There is a whole genre of music there, with a very strong cultural background
that is historically important in Jamaica and further afield, the UK being
just one of those places. Some of the best music, imo, from the 60s and 70s
came from Jamaican artists "ripping off" western music to create something
unique. I don't want to live in a world in which Marcia Griffiths' voice went
unheard. I also want people like Marcia to get paid and live a good life. The
current copyright system is not working for anyone, not for artists either I
believe.

The "degrading" of work seems like an arrogant argument, as if nobody in the
word could do better than the original (or even different if not better).
Books require editing before publication, songs require mastering and mixing
by professionals. It is reasonable to assume that any work could be reworked
as something improved, as long as that reworking does not try to pass itself
off as the original there ought not to be a problem. Some system of profit
share where profit exists could exist.

Here's a humorous article from techdirt highlighting the absurdities of the
current situation
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150503/17153830875/get-u...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150503/17153830875/get-
up-stand-up-whose-rights-now.shtml) My own take on one detail discussed on the
comments there is that the Marley estate probably are trying to regain the
copyright because the family are mostly working musicians (at least 3 sons and
one daughter of Bob Marley that I know of) and would like to perform their
father's songs.

------
Aloha
The bigger problem in my mind is all the orphaned works that will never be
read, seen or enjoyed again because they are still locked behind the wall of
copyright for owners who no longer care about them.

~~~
chimeracoder
Or worse, works which _could_ be used, but for which the process of actually
figuring out who the holders are and tracking them down is prohibitively
complicated and expensive.

~~~
Aloha
Exactly.

Personally, I don't mind the idea so much of a perpetual copyright - provided
it requires the rights owner to frequently and actively participate in the
process to keep the protections active after the initial period. (and perhaps
a fee schedule to reflect the supposed value of the piece) I think its
possible for a copyright bill to exist that both the EFF and Disney can both
support.

~~~
convolvatron
this is the problem. the law dept at Disney never has any interest in
weakening copyright law in any way. no matter how reasonable.

lawyers only see degrees of risk

------
cooper12
This comment was in reply to a now-deleted comment which ended with the
statement: "The bigger problem is figuring out how to curate all of this which
is more widely published than every before. Also, it's not crazy to think that
today's copyright laws see some major revisions in the next few decades. The
Internet has changed everything since just 1980 or so, and these are old laws
that need reworking."

\---

Unfortunately I'm not sure I can feel the same optimism. Copyright law has
long been beholden to corporate interests. For them, it's only fine if it
keeps getting expanded indefinitely. The more restrictive the terms, the more
likely that others will have to license their works and the more they can
bludgeon any offenders.

Your view is really tied to the present day, but what about all these works
that aren't available on computers that need to be desperately digitized? I
think we already have a natural curation mechanism: something popular and
important gets reproduced in some way; it gets quoted, adapted, tweaked. Those
are the works that need to be prioritized, but in doing so we might miss out
on undiscovered gems or things whose importance will only be apparent in
hindsight. Also, storage is cheap nowadays, we can easily just keep
everything, index it, and let others sift through it later. (one example is
the Internet Archive, we won't know what role these stored websites could play
in a few decades like the Geocities archive)

------
Goopplesoft
Interestingly the Copyright Term Extension Act is also known as the "Mickey
Mouse Protection act"

artlawjournal.com/mickey-mouse-keeps-changing-copyright-law/

~~~
theonemind
AKA The Sonny Bono act
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono)

i never had any desire to leave some great legacy after my death, but I can't
help but notice how I personally feel in regard to Sonny Bono because of this,
and realize that I actually don't want to leave humanity worse off and get
remembered for that. Quite possibly incorrectly, since I didn't track politics
at all my young age in 1998, I can't shake my impression that Sonny Bono had
no principles and sold us all out for his own personal gain.

~~~
jccalhoun
The Sonny Bono act gave Disney 20 more years. I am guessing that in the second
half of 2017 we will see some grumblings of yet another extension of copyright
(or at least some kind of reform where copyright can be renewed eternally).

------
bootload
Watching _" The Silicon Valley of Hardware"_ with Bunnie Huang [0], it is
obvious Shenzhen would have been a different place if the militarisation of
intellectual property was enforced. So the question is the step from hardware
hacking and manufacturing and sales hampered in the US?

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY)

------
protomyth
I wonder if there is a compromise that can be done to at least get the works
out there. I get the feeling the big fear isn't really that "Steamboat Willie"
would be freely available, but that the character of Mickey Mouse would be.

It seems like an extension of trademark law with continued registration and
payments on the characters would be a compromise that could break lose the
original book / movie.

I would imagine many would hate to give up the ability to create new, original
stories or do mashups, but we won't get that anyway.

~~~
dublinben
Trademark doesn't have time limits like Copyright. There is no real threat to
Disney's control over the Mickey character in commerce.

~~~
protomyth
Can you cite where the work in the public domain can be stopped from mashups
by trademark currently. It sounds like as soon as the copyright expires people
can do their own thing with the work.

~~~
dublinben
Here's some more information on the subject:
[http://copyright.nova.edu/mickey-public-
domain/](http://copyright.nova.edu/mickey-public-domain/)

~~~
protomyth
> the Court ruled that in order for trademark to protect a character in the
> public domain, the character must have obtained “secondary meaning.”

That's a pretty high bar, and what I suggested for a compromise was quite a
bit lower.

------
EvanAnderson
It's pleasing to know that long copyright terms provide incentive for dead
authors to produce new works.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
[http://archive.is/e0lnx](http://archive.is/e0lnx)

------
necessity
IP is bs. Don't care for it, don't respect it. Don't expect government - the
sole protector of it - to ever change anything regarding it for the better,
just ignore it.

------
chiaro
It's a shockingly transparent corruption of power that these increases were
applied retrospectively. The entire rationale for copyright is to incentivize
the creation of new works, which explicitly does apply to past creations. This
is nothing more than rent seeking.

------
Hondor
The TPP extends copyright terms in other countries. The new president opposes
that deal. So there's a bit of hope.

------
visarga
I think the effective status of copyright is being influenced by open source
and creative commons. The more we publish in open source, the more value it
accumulates, and that attracts new publishing. It grows like a black hole,
eating everything (or like communism, if you asked Microsoft a few years ago).
Just look of what remained of the copyright protected software market after
2000. Github is the new Library of Alexandria, not What.CD, because What.CD
was only free as in beer, while Github is free as in freedom as well.

~~~
aleksei
Github is most certainly not free as in freedom.

------
HirojaShibe
I would support an effort to remove the copyright protections of all works
that were created before Jan 01 2001. Making all works from the last century
available for not only the current generation but an actual gift for future
generations. All those works no matter the idea would now be re-
imagine,expounded upon, improve, and distributed wider for all peoples. There
is fundamental no reason to at all to keep such works under such protection it
only hinders the growth of culture,society and humanity. As well as supporting
efforts to repeal these century long protections of bodies of work by many
organization mention in the comment section.

------
enterx
All this copyright nonsense is so medieval.

What we need in the 21st century is the new Universal Copyright Act which will
claim the content public domain once it has 50%+1 direct democratic votes to
be so.

~~~
mjhm2539
On the contrary, in the medieval period, there was no notion of copyright
whatsoever. The Order of Preachers, otherwise known as the Dominicans, would
convene every year and openly share all of the technological advances they had
made with the rest of the order, who would then return to their priories and
implement the more effective agricultural/technological practices

------
FollowSteph3
Another possibility is a service that keeps track of people who give away
their copyright rights. Or similar to a renewal fee which gets exponentially
more expensive with time, at the very least we could require they at least
resubmit a request to stay copyrighted every year. The key is that you want
some action to be taken otherwise fs no longer copyrighted by default.

------
Flip-per
Copyright could be used as litmus test to see who actually makes decisions /
writes laws in a country.

------
erikbye
[https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs](https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs)

------
r4ltman
it'll change for the better, i'd explain how but I'm still manoeuvring in
order to potentially benefit, however, it's a very simple dialogue. granular
pay per bit as to become free, don't worry about the future. the future of the
future is the present, that's the future, and this thread, truly is the past
as art form.

------
geekamongus
I love that this website is a throwback to the 90's, complete with table-based
layouts and overlapping cells.

~~~
icebraining
Look at the source of HN some day :)

------
_andromeda_
Property rights should be preserved for as long as possible IMO.

~~~
ue_
Why? And that's even assuming that IP is property in the first place.

~~~
_andromeda_
IP is by the very definition, property.

Edit: Why? Property rights should be upheld in perpetuity. The author's estate
should continue to benefit from his works.

~~~
kefka
No, it's the exact opposite thing as "property".

I can take materials and land, and build a house. I can live in said house.

But if someone claims that the way I cut the wood was under a patent, then
they can lay claim on _my_ property with make-believe property - that of which
is in the mind.

It's also how we get absurd things like BRACA1 gene for breast cancer is
"owned" by a company, meaning all those with breast cancer somehow owe this
company for using any techniques to find it.

Or it's how we get idiotic things like "I'll sell you this shiny disk, but the
software says you lose all first sale doctrine cause of copyright".

Or, with laws strengthening copyright (DMCA) say "You may have bought and own
this hardware, but it's illegal for you to fix it without our approval,
because of 'prevention techniques'. " Might I remind you, that only 30 years
prior, companies would attach the schematic of the electronics in the back
panel for easy repair.

'Intellectual Property' degrades property in every way.

------
ginko
Sure, it sucks that none of these properly entered the public domain by now,
but who really cares if you pirate the Psycho, The Magnificent Seven, Elvis's
It's Now or Never nowadays?

~~~
Dylan16807
You may be able to pirate it, but try to incorporate it into a new work and
you're guaranteeing a lawsuit.

~~~
orionblastar
Even if you claim fair use?

~~~
jackvalentine
Fair use exceptions are very limited in scope compared to what you may want to
produce using the characters or other properties of a work.

~~~
orionblastar
Like a small clip from a movie to use to teach people about something in a
class or MOOC?

~~~
jackvalentine
Like making your own Micky Mouse movie.

