So, What Didn't Enter The Public Domain This Week, That Should Have
from the take-a-look dept
A couple weeks ago, I pointed out that, while some stuff was entering the public domain in many countries around the globe on January 1st, here in the US, we got a big fat empty set. The good folks over at the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University have put out their depressing annual post about what should have been entering the public domain this year if we still were working under the previous copyright law regime, before it changed in 1978 via the 1976 Copyright Act. Under that law, the maximum length of copyright was 56 years -- meaning that works from 1956 would have entered the public domain yesterday. There were some impressive works that will remain locked up for decades:
- Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume I and Volume II
- Philip K. Dick, Minority Report
- Ian Fleming, Diamonds are Forever
- Fred Gibson, Old Yeller
- Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues
- Alan Lerner, My Fair Lady
- Eugene O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
- John Osborne, Look Back in Anger
- Dodie Smith, 101 Dalmations
And, of course, this only covers works that were kept under copyright for the full 56 years. Since the earlier copyright law required a renewal at 28 years, and 85% of copyrights were not renewed (suggesting that the vast majority of copyright holders don't value them past 28 years), lots of works from 1984 should also be entering the public domain, but probably won't get there for another century or so.
And the real sad part is just how much culture we're losing because of all this:
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the current copyright term is that in most cases, the cultural harm is not offset by any benefit to an author or rights holder. Unlike the famous works highlighted here, the vast majority of works from 1956 do not retain commercial value. This means that no one is benefiting from continued copyright, while the works remain both commercially unavailable and culturally off limits. The public loses the possibility of meaningful access for no good reason.It's difficult to see how this situation makes any sense at all.
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Filed Under: copyright, public domain
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Personally I'm rather hoping for the latter, after reading something this depressing, I could do with a laugh.
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As ever, I find myself wondering what masterpieces might be out there, inaccessible and unknown to the mainstream that cannot be publicised or adapted due to this rule. Is there another Minority Report (for example) that could be adapted into a great movie in order to protect someone's profits? Probably not the author's either, as since Dick spent most his life in poverty and only gained mainstream visibility with the film of Blade Runner (whose release he didn't live to witness) - so who knows about his less successful contemporaries and their work?
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When that is said, I know for a fact that there are older and still very relevant gems out there.
The starving of public domain is very bad after the internet has arrived. Before that, there were good arguments for keeping copyright open to not loose old works completely. Today you digitalise it and spread it as "free stuff" on the internet, mostly through p2p.
Public domain has changed enormously the last 20 years and I am not doubting for a second that it will be a benifit for the majority of the works that would otherwise be abandonware and to a large extend extinct, ironically, due to a far too inflexible copyright.
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So, it's down to personal experience but I'd definitely bet that more people were introduced to Dick's work by Blade Runner than anything accomplished on the page alone would have achieved, which was really my point.
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How about the Bible?
The Revised Standard Version --NT copyright 1946, OT copyright 1952. Those copyrights continue to be enforced, perhaps because the National Council of Churches of Christ believes in spreading to the gospel only to those who have properly licensed it.
For those who haven't read the Bible, it should be clear that the RSV owes a great deal to the 1611 King James Version. Now for the KJV, 402 years ought to safely ensure that the work is in the public domain right? In most of the world the answer is yes, but in the UK, the Crown still claims a Royal prerogative on the publishing rights to the King James Bible. This use of this prerogative with respect to the KJV has been granted to Cambridge University which still attempts to exert their rights to restrict publishing anything longer than 500 verses without permission.
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Personally I'm rather hoping for the latter, after reading something this depressing, I could do with a laugh.
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True, but they fail to renew many copyrights, allowing a LOT of material to fall into the Public Domain.
A classic example: Most of the Fleisher Brothers animated output (Popeye, Superman, Betty Boop, Casper, Koko the Clown, etc.)
Also, the early Oswald cartoons created by Walt Disney.
However, since Disney, Inc would just outspend you in court (even though they don't have a legal leg to stand on), they're in a "de facto" copyright tie-down.
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Worrying about benefits to the rights holder when the public isn't seeing any benefit is completely missing the point
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Oh wait.. umm I'm not American..
sorry.. my bad ;(
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I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
"maximum length of copyright was 58 years" -- Pretty sure you mean fifty-SIX, unless some oddity that doesn't come to mind.
Take the loop to Techdirt.com! http://techdirt.com/
Every "new business model" here requires first getting valuable products (including money) for free.
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Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
"Land of the fee, home of the slave"
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Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
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Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
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Re: Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
No culture being lost? I have met parents whose children do not even know who Mickey Mouse is because Disney refuse to allow him to ascend to the public domain. That is an incredible shame because the older generations will speak of the great pleasure they had as kids watching Mickey Mouse for the first time.
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MAN, don't set the bar for mockery so damn low! I'm not that witty: you mock yourself better than I ever can!
Take a loopy tour of Techdirt.com! You always end up at same place!
http://techdirt.com/
Why so many self-referring links here? Techdirt logic: old assertions prove new assertions.
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Re: Re: Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
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Re: Re: Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
www.techdirt.com
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Re: Re: Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
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Re: Re: Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
And here we have it folks: the first correct and coherent thing ootb has ever said.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
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Re: Re: I don't think any
He has lost relevance with a part of the younger generation. That is why Disney bought Star Wars.
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Re: Re: I don't think any
He has lost relevance with a part of the younger generation. That is why Disney bought Star Wars.
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Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
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Re: Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
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Re: Re: Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
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Re: Re: Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
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Re: I don't think any "culture" is actually lost, you just have to pay for it.
The price is too big to pay, period. This is not about passive slave-like consumption as per your narrow-minded suggestion. This is about re-hashing existing works and taking them as a base to produce new cultural works. You know, the way it's been done for millenia. Now a bunch of culture pirates want to take it and lock it down. It's a travesty.
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Maybe we need some help...
That just made me laugh. Can't implies some sort of barrier. I have been making copies of copyrighted works for decades. Vinyl to cassette, radio to cassette, cassette to CD, CD to CD, CD to mp3, and I could go on for a while.
So if we can't make copies, maybe we just need to learn to use the copying technologies.
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Re: Maybe we need some help...
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Re: Maybe we need some help...
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Correction: that should say unusable.
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Also, the home copies made by viewers at the time must surely have made inferior copies to the ones that could have been retained and restored by the BBC. Even if the episodes are still available to view in some form, the masters have most certainly been lost forever, and to prevent that requires more work than copying a CD to MP3. Said work is also rather more expensive and thus unlikely if the legal right to do so is prevented...
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Maybe we need some help...
Another example of so-called "economy" triumphing over art.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Maybe we need some help...
It all boils down to the same thing - work that should be available to the public for all time is potentially lost because the only way to preserve it is to break the law. If a pirated or stolen copy of London After Midnight is never located, it's lost forever and the same fate may await the contemporaries of the works mentioned above - just so those studios don't lose a profit opportunity.
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There is a hole in your culture
It's sad that many things will be lost. On the other hand, it doesn't have to be that way in the future.
If you want to know, you can preserve it.
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Re: Re: Re: Maybe we need some help...
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Re: Maybe we need some help...
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Re: Re: Maybe we need some help...
Sure there are thousands of words rotting in film vaults, but thanks to many of us, there are many thousands of works that would be joining those rotting away but have been shared and can be accessed by everyone.
Share and Enjoy. (see how that works)
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Re: Re: Maybe we need some help...
The "author", legally-speaking, is the movie studio.
The same studio that failed, in many cases, to even renew the copyright on the flick at the end of it's first 28-year registration period.
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Re: Re: Re: Maybe we need some help...
As soon as they go bankrupt the masters are shattered among former employees, never to see the light of day again, or they are lost to a collector or they are lost to reuse policies or they are lost to fires, floods, earthquakes and plain bad archiving etc. etc. etc.
The safest is to store the work noncetralized and that is done best digitally and in non-closed systems.
The best way to ensure the survival of culture today is to release it to the public asap. The best way to ensure art is ensuring a way for the artist to make a living and so far the business-model has been government granted monopoly. The best way to preserve the spirit of the artist is letting the artist live undisturbed which mean letting the artist have the flexibility to choose protection of the work for a short period of time even after the artists death. 50 and 70 years after death are very far above what is close to reasonable in this case, but less than 10 years could make some people see an economic opportunity in wacking an artist to gain the possibility of recreating and selling the work.
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"The best way to ensure art is ensuring a way for the artist to make a living and so far the business-model has been government granted monopoly."
That is pure, unmitigated fallacy and also, it's your mere opinion. The best way to ensure art is to allow it to propagate unhindered. That is a fact. Art is the means to communicate ideas and the best way to spread ideas is to allow them to spread without restriction, even to encourage it. Art will flourish regardless of whether it is viable as an occupation and we are under no obligation to provide any class of citizen a monopoly of any kind. Since your original premise is false, all proceeding assertions based on that premise are rendered invalid.
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Re: Maybe we need some help...
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Re: Maybe YOU need some help...
It isn't just the problem that physical copies of certain works are being lost, it's that we're losing the value of those work culturally too. Adapting a previous work reasserts the cultural significance of the story for a contemporary audience. This act is the cutural equivilance of taking a work on wax cylinder and transferring it into a MP3. It is not good enough to just preserve the original when there is no social interest in it, but adapting a work, assuming that it's good and relevant, brings that interests and benefits both the adaptation and the original. This entire process in the end benefits culture as a whole, which is what we lack at present. While you may willingly make illegal copies of works, not many people would be so willing to make illegal adaptations of older works and face the liability that would ensue. If I am wrong about you, and others here, maybe then you should start a legal defense fund for unapproved adaptations. Without some legal change here our common culture is only doomed to stagnate and atrophy...
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While I see copyright as damaging to society, their is a commercial argument for long copyrights. Long copyright allows the publishers to keep old works out of the market and so reduce competition for new works.
With the increasing dependency on digital works, where DRM is used, works will be lost more quickly, as the second hand market is destroyed, With DRM copies die with devices, and or the person to whom they were licensed.
The disadvantage of long copyright, the destruction of culture by causing it to be forgotten far outweighs any commercial advantage to the publishers.
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Any content publisher who worries about this must have their head up their ass.
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So therefore your 'market' is only 5% of the planet. Whereas the other 95% don't have to legally pay you diddly squat, in fact can legally remove your DRM on any of these works (though not adaptations).
Therefore the argument for long copyrights in a limited and actually minute market only is basically itself bogus.
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"Whereas the other 95% don't have to legally pay you diddly squat"
...but can certainly choose to do so if you offer a product that encourages them to, perhaps by offering extra content or a version superior to the one used by public domain releasers.
That's definitely a point worth stressing. Public domain doesn't mean you can't make money, it only removes the artificial barrier that prevents others from doing the same. There's nothing to stop you cashing in, you just have to compete with a playing field that's now level.
So, even that argument disappears, unless you're of the school that thinks that a work should generate money forever with no further effort to attract future customers. In which case, you deserve to go out of business.
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I doubt that's true. I'm relatively sure that many other countries have similar automatic copyright laws. And there are various treaties about respecting the copyright lengths of other countries.
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Nope no such animal.
Reciprocity on copyright only works under the Berne Convention for works currently under copyright in the relevant countries. If a work goes into the PD in one of the signatory countries the other countries have no say whatsoever. This is why The Great Gatsby and other works are free and in the PD everywhere except the USA.
Though this doesn't mean the USA doesn't try to make there egregious rules and lengths of copyright terms the norm under things like TRIPS, AFACT (now moot everywhere) etc they still haven't been able to retrospectively get countries to change existing works. Only the USA and Germany currently do this stupidity
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In order for this statement to be accepted, you have to believe one other thing to be true. You must believe that you're in a product industry. I reject the claim wholeheartedly. It's a service industry and the sooner everyone accepts that, the sooner everyone realizes that copyright is a huge waste of time and is holding art back.
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The implication being the older works are superior in quality to the newer works...
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Joining the pile-on party...
I feel your assertion is deeply flawed in it's assumption that public domain works are "competition" to a publisher for said has full rights to republish these works, limiting such "competition" and opening up a new revenue stream, plus they are further able to publish new works that are an adaptation and/or a derivative work of the original (which, in the examples provided above, could be something like Minority Report With Zombies). I conclude that in the end long copyright doesn't help the publishers much either.
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It should only be subject to U.S. copyright law if so desired by rightsholders. If the work is public domain in the country of origin and the rightsholders are agreeable, the government should have no say on whether the work is public domain in the U.S. or not
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In response to the idea that the film would not be subject to U.S. copyright law due to the country it was made in I wanted to point out that the copyright status of the film is controlled by U.S. copyright law in regards to U.S. distribution.
I was only trying to point out that the film's origin has no relevance on how it is treated in regards to U.S. copyrights.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX2VaVtFYfs
Guy 1: RUUUUUUUUUN!!! Its GODZILLLAAAA!!!!!
Guy 2: It looks like Godzilla, but due to international copyright laws, its not.
Guy 1: STILL WE SHOULD RUN LIKE IT IS GODZILLAAAA!!!!
Guy 2: Though it isn't.
Both: AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Since the American versions are redited (and in most cases, retitled), they're considered seperate works from the original Toho/Japanese-language versions.
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Copyright vs The value of the work
It they considered it valuable to future generations they would automatically ensure that it was preserved in any way possible. Case in point, all books that are no longer published and cannot be obtained even in the second hand market.
And now for something completely different (to paraphrase a gorup (not a mistake) of non-humourous film-makers).
Now that this year is last year and next year is this year, expect this year to have some interesting times and events after the non-event of last year.
If the last didna make sens, yanot thinkin very hard.
That makes even less sense. Descending into trauma with a chunk taken out of the head.
We're still here, where's the end of the world that the documentary "2012" described? Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhg.
The pain in the head is too much. Getting a cancer cut out is just too traumatic. My eyebrow is now too high, my good looks are no longer ugly man quality.
Danger Robin Willson, danger - I have blown a fuse in my computational matrix and can no longer cogitate like a polish mechanical humiform.
I'm nuts, I'm Nuts, i'M NUTS - no I want some cashews, salted and roasted.
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Too bad copyright doesn't expire no more…
It's too bad that copyright is the standard for publication instead of the public domain. :-(
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Re: Too bad copyright doesn't expire no more…
but i am also on the same plan, all work shall be PD upon death. Hell, some may make it there before hand.
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I could do it manually using dd.
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Book links broken?
Is that a whoops maybe?
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Most of those earlier episodes, if they find the audio, will result in "animated versions" of those episodes with the original dialogue included.
There simply is a lot of Doctor Who content from its earlier years that are no longer available to be released, unless the BBC decides to just refilm those episodes with the original screenplays.
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copyright to strict
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/get-rid-right-make-derivative-works-copyright-law- and-limit-copyright-last-lifespan-author/05XxG8Zv
It is not searchable on the petetion.whitehouse.gov yet because I don't have 150 signatures yet. I would like to limit copyright more than what my petition calls for but am not sure If it would go far if I did that so I would be happy to a least have this get somewhere.
I really don't like the copyright law monopoly. If the old fairy tales were copyrighted long ago where would disney be?Copyright limits creativity. Many people have got their ideas from other stories and yet there are people out there willing to sue if others borrow from their work.
I wish stories like "The Lord of the Rings" were in the public domain.
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Sonny Bono Act
For books, this means the children earn royalties while protecting their parents' vision.
For movies, etc. owned by companies, this means they can continue controlling it because they have no family to pay royalties too.
That's why Bono opened another can of worms by inserting a clause that let creators get their works back at the time of renewal. It was his way of helping artists like Little Richard or The Beatles who lost all control of the songs he wrote.
Problem with that is, comic books are proving the terms of today aren't so easily defined with systems of the past, and the whole "work for hire" question is going to tie up some courts for a long time.
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Why unjustified blocking might make sense
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More ZOG control
Just like in Orwell's 1984, MiniTruth had to constantly destroy the old books because they didn't fit with the current manufactured "reality."
Well, here's a hypothetical: supposed there is a certain book that provides a first-hand account of Israeli atrocities committed by, say the Irgun during the 1950's. That book is unacceptable to ZOG's current version of reality because it criticizes Israel. So all ZOG has to do is steal whatever few copies are left in any university libraries (most scholarly works from that period would be few in number, and copyright law prevents any copies to be made to preserve or backup the work.) Presto, chango! What atrocities? There were never any atrocities committed, where's your proof? Oh it's in a book that no one can see? Right. Down the memory hole you go!
Perfect THOUGHT control. REALITY control. ZOG always wants to "be first with the truth" like David Patreus said.
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Public Domain Movies
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Re: Public Domain Movies
Firstly, because they don't have any monopoly rights on the film. Somehow, they thing they can only make money if they can block anyone else from doing so. Secondly, movies that go into the public domain only usually do so due to age, and studio already abandon most of their non-blockbuster titles after a poor opening weekend, let alone decades after release.
"if these movies are shown as poorly made dupes or are worn out?"
There's a few reasons for this. First of all, the companies who specialise in public domain movies are usually interested in low margin turnarounds of existing stock. So, they pick up dirt cheap copies of old prints, do zero restoration work and release them as cheap as possible (e.g. Mill Creek box sets or the DVDs you can see in dollar stores).
The flipside is that most movies that end up in the public domain tend to end up there because there's no studio who can claim (or are interested in claiming) copyright over them. This usually means that the movies are B-movies, weren't financially successful at the time, are difficult to locate, etc. Film stock degrades over time and requires correct storage and/or restoration. So, unless a public interest such as a museum picks up the title or it gets the attention of a Criterion or Keno, the resulting release will be a copy of a print that's degraded over time.
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56 years?
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