Announcing The Winners Of The 2nd Annual Public Domain Game Jam!

from the gaming-like-it's-1924 dept

The judges have had their fun, the votes are in, and now it's time: we've got the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924! We had some amazing entries this year, and we've even got a couple returning winners. Plus, we noticed a really exciting pattern: several of the games didn't just make use of newly-copyright-free works from 1924, they actually found ways to embody the spirit of the game jam — a celebration of the public domain and the creative power of remixing and reimagining — within their themes and mechanics as well. This has only strengthened our resolve to continue with these game jams each year, and hopefully expand them as the public domain continues to grow — but first, here are the winners of Gaming Like It's 1924:

Best Analog Game — The 24th Kandinsky by David Harris

As we began reviewing entries in the game jam, this was one of the first to catch our eye, and right away we knew it was something special. The 24th Kandinsky is a marvelously conceived and executed game that you could start playing right now with almost any group in any setting and have an interesting, entertaining, and above all creative time. It is a game about admiring, sharing, remixing, creating, and collaborating on art — all quite literally, and all based on the 1924 paintings of the famed abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky. Players become what one judge called "art DJs", physically reproducing and cutting up pieces of Kandinsky's work to create a new composition on a shared canvas, with some light voting-based competition so a winner can take home the group masterpiece as a prize. This is exactly the sort of public domain celebration we hoped these game jams would inspire, and a deserving recipient of the Best Analog Game award.

Best Digital Game — You Are The Rats In The Walls by Alex Blechman

The award for the best overall digital game goes to this RPG Maker experience that employs a classic technique for reimagining a famous work: switching the perspective character. You Are The Rats In The Walls takes H. P. Lovecraft's 1924 short story of the nearly-same name and, as you've probably guessed, puts the player in the shoes of the titular rats. One thing that makes this game stand out is its excellent and amusing writing, which mines a great deal of comedy from the combination of baroque Lovecraftian prose with more modern, casual dialog. But what sealed its spot as Best Digital Game was that it goes beyond the basics of the RPG Maker engine and actually adds some real gameplay mechanics — simple ones perhaps, but enough to elevate it beyond the more rigid interactive fiction it could have otherwise been.

This is Alex Blechman's second win in the Best Digital Game category, following last year's win with a quite different kind of game.

Best Adaptation — The Hounds Follow All Things Down by J. Walton

At first glance, this analog storytelling/roleplaying game based on Lord Dunsany's 1924 novel The King of Elfland's Daughter might not seem like a candidate for the Best Adaptation award, which goes to the game that most faithfully carries forth the meaning, style, and intent of the original work. And yet, something about the way The Hounds Follow All Things Down radically tears apart — then tasks players with creatively rebuilding — its source material allows it to tap in to what Charles De Lint called "the spell of legendry and wonder" that makes the novel so influential in the fantasy genre. The designer used an unusual, experimental method of procedural generation via predictive text algorithms to chop up the text of the book into curious fragments, which the players then use to construct a fictional "famous poem" within the story's setting. As such, it directly employs themes of authorship, oral history, remixing, and the way stories change over time, while strongly evoking the world of Elfland and its inhabitants.

J. Walton is our other returning winner this year, after taking the Best Deep Cut award last year with a game that similarly delivers rich meaning in strange and unexpected ways.

Best Remix — 192X by chloe spears

The award for the best combination of material from multiple public domain sources goes to this Twine-based interactive fiction that clearly had such remixing at the heart of its mission. 192X weaves together the Buster Keaton film Sherlock Jr., the Yevgeny Zamyatin novel We, and George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue — all works from 1924 (and thanks to the designer for noting that the game only uses the now-public-domain composition by Gershwin, not any of the still-copyrighted recordings). Moreover, it's another of the entries that brought the ideas of public domain material and remixing into the game itself, resulting in (as the designer describes it) "a game about the art we leave behind for the future, and what we allow the future to do with it". The writing is compelling and often funny, the interactivity is simple but designed with care and subtlety that enhances the story, and as one of our judges put it, "my hat is off to the creator for having the guts to even try to tell a Buster Keaton movie in words alone."

Best Deep Cut — Legends of Charlemagne by Abelardsnazz

There weren't many "deep cut" entries based on works that don't appear in the popular public domain day highlight lists this year, but the competitive deck-building card game Legends of Charlemagne — based on the N. C. Wyeth paintings published in a 1924 illustrated edition of Thomas Bulfinch's famous 19th century book of the same name — would be a strong contender even in a crowded field. It first caught our eye with its striking visuals that pair the paintings with perfectly complementary card designs, but its most notable achievement is having identified this wealth of beautiful imagery in one edition of a book that has been republished and repackaged many times over the past 150 years, and which could have easily flown under the radar of everyone looking for interesting 1924 publications. Wyeth's book, magazine and advertising illustrations are an iconic part of early 20th century commercial art, and Legends Of Charlemagne gives them new life as a game that will appeal especially to fans of history, legend, fantasy, and of course competitive card games.

Best Visuals — Hot Water by reltru

A video game with good graphics is a tough thing to pull off in a one-month development window, but this year we have a winner for the Best Visuals category that is absolutely dripping with visual style. Hot Water, based on the 1924 Harold Lloyd silent film of the same name, is a simple and short reaction game that could use some polish on the controls and mechanics, but its delightfully anachronistic combination of retro pixel art with silent movie interstitial title cards and a black-and-white, early-film aesthetic is instantly appealing. With the music enhancing this effect, plus a little treat at the end, you've got a couple minutes of silly, diverting, and above all visually charming gameplay that will put a smile on your face.

The winning designers will be contacted via their Itch pages to arrange their prizes, so if you see your game listed here, keep an eye on your incoming comments!

Like last year, we'll be featuring even closer looks at each winning game over the coming weeks, and you can check out all the submissions (including all the great games that didn't quite make the cut) over on itch.io. Congratulations to all our winners, and a huge thanks to everyone who submitted a game — and finally, another thanks to our amazing panel of judges:

• Sharang Biswas
• Patrick Ewing
• Eric Goldman
• Parker Higgins
• Tim Hwang
• Albert Kong
• Em Lazer-Walker
• Randy Lubin
• Mike Masnick
• Jason Morningstar
• Leslie Shannon
• Jeeyon Shim
• April Kit Walsh

We'll be back next year with another public domain game jam for works from 1925, and in the mean time, keep on mining that public domain! There's lots more to discover...

Filed Under: 1924, copyright, games, public domain

Gaming Like It's 1924: Check Out The Entries In Our Public Domain Game Jam

from the the-games-are-in dept

At the beginning of the year, we launched our second public domain game jam to encourage designers to explore all the new works exiting copyright protection in the US and turn them into new analog and digital games — and as of this month, the submissions are in! Our panel of judges is hard at work play checking out all the great games, and while they try to determine a winner, you can check them out too.

Though we didn't get as many submissions as last year (after all, this wasn't the historic year in which new works began entering the public domain for the first time in a long time) the quality and creativity of this year's lineup is off the charts. You can play them all at our itch.io page, including things like: a deck-building card game about Charlemagne based on the paintings of N. C. Wyeth, a text-based choose-your-own-adventure game based on The Most Dangerous Game, a game about remixing the art of Wassily Kandinsky, and rules for a free-form LARP based on Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, among many others.

We'll bring you more updates as our judges get closer to choosing winners in in our six categories: best analog game, best digital game, best visuals, best adaptation of a 1924 work, best remixing of multiple public domain works, and the best "deep cut" game based on something more obscure that isn't included in the popular lists of notable newly-public-domain works. Until then, get playing, and share your own experiences and thoughts in the comments!

Filed Under: 1924, copyright, game jam, games, gaming, public domain

Reminder: Our Public Domain Game Jam Of 1924 Works Has One More Week

from the don't-miss-out dept

Here's a quick reminder that we're running a Gaming Like It's 1924 game jam, asking people to come up with both digital and analog games using newly public domain works from 1924. While the US spent decades not allowing any new works into the public domain, that changed last year (finally!), and now we're slowly getting works into the public domain drip by drip. But what good is a public domain if it's not used to inspire new creative works? So, as we did last year, we're running this contest for the month of January. All the rules are at the link above, but there are lots of great tools and templates out there for anyone wanting to try their hand at creating something.

As always, Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a great list highlighting some newly public domain works, and there are some concepts and ideas in there that could be turned into really great games -- like E.M. Forster's A Passage to India or Hugh Lofting's Doctor Doolittle's Circus. And, of course, I remain curious if anyone will make a game out of George Gershwin's famed song "Rhapsody in Blue," considering that his family is upset about the whole concept of the public domain, and fought against it for years.

Anyway, here's a chance to have fun and be creative. You don't need to be a game designer. You don't have to come up with something super polished. Just experiment a little and see if you come up with something cool.

Filed Under: 1924, copyright, game jam, public domain

George Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue Is In The Public Domain And Gerswhin's Nephew Is Worried Someone Might Turn It Into Hip Hop

from the culture,-live-with-it dept

Last week we announced our latest Gaming Like It's 1924: Public Domain Game Jam, and among the newly public domain works first released in 1924 is George Gershwin's classic Rhapsody in Blue, which you might better know as the United Airlines theme song.

This is extremely noteworthy, because during the debate over the Mickey Mouse Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act fight in 1998, the Gershwin Estate was among the most vocal supporters and lobbyists in seeking an extension for the copyright. Indeed, the head of the Gershwin Estate, George's nephew Marc was particularly worried about losing artistic control over his uncle's work. Indeed, he seemed particularly worried that someone might make rap music out of his uncle's work:

Marc G. Gershwin, a nephew of George and Ira Gershwin and a co-trustee of the Gershwin Family Trust, said: ''The monetary part is important, but if works of art are in the public domain, you can take them and do whatever you want with them. For instance, we've always licensed 'Porgy and Bess' for stage performance only with a black cast and chorus. That could be debased. Or someone could turn 'Porgy and Bess' into rap music.''

Oh, the horror. That same article noted that Gershwin seemed to be ramping up the licensing fees for his uncle's work in the meantime:

Fifteen years ago, the license fee for using a Gershwin song in a television commercial for one year could be $45,000 to $75,000. The same song might now go for $200,000 to $250,000.

But, sure, it's not about the money (though I'll note that Marc recently sold his $5.4 million apartment in Manhattan). Of course, this is even more ridiculous when you realize that Gershwin frequently drew on influences of various other artists, including for Rhapsody in Blue (as for Porgy & Bess, we still have a few more years until that hits the public domain). George Gershwin himself admitted that Rhapsody in Blue was inspired by a variety of other music:

I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.

As the good folks over at the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain note, Rhapsody in Blue did draw on a variety of other types of music and now you can too, no matter what Marc Gershwin and the Gershwin Estate think:

Indeed, Rhapsody is a musical melting pot: it draws on everything from African American blues, jazz, and ragtime styles, to French impressionists and European art music, to Jewish musical traditions, to Tin Pan Alley. Now that it is in the public domain, this wonderful composition can be part of your kaleidoscope, where you can draw upon it to create something new, just as Gershwin drew upon his influences.

Of course, it does seem notable that the Gershwin publishing catalog was sold off a few months ago to Downton Music Publishing, who, it seems likely, will try to squeeze the last bit of cash out of it before it drip, drip, drips into the public domain for everyone to use.

Filed Under: control, copyright, george gershwin, marc gershwin, public domain, rhapsody in blue

Announcing The Public Domain Game Jam: Gaming Like It's 1924!

from the year-two dept

Gaming Like It's 1924: The Newly Public Domain Game Jam

Happy New Years, everyone. Last year, for the very first time in two decades, the US actually allowed some works to enter the public domain. This represented the end of an era in which copyright maximalist lobbyists had been able to regularly extend copyright terms each year to prevent any new works from entering the public domain. However, the backlash to such practices had become so vocal, and the evidence for why such term extensions were necessary had become so non-existent, that they didn't even make any serious attempt to extend them again, leading works from 1923 to actually enter the public domain. Well, now it's 2020, and works from 1924 have entered the public domain.

Last year to celebrate, we held our very first public domain game jam, asking people to create both analog and digital games utilizing newly public domain works. It was a great success with over 30 entries, including some really amazing winners.

This year, we're doing it again, with the Gaming Like It's 1924 public domain game jam. The rules are basically the same as last year. For the entire month of January, you can submit your digital or analog games (specific rules are at the link) based on some of the newly public domain works from 1924. If you're looking for ideas on what works are there, Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has an excellent list and LifeHacker has called out some highlights as well.

Once again, we're offering up prizes (with even more choices this year) in a variety of categories: best analog game, best digital game, best adaptation of a 1924 work, best remixing of multiple sources, best "deep cut," and best visuals. We also have a wonderful and diverse judging panel, that is a mix of gaming and copyright experts (and a few who qualify as both!).

You certainly don't need to follow the path of those who won last year, but if you want, you should check out last year's winners (and all the other submissions as well) to get some ideas. The contest is open for the entire month of January, with judging in early February. We hope you'll consider entering and help demonstrate the value of a robust public domain, and the ability to build on those earlier creative works.

Filed Under: 1924, analog games, copyright, game jam, games, public domain, video games

Elon Musk And SpaceX Just Backed Down From Earlier Promise To Release SpaceX Photos To The Public Domain

from the this-is-disappointing dept

Well, this is very disappointing. Back in 2015, you may recall that there was an effort to get SpaceX to put its photos into the public domain. As you hopefully know, all NASA photos, as works of the US government, are in the public domain -- which let us post photos like this one:

But as more and more spaceflight gets privatized, there were concerns that future space photos may increasingly get locked up behind copyright.

After an initial outcry, SpaceX initially agreed to use a Creative Commons license, but one that restricted usage to non-commercial efforts. As we pointed out at the time, that really wasn't good enough. Why does SpaceX need copyright as incentive to take photographs?

After people pointed this out to Elon Musk, he said that they had a good point and that he changed SpaceX's policy to dedicate all the photos to the public domain. And that's how it's been for over four and a half years.

Until now. As Vice's Motherboard reports, SpaceX has now gone back to a more restrictive Creative Commons license, one that says no commercial use is allowed. While using CC is better than going all out with full restrictions, this is still a very disappointing move. The company has told reporters that news organizations can still use the images, and many will have to rely on that promise. While Creative Commons has put a lot of effort into "clarifying" what is meant by "non-commercial" in recent years, including highlighting that for profit news orgs should still be able to make use of such works, that's not really been tested in court.

And, considering that Elon Musk has an occasionally antagonistic relationship with the press, you could see an unfortunate situation in which he decides to go after a journalism organization that upsets him by claiming that they were misusing the "NC" part of the license on a SpaceX photo.

So, once again, we have to ask: why is SpaceX doing this? Why is it going back on Musk's earlier promise that all SpaceX photos would be in the public domain? Why does SpaceX need the restrictions of copyright as an incentive to take photos? Isn't just being able to get to space enough incentives to take some photos?

Filed Under: cc licenses, copyright, elon musk, photos, public domain, space, space images
Companies: spacex

The Curious Case Of The Bogus CC License On A 3D Scan Of A 3000-Year-Old Bust Of Nefertiti

from the once-public-domain,-always-public-domain dept

Techdirt has written a number of stories about museums and art galleries claiming copyright on images of public domain works. That's really not on for institutions that are supposedly dedicated to spreading appreciation of the masterpieces they hold. The latest example of this unfortunate habit is a complex and fascinating tale involving the famous bust of Nefertiti, found a century ago, currently displayed in Berlin's Staatliche Museen.

A rather improbable story that people had managed surreptitiously to scan the bust at high resolution piqued the interest of the artist Cosmo Wenman. It seemed likely that the 3D scan files involved had been produced by the museum itself, so Wenman decided to use German freedom of information laws to request them officially. As his long and fascinating post on the 3D Nefertiti saga explains, the German museum was singularly unhelpful:

it acknowledged the existence of the Nefertiti scan and acknowledged that the organization was required by law to give me access to it. But it also declared that directly giving me copies of the scan data would threaten its commercial interests. The Egyptian Museum sells expensive Nefertiti replicas in its gift shop, and it implied that it needs to protect that revenue to finance its ongoing digitization efforts.

In museum-world parlance, this argument against open access is known as "the gift shop defense."

In the end, it turned out that the money generated by using the scans to make replicas was pretty minimal. Reflecting the weakness of "the gift shop defense", the museum sent Wenman a copy of the scans, but with a twist:

To mark their territory, [the German body overseeing museums] had inartfully carved a copyright claim directly into the flat underside of the 3D model. And without explanation, it had included a Creative Commons "CC BY-NC-SA" license.

A good analysis of the situation by Michael Weinberg points out why this is bogus:

Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses. That means that if you violate the terms of the license, you may be liable for copyright infringement. It also means that if the file being licensed is not protected by copyright, nothing happens if you violate the license. If there is not a copyright protecting the scan a user does not need permission from a 'rightsholder' to use it because that rightsholder does not exist.

The central issue is whether a high-resolution 3D scan of an object unequivocally in the public domain, is also in the public domain. An earlier article by Weinberg explains that in the US it seems clear that producing an accurate scan of a public domain object is also in the public domain. It's slightly less clear-cut in the EU, but even there 3D scans are unlikely to be protected. Moreover, one of the few good things in the generally awful EU Copyright Directive is explicit confirmation that material resulting from reproducing art that is in the public domain is also in the public domain, "unless the material resulting from that act of reproduction is original in the sense that it is the author's own intellectual creation". An accurate 3D scan does not fall into that category -- something that EU Member States could and should make clear when they implement the Copyright Directive in their national legislation. Weinberg also raises the issue of "moral rights" -- things like a right of attribution and a right of integrity:

While removing attribution or intentionally modifying the work to remove the fake [CC] license might create problems if the Staatliche Museen was the 'creator of the work' for copyright purposes, that is not the case here. The Staatliche Museen did not create any work that is recognized under US (and soon EU) copyright law. That means that there is nothing for the moral rights to attach to.

A post on the Creative Commons blog points out the use of bogus CC licenses causes collateral damage beyond simply misleading people about what they can and cannot do with material that is in the public domain:

Creative Commons licenses are tools to allow users to better understand what permissions are being granted to the public by the creator of the original work. When a CC license is misapplied, the ability of CC licenses to be a standard signal for communicating copyright permissions is undermined. Mislabelling works creates confusion among re-users of works and limits the rights of the public to benefit from the global commons.

It is doubly reprehensible that supposed guardians of culture should not only be asserting intellectual monopoly rights they don't have over materials in their collections, but that they should be undermining one of the most important tools available for promoting the sharing of culture -- the carefully-calibrated range of Creative Commons licenses.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: 3d scans, cc licenses, copyfraud, copyright, cosmo weman, creative commons, foia, museums, neferiti, public domain
Companies: creative commons, staatliche museen, the egyptian museum

Universal Music Claims Copyright Over Newly Public Domain 'Yes! We Have No Bananas'

from the yes,-we-have-no-public-domain dept

As you're probably aware, on January 1st of this year, we actually had a public domain day in the US for the first time in over two decades. Prior to that Congress (with the help of Hollywood lobbyists) had worked to continually extend copyright law whenever new works were due to go into the public domain. These extensions still seem to violate the spirit of the copyright clause in the Constitution, given that it is granting Congress permission to create such monopolies only so much as those monopoly rights "promote the progress." Any reasonable interpretation of that clause means that copyright law should be allowed in cases where it creates the incentive to create. But it's difficult to see how extending copyright law decades after the work has been created does anything to incentivize that work in the first place.

Nonetheless, this year, Hollywood finally realized that it was probably too much to ask to get another copyright term extension and finally let works from 1923 enter the public domain. One of the signature works of the public domain class of 1923 was the song Yes! We Have No Bananas by composers Irving Cohn and Frank Silver. As of January 1st, anyone was free to make use of that song. Indeed, in our own Public Domain Game Jam competition, we actually had not one, but two separate game entries based on "Yes! We Have No Bananas."

But, of course, even if Hollywood wasn't going to push for term extension, that doesn't mean it won't do what it always does, and pull other levers. Glenn Fleishman had posted a video of the song to YouTube in celebration of it entering the public domain earlier this year. He even titled it "Yes! We Have No Bananas, now in the public domain." The video is of him and friends/family singing it at a New Year's Eve Party:

However, that video has now been "claimed" by Universal Music and various subsidiaries, meaning that they could "monetize" it or force it offline, despite them literally having no rights to speak of.

YouTube's statement is fairly vague in its own right:

Dear Glenn Fleishman,

Your video "Yes! We Have No Bananas, now in the public domain", may have content that is owned or licensed by UMPG Publishing, Shapiro Bernstein, EMI Music Publishing, and UMPI, but it's still available on YouTube! In some cases, ads may appear next to it.

If this is your performance of a 3rd party song then you can still make money from this video. Click here to change your monetization settings.

This claim is not penalizing your account status. Visit your Copyright Notice page for more details on the policy applied to your video.

- The YouTube Team

From that, it appears to be the publishing arms of Universal Music, meaning that it's a claim on the underlying composition itself. And that is, definitively, in the public domain. At first I thought maybe they'd be claiming the specific sound recording, which might have been made at a later date, but since this is Glenn's own recording, and all of the listed companies are from the publishing (composition) side of things, it appears that it's just possible (if not likely) that Universal never took this work off its own books (perhaps it has no method of removing public domain material).

What's possibly troubling is that YouTube doesn't even seem to offer up an option for you to point out that the work is in the public domain, and even if these entities might have once had a claim on the song, a few months back the "for limited times" part of the Constitution finally kicked in and they have no legitimate claim any more.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright claim, ownership society, public domain, yes we have no bananas, youtube
Companies: universal music, youtube

'Baby Shark', Derived From A Public Domain Folk Song, Now The Subject Of A Copyright Dispute

from the shark-attack dept

If you have had a toddler in your house sometime over the past few years, you likely already know all about the "Baby Shark" song. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you are among the luckiest people on the planet. Except now I'm going to embed the video below to ensure you are aware of it.

I'll give you a moment to shake off whatever ill feelings you have for me.

Now, the origins of the song are something of a minor mystery. We'll get more into that in a second. For now, you can note that Pinkfong's "Baby Shark" video was published on YouTube in 2016 and has millions of views. It was only this summer, however, that a musician named Johnny Only sued Pinkfong in South Korea for copyright infringement, claiming that the latter's music was a ripoff of his own "Baby Shark" song that he published on YouTube in 2011.

I already know what you're thinking: "But, Tim, those songs do sound very, very similar." And when I tell you that Only is claiming in his lawsuit that the songs are specifically similar in length, tempo, rhythm, and style, your first thought is probably to agree with Only entirely. But maybe your second thought would be, "Wait, why are those the only similarities he's claiming? Why not the lyrics, which are largely the same? Or the music entirely? Why is he so specific?"

The answer has to do with the mysterious origin of "Baby Shark."

Even Only admits that “Baby Shark” predates him, however. Although no one is quite certain of the song’s origin, it’s believed to have been a campfire chant developed at U.S. summer camps for kids sometime last century. The song may have emerged in conjunction with the success of the “Jaws” franchise — though that’s just another theory.

In other words, this is a song without a known author — which effectively make the original version a public domain work.

Yup, this is a song that is generally considered to be in the public domain. At the very least it's an "orphan work," in that there's no clear evidence of who the copyright holder is, and no one has stepped up to claim it in the past few years that's it's even charted. That means that, for Only's suit to be successful, he's going to have to demonstrate that the elements for which he's claiming similarity were not part of the original song, were created entirely by him, and that they are protectable given that most people consider the rest of the work to be in the public domain. That's not an impossible task, but it's a fairly high bar to clear.

SmartStudy, the company behind the Pinkfong brand, is already pointing to the public domain song as its inspiration.

While Only insists that he should receive credit for what has become a worldwide phenomenon, SmartStudy strongly disagrees. They insist that their version of “Baby Shark” was based not on Only’s, but on the public domain version that Only based his work upon.

Given that this is all happening in South Korea, it's difficult to predict exactly how the courts will decide on this. That said, this sure feels like two versions of a public domain work where the real reason for the lawsuit is that only one of them became massively popular.

Filed Under: baby shark, copyright, johnny only, orphan work, pinkfong, public domain, south korea

NY Times Goes Off On Amazon Because Some People Are Publishing Fake George Orwell Books

from the but,-hey,-what-about-that-public-domain dept

David Streitfeld is a NY Times reporter who, among other things, covers Amazon. As far as I can tell, he has never written about Amazon in an article where he doesn't present things in the worst, most distorted anti-Amazon light. It's gotten to the point where I generally just won't bother with a Times article about Amazon if it's by Streitfeld, because it's guaranteed to be misleading. Somehow, however, I made it through most of this recent article about counterfeit George Orwell books on Amazon before realizing it was yet another Streitfeld hit piece. The article itself is kind of interesting: there are a bunch of folks attempting to sell unofficial George Orwell books on Amazon, and sometimes they're garbage.

What I find odd, is that while the article admits that many are published in India, where Orwell's works are in the public domain, the article makes no mention of the odd copyright situation in the US and UK, where Orwell's books all should be in the public domain based on the copyright deal that was made with Orwell when he wrote the books. Under those terms, all of Orwell's books -- including Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) -- should have entered the public domain years ago, meaning that there would be a robust market for legitimate copies of those works.

Streitfeld also complains about some attempts to "improve" on Orwell.

Most of the distorted texts are likely due to ignorance and sloppiness but at their most radical the books try to improve Orwell, as with the unauthorized “high school edition” of his 1933 memoir. The editing was credited to a Moira Propreat. She could not be reached for comment; in fact, her existence could not be verified.

“Down and Out” is an unflinching look at brutal behavior among starving people, which makes Ms. Propreat’s self-appointed task of rendering the book “more palatable” rather quixotic.

Streitfeld is rather subtle in mocking "Moira Propreat" ("more appropriate") but misses the point again. If those works were in the public domain, as intended, then there would be plenty of opportunities for people to update, remix, change, edit, annotate and do whatever they wanted with Orwell's works. And that would, undoubtedly lead to a bursting of creativity. While it's more limited here -- because it's locked down by copyright -- it's little surprise that what few books have made it out there are of dubious quality and value.

But how is that Amazon's fault as opposed to copyright for limiting the ability of more thorough individuals and companies to do this kind of work? It's also unclear why Amazon is getting the blame for selling badly edited books. Going back decades to Smith v. California, the Supreme Court has held you can't hold bookseller's liable for the content of the books. But Streitfeld ignores all of that and seems to suggest that this is all Amazon's fault, because Amazon is Amazon. He argues -- taking talking points directly from the Authors Guild -- that Amazon won't vet these books because it will 'drag profits down," leaving out the fact that it's impossible to catch all such things.

Yes, there's a legitimate argument that buyers of such books may be annoyed and confused by a less than accurate copy of an Orwell book, but to blame Amazon, and to ignore the copyright issues that brought us here, is a really weird choice, but if it involves blaming Amazon for some other issue, it's the choice the NY Times and Streitfeld always seem to make.

Filed Under: 1984, animal farm, copyright, david streitfeld, george orwell, public domain, remix
Companies: amazon, ny times