We have had difficulty getting our hands on these issues, though (or scans of them).
It's interesting that AMC just launched a series featuring Sam Spade this year, the year before the character goes into the public domain…
Black Mask is pretty rare. Brooks Hefner at James Madison University oversaw the acquisition/accession (I think) of their Black Mask collection, of which they have quite a bit in comparison to other places, but it's still incomplete. The Ransom Center in Austin specializes in rare and collectible items, but only has one or two issues. The Library of Congress may well have a complete collection, but what they do have isn't digitized because the pages are brittle and are literally falling apart (even moreso than other/older printed material).
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 curl https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42291112 | grep 'QSBSb[^<]\+' -o | base64 --decodeFor the desktop-ers, future travellers, or just generally private/skeptical mobile users among us I'd recommend this method https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42291434 for the private long lasting lazy experience (no external tools necessary, but you do need to perform a manual copy into your URL bar).
He would have to actively assert that he was releasing it into the public domain (and IIRC, although my last discussion on the topic was ~20 years ago, such a release had not yet been tested in court).
It is now, but back then a work was public domain if released without a valid copyright notice.
Charade, a 1963 film, entered the public domain immediately on release.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charade_(1963_film)#Public-dom...
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:text/plain;charset=utf-8;base64,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
Now if only HEVC wasn't such a hot patent / licensing mess.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
And there are many definitions of English "for" as well. This would fit the one used in the phrase "if not for this, ..." In other words, for itself = by virtue of itself, through the existence of itself.
Also note in terms of Indo European roots, per is a cognate with English for.
⸻
1. Cue some dude to tell me in 3…2…1²
2. And this knowledge will promptly disappear from my brain five minutes later, sort of like the guy I knew in my 20s whose name was either Jack or Chad and to this date, I still am not sure, but I do know that every single time I called him by name, I got it wrong and it totally wasn’t on purpose even though he didn’t believe me.
I once had a Spanish teacher, who also had problems remembering what that kind of time specification stands for and I came up with maybe a trick to remember. We do the same thing in German, so I guess it translates:
Lets say you have 11:00. That's easy. But what about 11:15? We would say "quarter 12", so I guess the English version is "quarter of 12". How to memorize, that this is 11:15? Well, you can imagine a round clock and the minute pointer has moved _quarter of its way to 12_. So you only have a quarter of that hour "already done". 10:30? We say "half 11". So I guess English is "half of 11", meaning that the minute pointer has moved half the way to 11.
Maybe this will help.
(Actually I personally usually don't use those ways of specifying the time, neither in English nor in German. I just say the 24h format as it is written: "11:15" is "eleven fifteen", 13:35 is "thirteen thirtee five" not 1pm something.)
I recently encountered a German asking for the English phrase equivalent to bis unter, looking for a phrase like "up to below". There isn't one in common use. We just don't count things in equivalent ways.
I feel like either of those could work depending on the context and are common in English.
The English terms would be:
11:15 -> quarter after 11, quarter past 11 (both pretty rare, tbh)
11:30 -> half past 11 (this is the only form that is moderately common)
11:45 -> quarter of 12, quarter before 12 (also pretty rare)
11:15 -> once y cuarto
11:30 -> once y media
11:45 -> doce menos cuarto
edit: and about the subject of the thread, "por sí" or "por sí mismo." "per" afaik is a preposition like "por" that means to pair or match things: so it can mean by, through, around, with, for, and even times("×") i.e. doesn't mean anything in English.
"si" is the 3rd person reflexive pronoun (when placed after the verb), and is probably similar to "se." ("mismo" is a redundant clarification is Spanish, probably because "si" and "sí" are homonyms.)
Still can't beat stuff like "bi-weekly" which can mean "every two weeks" or "twice a week" or probably some other thing as well.
"You should come to our Linguistics Club's bi-weekly meeting. Membership is open to anyone who can figure out how often we meet." (I mean, you have a 50-50 shot. I wonder if there's any personality insights one could learn from such a selection.)
no such luck w/ months or weeks.
also your username is almost as salient to the topic as mine! ;)
If you don't translate it literally, I'd vote for "in itself". "In itself" (viewed in its essential qualities; considered separately from other things[0]) has a different meaning than "by itself" (alone/unaided). And to me it's clear that "per se" pretty much universally means the former.
They also snipe away at the shittier parents in court.
Plus they have the "if you sue us over AV1 patents, you no longer get to use AV1 for free, patent landmines in place”.
Also Vorbis has always been patent free.
If the patents really expire in 2025, is there an already open source library written either in C or C++ one could use for reading h.264?
As the sibling points out, for H.264 we even had a high-quality open source encoder for a long time.
Somehow I suspect HEVC suddenly became a thing in the past few years precisely because AVC patents are expiring.
Otherwise there would have been no effort to create vp9 and av1, as everyone on that side of the codec wars would've stuck with vp8.
HEVC/H.265 has been in development since 2004, i.e. right after AVC/H.264 was published, and took almost a decade to actually be standardized. There's even an H.266, which started in 2017, a few years after H.265 was released. Though the primary concern of patent holders is not AVC patents expiring. Those patents actually aren't that valuable, because AVC is licensed way too cheap. MPEG-LA had negotiated a very generous free rate for online video[2], in response to MPEG-4 ASP (aka "DivX :-)") basically not getting much use online.
What patent owners want is to go back to the days of MPEG-2 where they were making money hand over fist just for owning a functional codec. They even sacked Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder and head of ISO MPEG, because he was trying to change ISO's patent policy to be more favorable to developing royalty-free codecs.
[0] ISO does not license patents and has no affiliation with MPEG-LA/Access Advance/etc, but Leonardo has gone on record saying this is their 'business model': https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu...
[1] under FRAND licensing
[2] Which is why YouTube's allowed to use H.264 without paying $$$ for it. Before that, they used whatever codec was available in Flash Player. Adobe (and Macromedia before it) used On2 VP6 primarily because it had no patent licensing royalty; before that they'd used H.263.
- Frida Kahlo
- Henri Matisse
- Alan Turing
i guess the Chrysler Building is public domain now? what can you do with a buidling?
I guess maybe the design of the building, if anything? If that will become public domain, expect it to appear in Macau in a year or less, and probably other places :)
https://www.wweek.com/archive/2024/03/24/why-the-portlandia-...
In that vein, similar to the Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh horror movies that have been released in recent years, Popeye will be entering the public domain next year and people are working on a horror movie based on that.
Almost certainly rule 34 happens first and just gets less attention in public. There were “bear” posters of Pooh all over SOMA (in SF) almost immediately after the copyright ended.
Clopfic, Kirk/Spock, or ask any pile of furries about Robin Hood or Nick Wilde.
Additionally the main plot line of Popeye is effectively Popeye protecting Olive Oil from being assaulted by Bluto - not exactly modern cartoon material.
On the other hand, Superman and Batman enter the public domain in 2034 and 2035 respectively, so that should be interesting. Though like Mickey Mouse/Steamboat Willie, I expect that it's only the original version/costume that goes public domain.
Edit: or had at least one person make at least one copy there. If the law allowed everyone to make one copy for private use.
Or perhaps I’m misunderstanding ?
e.g. Ethiopia which only shifted to a quasi Berne standard midway through 2004.
Edit: And maybe it is de jure too for those on a ship on the high seas?
Pirate radio worked, but listeners don't make a copy, ... it's a good question, I think if you fixed the work long enough to read/watch a text/video then it would be considered to be at least contributory infringement.
They won’t be making blockbuster movies anytime soon, but I imagine their business would be greater than zero?
Yes it is once they distribute to people online outside of Ethiopia.
And the payment providers will enforce that.
Where did you come across this notion?
Plenty of people in e.g. India, Brazil, etc., buy literally counterfeit goods, dvds, blurays, and so on, all the time, let alone transformed works.
Often even with the exact packaging design of well known companies preserved on the counterfeit packaging.
And the purchases are often made via well known global payment processors.
Edit: At most a large fraction of potential US customers would be discouraged by the need to use a VPN for online streaming or by the risk of a physical disc getting seized. But that’s still far from zero potential customers.
Ethiopian citizens, residents, etc., can clearly own a copy for each work.
The novel Red Harvest from 1929 is listed as entering the public domain next month. But the thing is that prior to being published as a novel, it was serialized in Black Mask magazine, and since all installments were published pre-1929, they're all already in the public domain.
The trouble, though, is that despite being public domain, actually getting your hands on these issues, whether in real life or figuratively as scans is something that poses a challenge—we simply don't have easy access to this material.
And that goes for lots of other stuff that we know about but don't have copies at hand.
Or can you?
For instance the recent Wicked movie (and book, and play, etc) can't use ruby red slippers, because that was a detail only in the relativley more recent movie, so even though the original wizard of oz book has been in the public domain a while, some details are siloed off. I think the Holmes stories had disputes like this for a while too, where if you mentioned certain side characters it might infringe a more recent adaptation or etc.
Now you can only do this through piracy.
I'm honestly not worried about getting zoomer takes on Red Harvest. I'd like to be able to legally send it to somebody I recommend it to without involving hundreds, if not thousands, of other people.
That effectively keeps public domain works copyrighted, for most purposes, for most of us. Most libraries for instance have some EULA that says you can only use scans you order from them for non-commercial purposes, even if they scan from a public domain book. I do not know if that can be enforced in general, but it would not be fun to have to find out in court.
> I do not know if that can be enforced in general, but it would not be fun to have to find out in court.
does the above sentence refer to using EULA-restricted public domain works and asking volunteers to carry the risk of being sued? or does it refer to somehow challenging the enforceability in court?
can it be illegal to merely insinuate EULA's as described above? which laws prohibit intimidation regarding copyright that is not held?
can John Doe intimidate people with EULA's on public domain works?
They can try and claim whatever they want, but they have no real power once it's in the public domain.
I get it’s important to protect the right of authors and companies but damn it’s 3 generations. Something my grand grand father may have seen, that’s insane.
25 year, a single generation would make sense. I’d argue that by then all the money would have been made and you would allow new generation to grow up with the greatest art from previous generation, it would be like a virtuous circle. Next generation would improve based on previous one And so on.
The crazy long Disney thing, though, is what it is because of lobbying muscle.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect to be able to continue to make money after you are dead. Earn enough during your lifetime to provide for your surviving daughters, sure, but I don't like the idea of someone being able to posthumously put a gag on people's ability to express themselves just so that their kids can get a nice inheritance.
Another example is Grant’s autobiography, which he wrote as he was dying of throat cancer. No way he would have done that without copyright.
Why not?
For centuries people wrote books so that they would have a legacy and be remembered. They wrote because they felt it was the right thing to do, or because they wanted to control the narrative around their lives. Do you have any specific reason to believe that Grant wrote his autobiography to provide for his successors, rather than just to have written it?
I understand the theory about incentivizing people to create, but honestly I'm not convinced that what we get from that deal is worth it. Too often it feels like extended copyright creates a similar set of incentives to advertising—sure, we get more works, but the best works would have been written even with a much shorter copyright because the author had something they wanted to say. The works that are being incentivized by long copyrights are the ones that we could do without.
That said, at the time of Grant's writing copyright in the US was 28 years (with an optional extension for another 14 if the author lived long enough), which means that OP's proposal of 25 years would likely have been sufficient to motivate Grant.
Was his creation of his autobiography primarily motivated by money? I would assume not.
I'd much prefer that to the current life + 70 years or 95 years after publication.
The same cannot be said of most people today, and I therefore agree that it's a bad argument for long copyright terms in a modern context.
So having a limited ability to pass on that asset if you die prematurely seems only fair—you'd have the same option if you were building something physical—but we shouldn't use inheritance as an argument for longer copyright. The question of how long someone should be allowed to earn money from a work should be orthogonal from the question of whether that right to earn money should be inheritable.
This is the flaw in life plus 70—it assumes that copyright should last indefinitely during one's lifetime and then provide for successors. I'd rather see a flat rate for how long we're comfortable locking up a work in copyright, successors or otherwise.
Does it really? Sure, timeless classics pay out over a long period of time but they are by far the exception. I'll wager that the vast majority of copyrighted works make the vast majority of their money in the first decade. So why do we need essentially perpetual copyright? (Essentially perpetual because almost none of the works created in my lifetime will ever pass out of copyright before I die)
I agree. I think OP's proposal of a fixed term of 25 years is more than reasonable. All I'm saying is that it should be inheritable and not based on when the author dies.
On the other hand copies of writing are not scarce. We can give copies to everyone who wants one for practically free. Property rights for copies of writing are therefore artificial. Creating artificial scarcity where none exists has real costs that in many cases outweigh the benefits.
Their works go out of print but they're still copyrighted so people can't legally reproduce them (for profit or otherwise).
My grandfather was a published author with some success but he's dead and his stuff is no longer in print. No one in my family is going to see revenue from his work. No one outside of his generation (when he was successful) will ever have a chance to read his books as they're impossible to find now.
Most books written in the 20th century are basically gone from public availability.[1][2]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-m...
[2] https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/How_Copyright_Keeps_Works...
Does the family not have rights to those works? A copy of the books? Scan them and release them copyright free if you want the world to see them.
There's no reason any other IP should be longer.
Why is that reasonable? Why should someone's daughters get a free ride instead of having to work for a living like everyone else?
Either we have a system where people earn wealth on merit, or we have a feudal aristocracy with extra steps. It can't be both.
In my opinion, the ideal length (if we are to have copyright) is between 10 and 15 years, at least if a work is already monetarily successful. If a work has yet to be monetarily successful, then we can allow up to 25 years for it in particular.
In my opinion, it doesn't. In creative and entertainment industries, the idea of practically indefinite royalties has been normalized, but no other industries has this*. For example, it would be strange to continue paying a construction company after your home has been built.
*As far as I can remember. I'm open to correction here.
Meanwhile one does not pay for continuous updates to a particular novel or a movie. Even if they do pay for new installments in a series, they do so separately.
And the per-second pricing is even less!
I suspect you're just paying a monopoly tax.
Probably floorplans would be a closer comparison - and I believe they are licensed IP?
You might pay the construction company again for the identical 2nd house, but you're not going to pay the architect again.
Imagine that you've paid the construction company after it finished building your house. You then go and live in it. One year later you get an invoice because you're living in the house they built.
That's what doesn't happen and what (I think) GP means with indefinite royalties: the person who owns the house has to keep paying the company which built the house.
The problem with that analogy is of course that royalties are based off profits, but there are ways to consider a home to have its own sense of profit (like the Belgian legal term 'cadastral income':
> Cadastral income is not an actual income. It is a notional value that we determine for an immovable property (building or land). This corresponds to the average annual net rental income you would receive in 1975 for your leased out property.
).
A closer analogy would be rent. Why do we allow a builder to collect rent a year after building a house.
Libraries certainly do in basically every country in the world apart from the US.
A rich author can retire, and not write any more books. From an encouraging creativity POV, copyright length should be set at about the amount of time it takes to create a followup.
But, as open source software, and most authors and musicians demonstrate. People will create without any financial incentive.
So ultimately copyright is there to allow an industry that can actually find and distribute these works.
For the record, I'm not suggesting that creators should be decently rewarded for their works.
To start, royalties have nothing to do with copyright. They are simply an agreement between an author and a publisher. I give you the exclusive right to publish my book, and I get a cut of every sale.
Royalties extend far beyond creative fields. Any deal where someone gets a percentage share of the sale of a product or service on an ongoing basis is a "royalty". E.g. in manufacturing or even software.
That said, I believe the security of UBI to be a stronger enabler for creativity than gambling you'll write the next great American novel in-between shifts at the fish cannery.
That hasn't been true for fifteen years.
I dont think any streaming service would be viable with a catalog of only original productions <1 year old.
Releases of "The Mandalorian" got people subscribing to Disney+, and new seasons of "Game of Thrones" had the same effect for HBO, for example.
In other words, a bundle of 100 movies for $10 million could be attributed as "$100k per movie," but that's almost certainly wrong. More likely, that bundle is a combination of something like $5 million for one movie, $1 million for a few others, $100k for a bigger set, and all the way down to $1000 or less for the remainder of the catalog.
I'm not sure its even the relevant question.
What length of time does a film studio, or book publisher look at for payback?
If everyones calculating their return on the first 12 months, setting copyright to 12 months obviously isn't going to impact any industry investment decisions.
I’m not saying specifically USA but also Europe, I can’t see common people fighting over the right of author to hold intellectual properties for 70 years.
Haven’t been trials to shorten it somewhere, either USA or any other developed countries where it’s actually enforced ?
* International treaties make it difficult without buy-in from everyone, or at least the most important countries. The USA is probably the only country that could afford to unilaterally make such a change.
* Politicians are largely beholden to big companies now.
* The average person is distracted with other societal woes, and politicians and companies work hard to keep it that way.
* Some people have been convinced that excessive copyright is a moral good through propaganda.
* Those promoting copyright expansion or the status quo have significant amounts of money; those criticizing it mostly do not (counting groups with real principles, anyway)
* It is suspicious for people who have no personal interest in extended copyright to excessively favor it.
It can take a long time for certain works to find their wings or true market potential, especially books and music.
Some examples of music: "Take On Me", "Running Up That Hill", "Bohemian Rhapsody", or even bands, like Neutral Milk Hotel
It was far more popular in the recent revival!
Film studios only existed because (1) distribution used to be hard and (2) films were financially and logistically difficult to make. Netflix and YouTube slayed the first challenge, and now GenAI will fell the latter and give indie directors the same kind of platform that indie game and indie music folks currently have: true one person studios.
I know the work I'm doing is valuable and that this field is the future. I'm sure it'll click for more folks soon.
It's also funny to see AI turn people who normally dislike copyright into die-hard copyright lovers.
It would be nice if you didn't assume that anybody who doesn't share your opinion is mindlessly regurgitating slop.
It’s also a matter of fact that we have the copyright we have that’s prohibitive to people and favors corporations. It’s upsetting to see how a bunch of Silicon Valley companies stomps right across those lines with impunity, while people like Aaron Swartz are persecuted and threatened with decade long prison sentences for crimes that in my mind ought to be much less upsetting.
If copyright was fair, training of AI intended for non-personal use ought to be a sufficient commercial activity to require a license. That would stiffle the development of AI, which is what I’d argue happens to human creators under our current system.
If we had a 25 year copyright, we could easily make useful AI trained on the sum of human creation until 1999, _and_ have badass human made remixes of 80s and 90s songs — we wouldn’t have to do legal gymnastics to allow the development of useful AI, as it’d have access to quite substantial training material from the 1900s, and unlock relatively modern training material year-by-year.
So yes, I dislike AI for infringing on copyright and I dislike copyright (in its current state).
My wife and I both work in the field, I on the tech side, her on the creative side, and she's been in it since the earliest days of industry trying to adapt these tools. There's a lot (like, holy shit, so much) of effort and money going into it, but so far it's only marginally helpful for non-evil jobs.
A series that is a variant of the stories of “The Wire”, but taking place in the Harry Potter universe? Coming right up.
Obscure prog rock band from the 90s put out one album? Now its two.
I can understand people their apprehension, feeling like art is losing something essential without the human touch behind it, but I saw an article a few days ago where people thought generated Shakespeare was better than actual Shakespeare. Until it was revealed which was generated.
If AI can generate me another, better Illmatic, I’m all here for it.
'Ah ha! LLMs are better than Shakespeare!' is a meaningless statement.
Besides, no one reads Shakespeare for pleasure; there is no need to generate more. ;)
> Besides, no one reads Shakespeare for pleasure
Exactly (kind of). Lots of rewarding works take effort to learn to appreciate, for a bunch of reasons that may include (as in Shakespeare's case) that they're old and their context and vernacular is not ours. Lots of people (I'd say a large majority, in my experience) dismiss entire genres and forms of art that they weren't heavily exposed to as children, often going so far as to judge them bad, simply because it would take some time and effort to learn how to enjoy them and to be able to discern what's good or remarkable about a given work.
What proportion of the population has ever in their lives enjoyed the experience of reading a Shakespeare play? Even once? It's gotta be tiny. Of course you can get them to choose AI junk over Shakespeare, it's not a kind of thing they understood or enjoyed to begin with, in most cases.
eg somebody uses it to illustrate an article there will always be somebody who complains.
So anything that enough people see will generate at least one complaint.
The creativity has already gone sideways for most of this. I can with a few simple sentences create an acceptable picture (in some cases a short film). With a AI pipeline I can make some pretty cool scenes. Instead of having to know how to properly draw an s curve with a nice gradient bit of layered colors over it and 14 meticulously created layers. I tell the program to do it for me. It does an acceptable job in a fraction of the time. People can complain all they want but the rest of us are already using these tools and will continue to do so until something better comes along.
Maybe because not everyone shares your opinion? Having an LLM generate art isn't necessarily a net benefit for society. Computers were supposed to improve our lives but instead of robots to perform dangerous menial work it's taking the creativity out of humanity.
Hey guys you no longer have to do fun things, tech bros have that covered. Now get back down the mine.
Maybe it'll get to the point where it's good enough to have on as background television - not everything needs to be great, after all - but what's the point of that? We already have far more high-quality television shows and movies than most people can ever watch.
Those make up an infinitesimally small portion of the total output, which is largely a deluge of crap, certainly. But, generally, rarity makes something more valuable and beautiful by comparison.
I came across the following recently. I think a casual viewer would assume it was just Bakshi-style rotoscoped animation without a major AI component.
If I were to watch 90+ minutes of that with dubbed voices on top of it, absolutely. There's practically zero cohesion between any of those shots. No real action, no real narrative. It's a collection of non-cohesive stills that were stretched, not any bit of a story at all.
AI is pretty clearly advancing orders of magnitude faster than CGI has. Just because it sucks now doesn't mean it's going to suck in another 5 years.
We will see. Some flaws might be baked in, like LLM's halucinating. That won't go away, unless we invent a new tech. So here with generating videos, will morphing objects for example ever go away? I am sceptical with the current approach.
Very much no throughline of concepts from one shot to the next. You never see the same character twice. No foreground dynamic action.. not even simple walking except one far-away character directly away from the camera which means that their silhouette hardly changed.
This all comes from the current generation of video diffusion models that basically just generate an image like they always have except with a hint of temporal coherence they expand that into a short shot with no types of movement except those seen a million times in their training set.
Getting gen models to be able to reason better about motion and to build mental world models of the 3d scene they are managing a 2d window into is going to be a big challenge, and require some additional breakthroughs on a par with the original GPT and stable diffusion breakthroughs that currently act as a foundation to a majority of modern AI innovation.
You say this like Stable Diffusion isn't a 2022 technology. And not early 2022, but quite late (August). ChatGPT is younger.
I mean sure we need more breakthroughs, but we've barely even seen a new hardware generation since those things came out and the researchers are really only getting started with the new capabilities of generative tech. If we don't get more breakthroughs in short order then that would be a stunning halt of progress, a breaking stop the likes of which we have almost never before seen. More breakthroughs are a given.
What about Shakespeare.
What about the Brothers Grimm. Should Disnay have to pay for those fairy tales?
In the end every creative work stands on the shoulders of giants. We should reward creators for contributing to our culture but this notion that they should be able to own their creations way past when they become popular is absurd.
yes and it's possible someone could have done it even better, had they not been required to convince investors to purchase copyright. GoT was a masterpiece, don't get me wrong, but it's a fallacy to think it couldn't have been better, or that other book adaptations could have been as good or better, without copyright being in the way.
It's a minor issue in the grand scheme, but my pet peeve is with "synch licenses" (not sure if that's even the right term), but where sitcoms can't go to home video because of stupid disputes about shitty songs that happened to be included. Did anyone watch "Married With Children" because of Frank Sinatra's song "Love and Marriage" in the intro? It's a catchy song, and I'm sure it lured people in who might have otherwise changed the channel, so yes it has value. But it should only be a tiny fraction of the royalties for a full performance of the song. doubly so for home video releases. Would anyone buy even 1 season of MWC just to hear the Sinatra song? I say no. And therefore should not be required to pay any royalties.
I am watching "Murphy Brown" reruns from pirateflix because apparently it never went to home video because of license disputes about the 60's soul songs in the intro. They add character to the show, for sure. But they're not why I watch the show. I watch it for the story and the acting. In this case, actors (who worked extremely hard over 10 seasons of that show!) are being wrongfully deprived of royalties because record execs can't be reasonable about how much 10 seconds of a 60 -year-old song is worth.
If someone writes a book, copyright will begin when they publish the book and the 10-15 years copyright expiration would only be applicable for paper book medium. After the copyright for the paper book medium expires, anybody can republish it. But, only the original copyright owner can "recreate" the work again in another medium - like Games, TV/ Films, Virtual reality etc. Even if that happens after the expiration of copyright on the first medium it originally appeared on.
With the Game of Thrones example, with short copyrights, Martin would lose the copyright on the books (the first original medium it was published on) in 10-15 years. But he would retain the copyright on his work for other medium. So if 20 years down the lane, HBO wanted to recreate his work for TV, they would still have to get his permissions to do so. Once Martin's gives HBO the rights to his work for TV, HBO would own it only for the 10-15 years, and after that, anybody could use it freely too, but only for paper book and TV medium. This means if Meta or Apple want to recreate Game of Thrones as a virtual reality show, they would again have to approach Martin to get his permission. If they do, then they own the copyright to his work, on virtual reality medium, till it expires in 10-15 years.
In this kind of system, the original author would continue to retain the future rights for any new future medium of delivery too.
Any excess revenue could, theoretically, be redistribute as grants for the arts.
Big coporations like Disney can hold on to the material and pay the sum with profits from other ip if it's fixed.
With exponentially increasing fees, the copyright holder can decide for themselves if it's economically worthwhile to pay the renewal fees or release it into the public domain. If the cost to extend copyright another 5 years after 50+ years is $1B, for instance, very few copyright holders will bother with that unless it's a highly profitable property.
It's also possible that you could set up a smaller fee for a news article, etc.
There are lots of implementation details that make "just charge fees" work.
So I use a 4 year old work, that I assume is public domain, and then the creator, pays his back fees and sues me?
alternatively, a creator creates a work, gets 5 years of protection, and never pays the fees that he owes.
The alternative is that everyone's blog enters the public domain immediately upon writing unless they want to pay $XXX per article, which also seems wrong to me.
Does Jackson own the IP? Do actors own part of the IP for every scene they're in? What does Jackson offer to investors, to get the backing he needs to hire loads of horse riders or whatever? Do we do it Star Citizen style, giving Jackson a few hundred million upfront with no obligation to deliver anything?
On the other hand: if an artist produces something that slumbers in anonymity for decades before it suddenly explodes into popularity and becomes part of the cultural canon, then I'd want the artist to reap whatever benefits possible. That is: if anyone is making big bucks off of that, it first and foremost should be the artist, for as long as they're alive.
I'm against long term copyright, because things become part of the 'cultural canon'
Why should I pay George Lucas because I want to say "use the force luke"*
'Cultural Canon' shouldn't be owned by anyone, because it, by definition belongs to everyone.
*Yes I know thats a misquote.
Assuming some nominal or zero starting fee. The author can choose to sell his rights at the beginning, or can choose to keep the rights.
If x years later, the renewal comes up and isn't worth it, then he doesn't have to pay it. the value to the author isn't worth the value to the public. If a mega corp comes along and buys it, they have taken on a risk that it will be worth more in the future, and the author has gained some extra income.
If the mega corp think its worth buying the rights, theres probably a good business case for the property, so the author should be able to get the money somehow. If not, the mega corp is giving the author a nice bonus.
This is also the core reason why tax systems should be simplified simplified simplified.
There's lots of works from when I was young that nobody is interested in publishing, even though I would like to see them again. They make zero revenue now (and probably didn't make much before), so I suspect the rights holders would abandon them if they had to pay any fee, especially an escalating fee.
I'm personally less worried about works that remain in print.
While it is likely legal for me to go through all that effort for myself, it isn't legal for me to share the fruits of my effort with someone else who wants a copy so they need to do it themself. Even if they have a worn out copy themself it isn't clear that I can print them a new copy. If I want to share this work with someone else who might want it I'm stuck - I can only do the above for personal use.
Wouldn’t that just put the works in the public domain, allowing others to legally publish the works? What would be the downside?
If it's revenue based and there's no revenue, then the rightsholder will renew to protect their options.
I think that's okay, Disney has lots of money but they aren't stupid, i.e. they won't spend money unless they expect a return on investment.
What you really want to prevent are orphan works which are copyrighted but no one can get a copy of.
has 4 pages of prices
Seems like it's the US that has doubling fees, doubling every 4 years.
Brand is valuable for consumers and protecting that brand only makes sense if you continue to have ownership and control over it.
For a non infinite money glitch version of this, see “Calvin and Hobbes”. Would the world be better if those characters could be printed on random merchandise?
I think those indirect impacts probably incentivize more lobby groups to keep the status quo.
The US should go with 50 years from first publication. It doesn't have significant financial effect for rights holders. Revenue on content over 50 years old is tiny. Maybe if you're still alive, the sole author, and own the rights yourself, you could apply for an extension for the rest of your life. But no more than that.
Someone with Trumpworld connections could push this, as a way of getting back at Hollywood.
TRIPS requires fifty years for features, but not for various bits of copyright that go into making a feature, where it requires life + 50. There are vanishingly small amounts of films that would be genuinely clear under the TRIPS terms, they'd basically just be performing arts pieces with no script or planning or music.
Unless they release new IP with that character every X years, the rights revert back go Marvel (Now Disney).
Same with books. If you have an ongoing series for 20 years, the first books shouldn't enter public domain.
But a book series or TV show with no new content for 15+ years? Public domain.
Is 10 Cloverfield Lane a sequel to Cloverfield? They decided to throw the Cloverfield name onto it shortly before release for marketing reasons, the actual movie has nothing to do with the events and story of the original Cloverfield.
Is the video game Nier a sequel to Drakengard? Technically yes, but the connection is vague and distant. And there's also Drakengard 2 which is the sequel to a different ending for the original game.
How would you count Fear the Walking Dead, the spin-off series of The Walking Dead, itself and adaptation of a comic book series. Do the shows continue to get copyright protection so long as the comics are still being published? Or vice versa?
So, probably not more than twenty years. Fifteen would be better.
If so, if they havent done that in the first 10/15 years, why should they get an extra 10/15 years?
Further, another issue of very long copyrights is preserving things you don't really have a right to preserve.
that successful videogame may still be around in 25 years. the one that wasn't so popular has much less chance of surviving.
And then you have the added complication of what was successful? a fixed term means you know when something is in the public domain.
personally, I think there should be registration and fees attached. if you want copyright protection for the first 5 years, pay a nominal fee. if you want more than that, pay exponentially more for each year.
If companies want to pay that tax, they can. if it isn't worth it, then it can go in the public domain.
Either way, at least you have a register of what is in, and out of copyright.
Long terms prevent the creation of derivative works which at an extreme could be reducing the number of works created as well as disincentivizing creators from creating new works if they've been especially successful early in their careers and decided to coast.
I think people have a tendency to focus on corporations and super-successful individual creators as the primary beneficiaries of copyright, and I get it, but George R.R. Martin should not be your yardstick: the long tail applies here. A lot of authors have books that might keep bringing in a thousand dollars or less a year in royalties over a couple decades; if those authors are able to put out a book a year, that "back catalogue" might end up being most of their writing income. And the rise of ebooks has probably created more authors in that boat, not less.
The original US copyright act in 1790 set the term at 14 years, with a near-automatic extension of another 14 years granted upon request. I'd be happy enough going back to that, but I don't think I'd want to see less, honestly.
There's also absolutely zero sense that if there's any term based on the lifetime of the authors, that it should extend a single day after their death.
I'd definitely prefer a 20-30 year fixed term, but if it was going to be based on lifetime then it should only be until the death of the author.
Young book author agrees to a profit share agreement with publisher and works most of the time.
Has an accidental death at launch party, his work is in public domain now, and the publisher & author's family are in trouble ?
Or it simply makes publishers reluctant to work with old authors and be biased towards healthy young writers.
For this particular scenario, I would tell publishers and authors to take out a life or accidental death insurance policy.
Any particular time for transfer from market control to public domain is arbitrary. If it’s worth anything it should be traceable not stolen. Everything will eventually have too little demand to be defensible and control will be let go and at that point it becomes public domain because it became public domain.
If you're not selling your game published in 2005, it should be free for everyone to grab - you clearly don't care about it anymore. If you did, you'd let people pay money for it.
Not by a long shot. They're still milking famous books, movies, songs, from 50 years back and more.
But I'd argue that by 25 years all the money being made for the original owners should have been forced to stop. Similar as with patents.
Once concern is when a creator isn't making money (e.g. from a book), and the work takes off after the 25 years (say, it becomes viral).
When something is available for every channel to rerun, it would be even less of a differentiator than a channel getting the rights to Friends or Seinfield today.
So Channels wanting to attract people would need to come out with new material still - as Seinfeld and Friends would be able to be played by any other channel.
I would say that the bulk of the (for lack of a better term) fandom, occurred after the 1980. Frodo Lives!(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frodo_Lives!) notwithstanding.
I would also argue that corporations would have no qualms of waiting 25 years to capitalize and format shift a work of art, where as the 50 year term limit makes it more difficult for them to play off of nostalgia alone.
So? Tolkien after all died in 1973. The fandom would exist even without copyright past 1981.
>I would also argue that corporations would have no qualms of waiting 25 years to capitalize and format shift a work of art, where as the 50 year term limit makes it more difficult for them to play off of nostalgia alone.
What would waiting for 25 years achieve? And what is "format shift" this context? "The book is copyright free, but the movie coming out after the book's 25 years is not"? Wouldn't that be an improvement over today which neither is?
It says authored 1929 for the US which seems to indicate 95 years? I've lost track of how long these ridiculous lengths are now.
That's how it is in the US and most of Europe.
Totally legal. No loss to first individual. The fact is that intellectual property IS treated differently, and was justified as being required to incentivize invention and creation NOT because there was any natural right to the product of one's thoughts to not be copied or expanded upon. Now that it arguably gets in the way of innovation and creation, what justification is there for these ADDITIONAL legal restrictions.
grandma not sharing her best recipes, and children calling each other "copycat!" is an argument for a natural right. It is innately how humans feel, and there is a supporting argument that we don't want grandma's secret innovations dying with her, to incent sharing.
1) First reason, it is not physical property.
2) Second, many of the creators who lobbied for longer copyright terms benefited from a rich public domain when they did not have anything. In the case of Walt Disney, he made a film series based on Alice in Wonderland, which never had copyright protection in the US, and it's copyright expired in the UK in 1907.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney#Early_career:_1920...
If we were to take the contents of a book or a movie for example, and copy it, you still have the physical source, and nothing is lost, your property is still yours. It's just that there is more of it due to the additional copy. That copy isn't yours, and from the moment it was created it still isn't yours. So in that line of thinking, the property that was created is not the same as the property it was copied from, which means two different properties exist.
We can make this even trickier, because if we were to reason about the physical property and the intellectual property separately, the story in a book, and the physical book itself would be two different properties. So when you create a copy, that book that started out blank was definitely not part of the property of someone else. So does the act of adding intellectual property now suddenly transfer the physical property to the source of the intellectual property?
In the current laws and practises around the world we have made all sorts of rules about this, but just reasoning about it before falling back on established practice already shows that it doesn't always turn out to be as easy as it seems.
hopefully, ideally
It really isn't.
I think it would be interesting to consider other reforms.
Note that copyright is not just a single right. It is a bundle of rights. In the US those are the copying right, the derivative work right, the distribution right, the performance right, the display right, and some others. The bundle of rights might be different in other jurisdictions but in most it is similar. In the rest of this comment I'll only be consideringd US copyright.
First, I don't see why all of those rights should all have the same term. I see no reason to believe that the optimal term for say the copying right and the optimal term for the derivative work right would be the same.
Second, how about adding more compulsory licenses? US copyright law already has some compulsory licenses (also called mechanical licenses), such as for cover songs. Briefly, a federal agency called the Copyright Royalty Board sets the terms and rates for these licenses, and anyone can obtain the license according to those rates and terms, regardless of whether or not the copyright owner wants to license the work to them.
For example suppose we made it so that the copying and distribution rights have a three phase lifetime instead of the current two phases (which are an exclusive phase tied to the author's lifetime followed by public domain). The three phase lifetime could be (1) an exclusive phase of a fixed number of years, followed by (2) a compulsory license phase, followed by (3) public domain.
The derivative work right is the hard one. On the one hand a short term allows others to play in an author's universe. I've seen some really good and really well written fan fiction that is not currently technically legal, especially crossover fan fiction that merges the story universes of different authors. Encouraging this would be good.
On the other hand some things would be ruined if they became public domain too quickly. I'm quite pleased that Bill Watterson still gets to decide who can make "Calvin & Hobbes" derivative works. If copyright was only 14 or 21 years (terms people often suggest), I've no doubt that every character from "Calvin & Hobbes" would have started appearing in ads as soon as the copyright expired.
Just reduce the term so that people can create derivates of the culture they grew up on (abolishing the mess entirely would be even better). Characters from Calvin & Hobbes being used by others is not any more of a problem than fan fiction is a problem now.
I dont think that distant kings, state religions, or crusading armies were more faceless.
Disney is surprisingly friendly to Star Wars fan fiction.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/movies/star-wars-fan-film...
Free Culture by Larry Lessig was an excellent book on the subject. He fought the copyright extension in the Supreme Court and founded the Creative Commons. The experience showed him the degree to which money has corrupted the US political system, so he moved his expertise from intellectual property to election reform. He was briefly a protest candidate for president, who vowed to make his reforms and then resign.
Next year it will be a link to a tiktok movie?
It's fascinating to me that like 95% of what anglos see as "occult" or "magic" is directly descended from that very recent grifter.
Also see vampires and Stoker (though that's not as intentional).
* Ernest Hemingway's novel "A Farewell to Arms"
* Ludwig Wittgenstein's essay "Some Remarks on Logical Form"
* The first part of the 14th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica
* William Faulkner's novel "The Sound and the Fury"
* René Magritte's painting "The Treachery of Images"
* Wassily Kandinsky's painting "Upward"
* "Un chien Andalou", directed by Luis Bunuel and cowritten by Salvador Dali
* "The Cocoanuts", the first film of the Marx Brothers
* the first "Silly Symphony" cartoons, including "The Skeleton Dance".
Not a bad year at all!