Class of 2016: Whose works will enter the public domain | Hacker News Reader

Class of 2016: Whose works will enter the public domain

publicdomainreview.org

129 pointsThevet72 comments

"Wondering what will enter the public domain through copyright expiration in the U.S.? Like last year, and the year before…Nothing."

So wonderful to see new works enter the public domain, and then there's the gutpunch. So depressing.

Frigging Mickey Mouse. This two-bit mediocre cartoon character is why we can't have nice things.

Do they still even make Mickey Mouse cartoons? He really seems like nothing more than a logo and mascot at this point.

You don't have kids. Mickey Mouse Club House is HUGE with kids.

The big issue for Disney is once Mickey Mouse enters the public domain, anyone is free to create derivative works of the initial cartoons.

Maybe only in trade classes where original-style Mickey Mouse is not asserted as trademark.

You can make derivative cartoons with Steamboat-Willie-era Mickey Mouse, but you can't distribute them in commerce without a few legal precautions, as Disney asserts the Mickey Mouse image as a trademark with respect to int'l trade class 41 (entertainment). It's no longer a copyright violation, but a trademark infringement.

You can't do it in such a way that creates the possibility that someone might confuse your derivative work for a genuine Disney-branded entertainment product. So it might be as simple as plastering a disclaimer over the intro to your cartoon that informs all viewers that the following is video is derived from a public domain work, and is not associated with Disney. But don't count on that saving you from the flesh-eating lawyers.

Actually, yes. They've been putting out new Mickey Mouse shorts for months now. They're all on youtube[0].

[0]http://youtu.be/iNT8T58G3f4?list=PLC6qIbU1olyXQe1WOKt8UJ4hEr...

It looks like those shorts are some sort of modern reproductions. Originals, which I personally like much better, are here:

https://www.youtube.com/user/OldVintageTimes

They're modern, but not reproductions. They're all brand new material, and quite good.

We need to find someway that Disney get's their copyright for everything and the rest of the world can have Public Domain.

Also the Autobiography of Malcolm X is one of the best non-fiction books I ever read and should be read by everyone in America. Though I don't think that book would be public domain now due to Alex Haley being a co-writter and died in 1992.

The thing is, they can keep him as a trademark even if he is public domain. This is how the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate keeps Tarzan and John Carter, for example.

Maybe it should just be increasingly costly to maintain an old copyright, so a few high-value copyrights like Mickey Mouse could be maintained while much more literature simply passes into the public domain. Or perhaps film copyrights could be separated from print copyrights.

Or maybe we could just not have de facto perpetual copyright.

But trademark is restricted by trade classifications, and must be monitored and defended vigorously by the trademark-holder.

If you sell construction equipment, you can have a Tarzan brand of earth-mover. If you sell space tourism, you can have a John Carter brand of travel package. In order to lawyer-smack you, the estate would have to show the court that they were already using the trademark in that line of business before you.

So you could call anything that Disney does not already sell a "Mickey Mouse". Think of something NSFW. When they go to C&D you, you can demand to see proof that they are actually in that line of business. They either successfully defend the trademark and get a PR disaster or you get to use the trademark for your trade class.

I think it's a little more complicated than that. The primary goal of trademark is to prevent consumer confusion. Mickey Mouse is so closely associated with Disney and used with such a dizzying array of products that calling something Mickey Mouse, even something NSFW that Disney wouldn't want to make themselves, seems likely enough to cause confusion.

And I wouldn't worry about Disney's ability to monitor and enforce their trademark either

They have failed before.

https://www.google.com.py/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&bi...

Somehow that is allowed in my country because they are not selling cartoons, just food and spices and things like that.

Using an image of Mickey Mouse himself adds insult to the (admittedly tiny) injure.

It's not, really. Disney does not sell "adult massagers", and everybody knows it, so if I want to make one and call it the "Mickey Mouse", they do not have grounds for a trademark infringement action. They do not sell that type of product.

Once Steamboat Willie is in the public domain, I can even put a picture of Walt's original Mickey character on the box.

Of course, the profit margins on a product that does not set fire to the "sue me now" beacons are usually going to be higher. If you are not already aware, the international intellectual property protections are more beneficial to people and companies that have more money to spend on invoking them.

Just because you could doesn't mean you should.

So trademark holders have to monitor and vigorously defend a trademark that is more limited than copyright. What's wrong with that, for an 80-year-old work?

Is this really a worse system than one in which a huge volume of literature and research from the 1930s to the 1960s is locked into an out-of-print limbo, not "valuable" enough to republish and yet virtually inaccessible outside of research libraries?

The fatal flaw of Trademark is in the line of business. Disney would be liable for anything new. That makes the millions of dollars to continue to flow to protect new items coming into public domain.

What if we could have the multi-million dollar Copyright license. It cost MILLIONS for them to keep things out of Public Domain for 25+ years, therefore things not valuable fall to public domain

Been wanting to buy this on Kindle, but it's only available in paperback. :\

We need to create a sort of hybrid copyright and trademark that will solve the mickey mouse problem. So that a company can keep their actually used characters, but that unused stuff goes into the public domain after 25 years plus not being used in the past 5 years.

That way Disney can keep their mickey mouse, but someone can find a book written 40 years ago that isn't in circulation anymore and reprint it. Or create unauthorized sequels, riffs, whatever.

Nope. We need to make the copyright to last 5 years for exclusive monopoly, and more 10 years for making profit out of the copyrighted work.

And make Mickey Mouse public domain.

I always thought an easy solution amenable to people and companies is you should have to pay to keep up the copyright after a certain time.

Maybe start copyright at 40 years. If you find the work valuable you could register to extend it. If you don't find it valuable and don't bother to register the work it falls into public domain. Seems like an easy solution.

IMO, copyright does two things. Protects direct income, and prevents derivative works. I think ~5-20 years to prevent copying is reasonable, but derivative works could benefit from longer term protection. As in, you can't make a movie based on a book in that author’s lifespan.

IMO, this is not about profit, so much as artistic integrity.

It's also likely to pass the Disney test. They are not making money from Steamboat Willy it's all about protecting the image.

> but derivative works could benefit from longer term protection. As in, you can't make a movie based on a book in that author’s lifespan.

Why? If no derivative works can be made within the original author's lifespan, that would mean that the author's audience would likewise rarely live to see any. By the time the author is dead, their works are might be irrelevant or forgotten. Who is going to remix them then? Copyright terms lasting lifetimes rob entire generations of their culture. The original length of copyright in the US was only 14 years.

We already see lot's of copying for any popular work. AKA CSI: Miami. And, you can generally do fanfiction as long as your not trying to make money from it.

I just want to minimize the amount of me too pandering that follows any popular new thing.

Why bother? Is there a good reason in the public interest to keep Mickey out of the public domain, or is this a workaround to do as much in the public interest while submitting to the fact Disney has enough money to block the otherwise status quo ending of copyright.

If the former, I'd suggest that you have a warped vision of how Disney's profitability is the public good, and secretly think you're lying. Or if it's the later, our democracy has some really fundamental problems and caving on this just makes them worse.

It's not that the public should be concerned for Disney's profitability, but that it is much easier to simply split the cases and let Disney have a much smaller victory in just the space they desire rather than a larger victory that affects all of copyright.

I can get that. But that reasoning rests on an admission our democracy is incapable maintaining principles for no other reason than the power of corporate lobbying. (As you've already said the public shouldn't be concerned with Disney's profitability, so I'll assume that their lack profitability doesn't represent any threat to the nation.)

If someone wants to argue that such a state of affairs is fine, OK. We can have that conversation. But I see it as a fundamental threat to the rule of law.

What's wrong with admitting that the system doesn't work?

If it's true, then we should act in consequence instead of flipping out at the suggestion of palliative measures.

It's like refusing to consider measures to mitigate harm caused by global warming because you don't want to "admit" that corporate interests make it very difficult to prevent global warming.

Because it's not a simple binary. The system works well for some purposes and not for others, but we can't easily measure the costs and benefits. I don't like the copyright system at all, but as a creator I derive some benefits from it like being able to protect my own work while I figure out how to sell it. Thus I'm not supportive when some people (not necessarily you) take the position 'it's broken, so let's just abandon it completely' since that would reduce the potential future value of anything I've created and shown to anyone else to zero, which would create a huge economic problem.

It's true that some kinds of creative work can't be adequately copied. People enjoy hearing musicians play and sing at live concerts, because something about the immediacy of the social experience is more enjoyable than just listening to a recording. Likewise, original works of painting and sculpture are almost impossible to truly duplicate.

But this is not the case for some other works of art, like novels or movies. The costs of creation are as high as for any other kind of artistic work product, while the marginal costs of reproduction are very much lower, and if they become too disjunct the business model collapses. Nobody is going to spend millions of dollars making films if it'c clearly impossible to recoup that investment, for example, nor are authors likely to spend years sweating over novels. Libertarians like to say 'your failed business model is not my problem' but ignore the fact that the business model is not failing, because people around the world are in fact quite happy to pay money to read books and watch big-budget movies absent any external compulsion to do so. And if I want to make a better sci-fi movie than the forthcoming Star Wars picture, the principal obstacle is not a legal one but the enormous cost of hiring so many skilled craftspeople and resources to make something of equivalent artistic and technical quality. The only legal barrier is that I can't call it 'Star Wars' or reuse elements from existing Star Wars products outside of the narrow exceptions of the fair use doctrine like parody, critical or educational use etc.

Forget the specificity of Micky Mouse, as that character just represents Disney's brand. Do you really think a company should lose their brand after X years? Disney doesn't care about Steamboat Willy, they care about people selling knock-off mouse ears, which comes with Willy entering the public domain.

I was just listening to an NPR segment on how Elvis Presley's image has become tainted by cheap crap, and that inspired Frank Sinatra to ensure the same doesn't happen to him. His biggest fear was that his face would be sold on a coffee mug. Should anyone be able to do anything with Frank Sinatra's likeness now that he's passed?

Should the estate of George Lucas be able to create new Star Wars movies in X years to compete with Disney's Star Wars movies in effort to undo everything they added to the universe "Because it wasn't George's vision", even though he sold off the rights?

I know I'm throwing hypotheticals and edge cases out there, but I just want us to focus on the issue deeper than "What reason is there to keep Steamboat Willy out of the public domain?" There's no good reason. But there are tons of good reasons to ensure people can't profit off an active brand's image.

But there are tons of good reasons to ensure people can't profit off an active brand's image.

So, should a brand get to control in perpetuity whatever they choose to associate with themselves? Should we extend trademark protections to whatever a brand wants to self-identify with, even if it falls outside the traditional scope of a mark?

Basically, I'm getting to the question: should it be the brand's responsibility to choose a protectable mark, or should it be on society to accept a loss to the scope of public domain whenever a brand has a lack of foresight? (and/or arrogance they could keep getting laws written for themselves?)

The system for doing that is called trademark.

Why should a company have control of "art" into infinity just because they make money on it. Kind of the tail wagging the dog. Copyright was giving someone limited "ownership" to something they created for a limited time so we could create jobs for artists. Think of all the derivative works that aren't created because they are blocked by copyright.

I am fine with trademark protection, but you can't say that everything sold under a trademark constitutes the trademark itself. As for this...

I favor a 'longer of (alternatives)' term that can persist beyond death, so if you finish your great work of art and drop dead the following day it doesn't become public domain as soon as you hit the ground, but that post mortem copyright should not last very long - maybe 20 or 25 years, the typical length of a human generation, and thus enough to support a newborn heir to adulthood, for example.

Elvis' image is only 'tainted' to the extent that the availability of cheap crap makes it more difficult to sell premium-priced crap exploiting the same image. I'm old enough to remember reading of his death in the newspaper and while I'm well aware of the existence of tacky Elvis products none of them reduce my enjoyment of an Elvis musical or movie performance if I'm feeling nostalgic. Elvis is as great as he ever was, you just can't charge as much for stuff with his name on it as you used to.

Sure, I understand Frank Sinatra not wanting to end up as the commercial equivalent of a punchline, nobody would. But let's be realistic here, his estate is licensing his recordings and likeness to sell whisky right now, so why should they enjoy a legal subsidy to operate a Cult of Frank Sinatra?

Of course, yes. Would we be better off culturally speaking if people had to get a Shakespeare license before staging one of his plays, to ensure that no theater goers ever had to endure a shitty Shakespeare experience? Of course not.

I don't think brands and the products put out under then should enjoy legal protection in perpetuity, and for that matter I'm not sure corporations should either. In wills and trust/contract law, there's a 'rule against perpetuities' because giving people the power to set conditions that last forever just doesn't work out well in practice and so individual autonomy is sacrificed on the altar of the larger social good. When we apply property interest to immaterial things like texts or legal bodies, they should in some way reflect that which they imitate; just as a corporation is a legal embodiment of a collective human action - ie we treat it as a person for administrative simplicity - intellectual property is the legal instantiation of private human knowledge and that privacy should not be so strongly protected as to exceed human discretionary capacity.

Put another way, persons involved in a commercial negotiation centered around an exchange of information for consideration has the option to reject inadequate offers, withdraw from negotiations, and keep the valuable information to themselves until such time as a better offer appears or the value of the information expires. We grant a property right in certain kinds of information because of the considerable costs of creation relative to the tiny costs of reproduction, and I believe there is a sound economic and moral basis for doing so - but that basis must be rooted in some cognizable measure of individual human experience, which after all is the only sort of experience we can honestly lay claim to. Collective organizations may well have experience (in the sense that an ant colony may be capable of cognition, experience, and consciousness notwithstanding the limited mental capacity of individual ants) but the threshold of eusocial consciousness remains obscure and may be formally undecidable using existing methods. Insofar as legal rights and responsibilities accrue to individual humans, the median individual human experience must therefore remain our legal yardstick for the time being.

Is copyright - or a novel legal structure as you suggest - really necessary to "protect" Micky Mouse? Isn't trademark enough? If I understand correctly, the expiration of copyright of Disney's works will bring the individual works into the public domain one at a time, but the trademark on the characters still stands as long as Disney enforces it.

Easy. Automatic copyright lasts until 5 years after the creator's death (or 10 years total for works by corporations). You can extend copyright indefinitely, but there is a fee that increases exponentially with time. I'd suggest $100 for years 5 through 10, and $1 billion for years 75 through 80.

Why? Disney can continue to use out-of-copyright characters. The court has, inexplicably, accepted the lawyering that "limited time" has no meaning. That's what needs to change.

Tbh, after 10 years, I think IP should just expire altogether for non-commercial use.

The Sonny Bono (Mickey Mouse) Copyright Extension Act was in 1998. It extended copyright by 20 years. It's now (almost) 18 years later. In the next 2-3 years, the next copyright extension fight is going to happen.

Hopefully we have a more educated Congress these days (though I kind of doubt it). But at least we need to try to make it an issue in the 2016 election cycle.

Oh man, time to get organized. Who will do the lobbying on this? The EFF? Wiki says amici briefs to Eldred v. Ashcroft were filed by the Free Software Foundation, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Bureau of National Affairs, and the College Art Association. RBG's majority opinion there framed the plaintiffs as "individuals and businesses whose products or services build on copyrighted works that have gone into the public domain." I wish there was some kind of group advocating for users of public domain materials, whose access to our literary heritage is so hampered by copyright.

Disney & copyrights are really interesting. The linked site has a lot of info about why releasing to public domain doesn't harm content. But is there a Mickey/Disney equivalent internationally? I can't think of one, but I'm American...

It seems your "but" has the hidden assumption "since the US has longer term copyright", but in fact, when Mickey was created and for a long time, the US was actually one of the countries with shorter copyright terms. The Berne convention, which sets the copyright length to Life + 50 years, was signed by most developed countries before 1930, but the US only did so in 1988: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

This doesn't prove that Disney hasn't benefited enormously from extended copyright terms. Their stock growth is huge since '88, but it's impossible to say how much of that growth would have occurred without their copyright [0]. We can speculate, but it's hard to even imagine how Disney would be different today without certain copyrights. That's why I was looking for a comparable media empire internationally.

[0] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:DIS

Of course Disney benefited enormously from extended copyright. But what it does show is that long copyright terms are neither necessary nor sufficient for a Disney to appear and become successful, since the US at that time didn't have them.

What I don't understand is what finding a comparable media empire internationally would give you, since most of the world has the same copyright terms as the US, and so it wouldn't be helpful to judge the results of different terms.

No, we cannot have nice things because the largest international media conglomerate can influence government to give them permanent monopoly to their ideas, and because people are apathetic to both the money in politics and the perpetual monopoly on information being issues.

What is the point of belittling a person who is making the same point as you are?

I'm not belittling the OP, its just that the animators and writers and creative people behind Steamboat Willie are in no way responsible for the monster Disney corporation became, and neither is the character. Put blame where blame belongs, and all that.

I hope in a millennia copyright is looked back upon with the same disgust and insanity that human sacrifice, child wives, and genital mutilation are (mostly) today. In a society unbounded by information scarcity, to intentionally and systemically stymie it is to intentionally cripple yourself. The immediate magnitude may be less significant, but the long slow death of culture to perpetual copyright is having absolute consequences on our modern society today, with escalating damage as time goes on. The longer we as a people are culturally stunted walking a tightrope of legal bureaucracy established and maintained to protect monopoly and corporate profit the more of our history we lose, and the more of our bonds are lost or never formed amongst one another in common knowledge. But because the suffering is scattered across our collective conscious, and because it requires an understanding of how information and culture are made beyond the average wit, the movement is limited and rife with a never-ending uphill battle against one another rather than against the aggressors, because we were all raised in this system and to see outside it requires great effort and a sacrifice of established ethos many are not willing to engage in.

It is the same outside thought that kept slavery the norm, or subjugated women, or made great thinkers like Giordano Bruno heretics to be burned rather than celebrated. People are born into systems of oppression and will fight for them because it is what they know, even if it is to us now what is not right. And I firmly believe intellectual property protectionism falls into that history of oppression - much more muted, much less immediately harmful, but backwards and self-defeatist all the same.

I'm very much for copyright change, but equating copyright monopolies with human sacrifice and genital mutilation is specious bullshit that makes people less sympathetic to the cause of reform. The injustices of copyright are a minor annoyance by comparison to other kinds of abuse and trauma.

because it requires an understanding of how information and culture are made beyond the average wit

Bah, humblebrag. Almost everyone I've ever discussed copyright with is perfectly capable of appreciating the systemic perpetuation of privilege that inheres in copyright monopolies. You're waving a bloody shirt for the moral equivalent of a paper cut; it's not OK to borrow the vastly more intense sufferings of others to make more of an emotional impact.

I'm not equating it. I'm comparing it. They are simply explicit and blunt examples to make a point, more relatable examples would be traditional models of miasma causing disease or of the Earth being flat. But you also reinforce my point - it feels more explicit when the consequences of a misguided social order have physical ramifications in the immediate, rather than the sociological spanning the entirety over a long time. Probably the greatest relatable yet poignant example would be the cultural view of women as helpless or lesser than men for most of history since cultivation of crops began. It started as a tool of control, and was passed down in an ingrained psyche we have still not fully escaped. But we can fully understand both that people borne into it assumed it to be an absolute of the world, the same as how many think copyright and intellectual property must be, while also recognizing how wrong they can be.

> Almost everyone I've ever discussed copyright with is perfectly capable of appreciating the systemic perpetuation of privilege that inheres in copyright monopolies. You're waving a bloody shirt for the moral equivalent of a paper cut; it's not OK to borrow the vastly more intense sufferings of others to make more of an emotional impact.

This is also the point. It is not about the privilege of the owners, it is about the damage inflicted by it. It is not about money earned but history, knowledge, and potential lost. You can see the immediate consequences of slavery, but also recognize that such a sin of culture has consequences in the potential of everyone involved beyond the subjugated. If a debate on copyright devolves into pursuits of wealth or privilege, the macro impact is already lost. In addition, anyone you are having a debate with is probably already putting in the effort. I speak of the other 99% of peoples who give it no consideration and assume it as natural as gravity or light.

And I'm not claiming to be some enlightened saint. As others have said, these flaws in social organization of peoples require mental effort to grasp and overcome. You always want to presume what you know is what is right, and I am certain I have my own assumptions that are as moralistically wrong as copyright that I have not yet, or may never, challenge. And hopefully whatever we are in that thousand years looks back and sees them all as backwards and unreasonable as we see so many historical practices as wrong.

I personally make money selling software that I wrote expecting to be able to sell it in the future. Without copyright, I wouldn't have done it in the first place. How do you see this sort of activity in a world without copyright?

This is always the first comment, and its always the easiest. You do not treat your information as a scarce resource when it is not. You treat your scarce resources as scarce. Seek payment to develop, not for the fruits of development, at least not to be treated as a falsified scarce commodity. The time and mental energy to create is the limited resource, not the creation itself.

Sure, but who will pay for that time and energy? I guess no-one, which means not producing the product in the first place.

> I hope in a millennia copyright is looked back upon with the same disgust and insanity that human sacrifice, child wives, and genital mutilation are (mostly) today.

Woah there, buddy.

> in a millennia copyright is looked back upon with the same disgust and insanity that human sacrifice, child wives, and genital mutilation are

1000 years is enough time for our contemporary culture to change. Those things you listed may even become acceptable by then. Just to compare with what we already accept - capital punishment, abortion, children being controlled by their parents, and even forced to eat food, circumcision.

And all are valid examples of potentially backwards thinking, and the many more even us are not recognizing because we have not dedicated the mental energy required to break out of our respectively imprinted expectations of social organization.

I only speak of one example amongst many, but I stand by it being in our best interests to recognize and correct them before they cause too much injury to either individuals or the collective.

Of interest to Europeans is also that the group "died in 1945" also includes Aldof Hitler. Up until now the Bavarian government (as the copyright owner) blocked any and all reprints in Germany and wherever else they could. I'm looking forward to reading it, admittedly primarily because I'm curios whe they were so hellbend on keeping it away from the general public.

Nazi propaganda is illegal in Germany. That's pretty much all there is to it.

Yet "Mein Kampf" will be available again starting January 1st.

see: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34980701

It's incredibly tedious and poorly written. I wouldn't waste my time time again, if I were you.

Blind Willie Johnson's song "Dark Was the Night" was among those put on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 and launched out towards interstellar space.

Next year in the "life plus 50 years" countries (including Canada): Walt Disney. I hope people in those countries make a mockery of mickey.

Making a mockery of Mickey is fine. It's parody!

Good point!

TPP has killed that. Canada will be life plus 70 shortly.

Does anyone track the quantity of work under Creative Commons? How does that compare to the volume and quality of public domain works lost to draconian Copyright extensions?

Passed 1 billion now, http://creativecommons.org/weblog/2015/12/08/46651

It was said below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10719751) but it's worth a top-level comment: the TPP may ruin the public domain for countries currently enjoying annual PD growth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com