What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2017
web.law.duke.edu
web.law.duke.edu
I can't help but feel today's absurdly draconian copyright laws and lengths are going to make our century a terrible cultural black hole for our future-human descendents.
The vast, vast majority of creators who produce culture--books, movies, music, visual art, etc.--don't see widespread distribution, success, or fame in their own lifetimes. This is true today and it was true in the past too.
Today, we have people like Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and others, volunteering their time and energy to lovingly archive, curate, and distribute out-of-copyright works. Many of these works get a cultural second life: people today can freely discover and read a book published before 1923, whose author might have died penniless and unknown in their day. Their work, their name, their ideas, and their legacy lives on 100 years after their death, even if the world they lived in overlooked them, because volunteers can freely update and distribute those works.
Can we say the same about the vast majority of work produced today, for whose creators don't attain widespread fame or cultural influence? Everything anyone produces, from a smudge on a piece of paper to the Great American Novel, now automatically gains a copyright that can last over a century, and that has almost never failed to be extended. As one of the many everyday creators who never see significant success, how would you feel if your work was not only ignored today, but for all time too?
Our future-human descendents are going to think culture from 1923-2100 consisted of almost nothing but the 400 comic book movies, the 75 Star Wars movies, and Harry Potter. Everything else will be too unprofitable for a megacorporation to distribute, and illegal for anyone else to.
It was very sad to see What.CD go down recently. They had every release of every LP, EP and demo, of every obscure artist you could possibly imagine. The curation and amount of content made commercial services like Spotify and TIDAL look barren in comparison. Best of all: there was no DRM on the content and you could freely use your VPN.
I just hope enough libraries survive for the content to last.
At least that way if shit goes south the information is still out there even if the curation and "updates" to it will no longer happen.
I do think this could be solved, with for instance public-key addressed content (e.g., a DHT where the content is references to files, addressed by pubkey and muteable only to the owner of the corresponding private key). I've been trying to figure out why this isn't done in practice for a while now.
Maybe it's a selection bias, where all dark file distribution networks run that well/securely drop off the map completely?
Most private trackers are using the same pretty dismal PHP bit torrent tracker libraries/servers that work with mysql or sqlite. It would of course be possible to replicate these or do something as simple as cron jobs, rsync, etc., but that's not often the real issue.
The larger issue is the legal aspect. Most of the time a big tracker is taken down, the owners are known to authorities or don't want to risk being known, even by association. As such, continuing the same site, even under different management would put them at risk. If I remember in the case of what.cd and a few others, they put out notices saying they intentionally nuked their databases for this among other reasons.
If for example a big site shuts down and one of the members spins up a new instance, the fear is that the original owners would be liable. It doesn't matter if this holds up or not in court or is even a real thing, merely the threat of it is not worth the trouble to many people. Not many people want to sign up to go to jail or deal with financial threats because of sharing movies or music.
Distributing the database doesn't solve the legal aspect. In fact, distributing the database might be seen as more ammunition to threaten the original site admins as being "enablers." So in theory what you are saying makes sense and would be a good idea, but in the face of reality and human behavior, it is much harder and more than a technical issue.
I mean, I do feel like we're ready to start jailing/extrajudicially punishing people just for writing software that the copyright lobby/intelligence community doesn't like, because it makes piracy/privacy more accessible, but it'd be a first for someone not involved in actually commiting piracy to wind up in the sights of the copyright lobby.
In the Netherlands everyone has to pay a premium on CD's and DVD's, "for rightsholders", which goes to some shady copyright organization which distributes part of the money to top-40 artists. I don't think "copyright tax" on all storage media is a much larger step, nor do I think government-mandated DRM is. Not having "the right to tinker" like we do now already comes pretty close.
Chinese walls/firewalls don't quite hold up in court as well as one might think. Obviously it can depend on the country and circumstances, but anytime people feel there is a criminal conspiracy at work, they come up you hard. It is also hard to keep such a wall "clean" as all it takes is one person being stupid to establish a link.
Again, it's also about fear and human nature, not reality. I'm sure there are people with great opsec and planning who don't have this problem, but they also don't necessarily attract enough attention to get shut down. Factor in that many admins start a site because of ego, and that doesn't lead to great opsec. Nor do most people want to use software they know nothing about.
I should probably add FWIW, married to a prosecutor who goes after international criminal conspiracies among other things. Not the computer stuff thankfully, but I've seen and heard about what happens when the words criminal conspiracy get thrown about and people with money are involved. Doubly dangerous when extradition treaties exist or the country handling the case is a bigger power like the US.
I do wonder how much cooperation there is between the copyright lobby and intelligence agencies. Their interests and arenas are very much alligned.
Chilling effects matter a lot, and that is part of the reason I do choose to speak up, though it gives me more anxiety than I'd like to have. I can't imagine what a hell it must be to run an actual illegal pirate network.
The average person isn't really going to be targeted for most things though. What is scary sometimes is the recklessness that people exhibit when they do have powerful information about other people. That enables some of the bad actors, whether private citizens, criminal organizations, fraudsters, or otherwise to do bad things with the information. Gathering information is a dangerous thing even if used for noble purposes because it's very hard to guarantee it is used for that.
As far as cooperation between intelligence agencies and copyright lobby, again I can't say. My feeling and first-hand experiences have more been it's an indirect relationship at best. More that lobbies pressure people, who in turn pressure intelligence. That combined with negligence and sloppy information handling and operational security, and sometimes the wrong people are able to see information they shouldn't that was often for other purposes.
I'll never understand what makes corporations and the idea of nations make people act so irrationally and often evil. It's really not that hard in life, don't be an a-hole. If you have to ask yourself if you are doing the right thing, you probably aren't most of the time. Money has just become such a huge part of civilization that it becomes a primary motivator of behaviors for many people, and the results speak for themselves.
I could go on, but I'll leave it at money makes the world go round, and sometimes I feel we've just recreated things like serfdom, monarchy, divine right, and the whole family of awfulness like that in new forms.
It's always a matter of how much attention you grab and what people you piss off. Things can look like they are fine, legal, and alright, until they aren't. It's hard to know if a strategy works until it doesn't.
Beyond the perception issues I mentioned, all I am saying is that the legal issues tend to be somewhat volatile because what is legally or ethically correct isn't necessarily what happens in reality. Combine that with other motivators like politicians and deep pockets and it gets pretty scary.
I am glad my spouse works in what I would call a more moral side of prosecution that's hard to argue the other way. She can't and I can't say that entirely good things happen in other areas of prosecution like piracy and digital crimes. If someone wants to cause you trouble, they can often find a "way" or at the very least dig and bother enough until they invent something or shake things up to find something. The cost of a legal battle alone sometimes is its own form of extortion and can be a deterrent. Gross behavior, but it happens.
The mindset cultivated seeders with the fear of getting kicked out if one was a bad peer / leech; ratios, bounties and freeleech items created a gamification for uploading material and seeding otherwise unpopular items for other users.
This appears to be the precise 180 degree opposite of what the case is as at 2 January 2017.
Additionally, while much metadata was lost in w.cd's demise, a large amount of the files have already been recovered through various replacements.
https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-is-dead-but-the-torrent-hyd...
The irony of course being that we developed the Internet to prevent Single Points of Failure from destroying our American society, yet we're seeing our culture die over and over again to the crumbling of Single Points of Failure.
Maybe at some point we'll start seeing the point of building failure-resilient networks, but as long as there's money to be made in Facebooks and Netflixes and other walled gardens, we're just going to keep seeing these failures wipe us out.
This isn't to say that you can't find what you're looking for but most of the quality stuff is usually repackaged from other higher quality sites/sources that are single points of failure for their niche of content.
People still need a platform to build the community, but that could be built in a separated system from the distribution.
BitTorrent uses cryptography to ensure file integrity. DCPP does too. Even FXP did (although only CRC32 this was reasonable back then).
Debian repositories don't compare to the illegal distribution of quality audio (and video) because Debian repositories are legal to host/spread. Because of this reason they're widely available and therefore the supply meets the demand. Unlike with illegal distribution of quality audio (and video).
The comparison with Library of Alexandria goes moot. During the burning of the Library of Alexandria many works got lost forever. Thanks to the invention of printing in the 15th century this is already more unlikely to happen. Nevermind storage on computers which has seen tremendous progress. One also needs to keep in mind that all the copies people had from the content on What.CD still exists. So it is more akin to a Library of Alexandria being burned down while all the copies are still spread (multiple times!) among large groups of individuals around the globe. I don't think many people on Earth would be able to figure out where those copies are, except maybe the NSA or GCHQ. But it'd cost them a lot of effort which isn't worth the hassle, besides being outside their scope of interest.
This is not to say we're there yet, just that its less dramatic than it seems. The burning of the Library (What.CD) is substantial because it was a meeting place for those interested in the data, akin to the shutting down of Silk Road or Timothy Leary getting busted. However one lost battle doesn't mean the war is lost.
Its still important to improve distribution of data, allow anonymity on the Internet, or the combination of both.
As another commenter mentioned, GNU/Linux package management and in fact most free software projects are managed this way.
The only downside would be that maybe some of the information would be infringing copyright, even if it's just the database rather than the music itself.
This isn't likely unless they're hosting the cover images instead of distributing them with the torrents. iirc, wcd used a separate domain to host cover images to be viewed when browsing the site.
http://rocknerd.co.uk/2016/11/19/what-the-death-of-what-cd-f...
tl;dr the way to preserve culture for all of humanity is to make lots of copies.
There also was a site called "What.CD Interview Prep" with all the knowledge you were supposed to have before joining, e.g. about lossy and lossless encoding and "The Golden Rules". I'm sure no one ever had that open on a second computer, or just closed it for a sec when making the screenshot proof.
You do realise the attitude you're defending is why What.CD has completely failed to preserve culture.
Their users might have dispersed, but the content is still out there and the good sharing habits will stick with the ex-members. It has also caused many, many CD's to be ripped, curated and massively distributed to very high standards, for years. The curated metadata and social structure might have been lost, but the content survives.
I think they were mostly sabotaged by lack of anonimization and by their centralized architecture.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-mi...
There are plenty of other types of work that have always been lost - construction, acting, cooking, accounting, organizing things, well it's an endless list. Just about everything people spend their effort on won't last long or be studied by anyone after their job's finished, let alone after their death.
If a book was never popular then it's not really a part of culture any more than a small business's company culture is.
"What one person thinks others should have access to," on the other hand, now that one has a long, sordid, and sometimes-violent history.
>If a book was never popular then it's not really a part of culture any more than a small business's company culture is.
Demonstrably false.
Each employee of that small business talks about their job, and/or moves on to other jobs where their previous working experiences are expressed in terms of both job performance and managerial habits. This is cultural dissipation (in your "workplace" context, but also carries to others), the primary method by which cultures evolve: a person's thoughts and preferences are expressed to others, verbally or via creative acts, which can appear as suggested priorities, and often are promoted into mainstream culture.
It took 200 years for most anybody to consider Baruch Spinoza as anything more than some old excommunicated shitbird. Palmyra is currently being reduced to dust and memories. There are more examples.
This.
Tangentially, one of the things I really liked about the film "The Cloud Atlas" is the subtext of cultural dissipation through low-probability events. The implied moral being: "Try to always be the best person you can be, because you don't know which moments of yours are going to end up having lasting significance.
2. Relicense works that have been purchased where possible for open access.
3. sell subscriptions to people to accrue money which helps buy works.
4. Let people who subscribe prioritize the purchases.
5. Let people who leech know that they are slowing the purchase process down by merely reading and not contributing.
6. Negotiate buy out clauses for those who claim royalties on their out of print works (shouldn't be much since the works weren't in print and hence no royalties could be produced!)
7. Start fund for authors to actually produce new works. Delivery of payment upon completion of work. ~patron model.
8. Probably work with writers' guilds and unions to help make sure payments are fare and reflect the needs of authors. But don't let them take the piss and renegotiate contracts when they let go of royalties for their out of print work but their work suddenly becomes popular.
Wanna find a lesbian film from Germany from before the Nazis? Pandora's Box is on the torrent sites!
Piracy is good for our heritage.
One counter-balance I've seen mentioned is that any proposed annual fee should be exponential (presumably with a relatively modest exponent such as say (1.0, 2.0]) with the number of years since original publication date.
Copyright, just like Patents, was designed as much to force things to expire as to hold them hostage to creators/owners ('limited monopolies' to encourage creators/owners with an emphasis on 'limited' to eventually win out for the public good). All copyrighted things should eventually expire, for the public good (that's what the US Constitution tried to provide for, originally).
There likely isn't a solution that our corporate overlords would accept that includes decent expiration terms, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying. It's the entire point of Copyright to regulate this sort of thing. If Copyright doesn't regulate expiration terms than what is the point of having Government involved at all? Might as well save the courts time and money, cut out the middle man, and let the megacorps build their own "Mickey Mouse cops" to police copyrights at that point... We don't have to live in that dystopia and we can as citizens demand that the federal government do its constitutionally mandated job of providing for the public good.
If a creator only desired widespread distribution, they could do it by explicitly putting their works into the public domain, or by only selling time-limited exclusive copyright licenses.
So why don't they do that?
(My take is that it's because they would rather try make a living by selling/leasing their copyrights, and perpetual copyrights are worth more money than limited ones.)
Copyright law is ridiculous. Nonfiction and scientific work should be treated differently than fictional works. I don't really care if Mickey Mouse goes into the public domain. But it's crazy that 100 year old scientific works can still be under copyright and illegal to distribute. These objectively have value to society, and the argument for the existence of the public domain is much stronger.
And why on Earth should copyright last last so long to begin with? How many works are worth anything after 10 or 15 years? I believe 99% of all works make 99%+ of their revenue in the first few years. Having copyright last a lifetime, let alone much longer, is just crazy. Creators benefit exponentially less for every additional year of protection. And only the very successful ones even benefit to begin with - the vast vast majority of works are just forgotten by that time.
Put a cost on renewing copyright. This is actually how it used to be. Half way through, you could pay a fee to have copyright extended. Very few people paid this fee (because most works aren't economically valuable), so most works went into public domain much sooner. Journals charge $30 to access obscure ancient papers. But I bet they wouldn't pay even $30 to keep the rights to those same papers.
Don't put everything into copyright by default. And again especially works of nonfiction or scientific papers. If the authors want that, then sure. This wouldn't fix the issues with big journals that demand it. But it still seems like a sensible idea to have copyright opt-in, not opt-out.
Imagine all the fun stuff all people would be able to do with the Disney characters if they came out of copyright. Disney could then make new things to define themselves.
Most of our entertainment industry just latches on to the old, giving us endless remakes and sequels instead of trying to find new writers and artists that give us things that are not cliche, inspiring and new.
" But it's crazy that 100 year old scientific works can still be under copyright and illegal to distribute. These objectively have value to society, and the argument for the existence of the public domain is much stronger.
And why on Earth should copyright last last so long to begin with? How many works are worth anything after 10 or 15 years?"
The nature of capitalism means that because there's value to those scientific works, someone will try to extract wealth from them. That's why this happens across the board.
Regardless, I see what you're saying about OP contradicting his/herself, but it's not necessarily a contradiction: the value to society may be greater than that to the copyright holder. Of the millions of works still under copyright today created in 1960, only a handful are still generating wealth for their copyright holders. But could all those works which are not generating wealth actually be valuable to modern people breathing life into old works by republishing or remixing? Perhaps.
I agree completely. This would go a long way towards bringing old works into the public domain, by making sure the artificial privilege of exclusive control requires active interest to maintain.
Ideally, I'd suggest making the fee scale exponentially (or at least non-linearly) with age, as well. That would lead people to ask questions like "is this decades-old work really worth millions to renew again, or should we make something new with that same money that'd reset the fee schedule?".
I'd even go one step further, and make it a progressive tax proportional to the duration the work has been copyrighted. Initial grace period of a few years is free, then a very modest rate, but after a couple of decades it starts to ramp up really high. If it's that valuable, you can keep paying it off the profits as long as you want.
Same thing with estates. Inheriting a copyright? Fine - but there's a tax on that (with the usual applicable caps etc).
And said tax receipts could be specifically allocated to, say, fund libraries, free public Internet, and other forms of storing and distributing information and works of art for the benefit of all.
Also the way the current copyright system works means those free software licenses are already "dead" by your definition. It's just through pure chance that the duration keeps getting extended retroactively. The only difference between the current system and the proposed system is in the duration and the fact that in the old system all works had effectively the same duration again through pure chance because it's based on the lifetime of the author.
14 years seems plenty enough that its really shouldn't have any real impact on copyleft. Bugs, security patches, and plain reality changes makes 14 year old software kind of unusable. Many applications that is 14 years old won't even start on modern system and hardware.
So, there's this benefit too!
However I don't think it would work in practice, for the same reason public domain suffers now which is corporate lobbying. Fit to purpose, well thought out laws do not survive it.
It's the collective maturity of people that has to change. When the powerful elite is able to value culture more than their personal agenda, we could see some change. But that is a distant future if at all.
Company has an asset whose value increases, that needs to be booked and eventually declared as income AFAIK. I'm really not a good accountant when it comes to IP but I think that's the general idea.
I don't think derivative works should be protected personally. Is the world really better off with only George Lucas being able to make Star Wars movies? The fans would say no, I imagine.
Creators should be protected from pirates. Movies require a ton of money to make, and copyright protects their investment. And gives an economic incentive to create new works. Protecting derivative works doesn't really increase incentives for new works much. But it heavily restricts what others can create on it.
That said, it would be trademarkable. So you wouldn't be able to call it "Star Wars", or advertise it as canon. Or put the famous logo on it.
I read once that ancient Greek plays had lots of crossover and common characters that everyone knew. I think an alternative world without derivative work protection would be pretty interesting. Some of the best works I've ever read were fan fiction. They are technically illegal, and can never be put to print.
That's why it shouldn't be considered plagiarism for the author or someone eles to republish those works at freer pastures.
But who are we kidding, many journals refuse to publish validation of existing studies, which is the basis of empirical science.
They refuse to do science properly and we are worried about them not giving access to information.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...
"What books would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978 copyright laws?"
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
John Updike, Rabbit, Run
Joy Adamson, Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty
Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval: The Age of Roosevelt
Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
Scott O’Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins
John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique
The Time Machine
Psycho
Spartacus
Exodus
The Apartment
Inherit the Wind
The Magnificent Seven
Ocean’s 11
The Alamo
The Andy Griffith Show (first episodes)
The Flintstones (first episodes)
There is a whole genre of music there, with a very strong cultural background that is historically important in Jamaica and further afield, the UK being just one of those places. Some of the best music, imo, from the 60s and 70s came from Jamaican artists "ripping off" western music to create something unique. I don't want to live in a world in which Marcia Griffiths' voice went unheard. I also want people like Marcia to get paid and live a good life. The current copyright system is not working for anyone, not for artists either I believe.
The "degrading" of work seems like an arrogant argument, as if nobody in the word could do better than the original (or even different if not better). Books require editing before publication, songs require mastering and mixing by professionals. It is reasonable to assume that any work could be reworked as something improved, as long as that reworking does not try to pass itself off as the original there ought not to be a problem. Some system of profit share where profit exists could exist.
Here's a humorous article from techdirt highlighting the absurdities of the current situation https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150503/17153830875/get-u... My own take on one detail discussed on the comments there is that the Marley estate probably are trying to regain the copyright because the family are mostly working musicians (at least 3 sons and one daughter of Bob Marley that I know of) and would like to perform their father's songs.
Personally, I don't mind the idea so much of a perpetual copyright - provided it requires the rights owner to frequently and actively participate in the process to keep the protections active after the initial period. (and perhaps a fee schedule to reflect the supposed value of the piece) I think its possible for a copyright bill to exist that both the EFF and Disney can both support.
lawyers only see degrees of risk
Most people would find it unimaginable to consider Gulliver's Travels or Robinson Crusoe as copyrighted works — who should own them? The great-great-great-grandchildren of the authors? Some copyright acquisition firm? Shouldn't all incorporeal cultural output be returned to the public at some point?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_the_Blues#Copyright...
Of course even if it worked this way, this only solves some distribution issues. You still couldn't use the content for other purposes.
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Unfortunately I'm not sure I can feel the same optimism. Copyright law has long been beholden to corporate interests. For them, it's only fine if it keeps getting expanded indefinitely. The more restrictive the terms, the more likely that others will have to license their works and the more they can bludgeon any offenders.
Your view is really tied to the present day, but what about all these works that aren't available on computers that need to be desperately digitized? I think we already have a natural curation mechanism: something popular and important gets reproduced in some way; it gets quoted, adapted, tweaked. Those are the works that need to be prioritized, but in doing so we might miss out on undiscovered gems or things whose importance will only be apparent in hindsight. Also, storage is cheap nowadays, we can easily just keep everything, index it, and let others sift through it later. (one example is the Internet Archive, we won't know what role these stored websites could play in a few decades like the Geocities archive)
artlawjournal.com/mickey-mouse-keeps-changing-copyright-law/
i never had any desire to leave some great legacy after my death, but I can't help but notice how I personally feel in regard to Sonny Bono because of this, and realize that I actually don't want to leave humanity worse off and get remembered for that. Quite possibly incorrectly, since I didn't track politics at all my young age in 1998, I can't shake my impression that Sonny Bono had no principles and sold us all out for his own personal gain.
It seems like an extension of trademark law with continued registration and payments on the characters would be a compromise that could break lose the original book / movie.
I would imagine many would hate to give up the ability to create new, original stories or do mashups, but we won't get that anyway.
That's a pretty high bar, and what I suggested for a compromise was quite a bit lower.
Bigger than ever? I mean, Office is still raking in cash, open source on mobile is almost irrelevant, right?
What we need in the 21st century is the new Universal Copyright Act which will claim the content public domain once it has 50%+1 direct democratic votes to be so.
Edit: Why? Property rights should be upheld in perpetuity. The author's estate should continue to benefit from his works.
I can take materials and land, and build a house. I can live in said house.
But if someone claims that the way I cut the wood was under a patent, then they can lay claim on my property with make-believe property - that of which is in the mind.
It's also how we get absurd things like BRACA1 gene for breast cancer is "owned" by a company, meaning all those with breast cancer somehow owe this company for using any techniques to find it.
Or it's how we get idiotic things like "I'll sell you this shiny disk, but the software says you lose all first sale doctrine cause of copyright".
Or, with laws strengthening copyright (DMCA) say "You may have bought and own this hardware, but it's illegal for you to fix it without our approval, because of 'prevention techniques'. " Might I remind you, that only 30 years prior, companies would attach the schematic of the electronics in the back panel for easy repair.
'Intellectual Property' degrades property in every way.
... In which case nobody alive truly owns anything which isn't just a derative work of what the estate of some ancient Greek's estate would already own, thus you'd owe them royalties for everything you do with "your own" works.
It is also by nature non-rivalrous, this no need for defending it to be able to use it for yourself.
It is proven over and over that sharing and collaborating results in better outcomes for everybody, and thus there's no strong argument based on "benefit of the author" in favor of it.
There's also no obvious definition of what the limit is for WHEN you've created something novel, thus nobody can ever actually really know if they truly have something they actually own or not.
Otherwise, why bother having a law about copyright infringement at all?
Statutory damages are a damage award in civil law, in which the amount awarded is stipulated within the statute rather than being calculated based on the degree of harm to the plaintiff.