Artists and writers whose works enter the public domain in 2018 | Hacker News Reader

Artists and writers whose works enter the public domain in 2018

publicdomainreview.org

224 pointsbenbreen54 comments

I've had this Slashdot comment bookmarked since 2009: https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1306857&cid=2873632...

  In the USA Copyright lengths are very simple. Anything
  older than Mickey Mouse is public domain and everything
  else is still copyrighted.

Edit: Typo--fixed the year.

Thank you for sharing this. I legitimately hope that something will change, and I won't have to share your comment in 2035.

Honestly, I wish they'd just issue a special exception for Disney instead of screwing up the entire system because they don't want to appear nakedly corrupt.

My idea for Disney-appeasement without special exemptions: Let copyrights be extended for 14 years at a time, indefinitely, with the requirement of registration and a token filing fee. Anyone who cares can keep their copyright for as long as they want, if they just care enough to fill out a 1 page form. Anyone who doesn't care that much (or no heirs, or whatever), the copyright expires. Bonus side effect: for everything still in copyright, there is a database you can look up current contact info for licensing.

Pretty sure that would violate the Equal Protection Clause.

Let creators enjoy the full benefits of copyright by returning the ownership back to creator after 10 years.

After a decade, it is expected that creators will be able to command bigger cut as compensation for popular works and thus, inspire more creators to publicly deliver works due to the expectation of more appropriate and fair level of compensation from interested distributors. Otherwise, creators are discouraged from independent creation of works if it's believed that they will suffer perpetual loss of copyright ownership in exchange for a minuscule payment.

Similar scheme exists in Europe: http://evolver.fm/2012/02/29/why-mastered-for-itunes-wont-de...

As it stands, distributors can say "well, sell us the copyright for a dollar and we might give you a cut. No, not a licence, the copyright! At least you'll get a lot of exposure? Hehehe"

The current scheme has a lot of economic encouragement for indy creators to aim for live music, book signings, etc. Where creators need can be present and needed.

Hmm... Not sure what to think about this.

The real question is: What role should publishers/distributors have, and be allowed to have?

From a writer's standpoint, I think it was common not to grant the publisher a perpetual license. The publisher would offer the author an advance and get exclusivity. If the book made enough money to cover that advance, the copyright would revert to the author (publisher may still have license to keep publishing, but not exclusivity).

In today's world, people can and do make big money self publishing on Amazon, so the hold publishers had has reduced. The argument makes less sense now than 20 years ago.

If you want to argue that self publishing is still a crap shoot compared to traditional publishers, then we have to recognize the great value publishers can bring to the author, and discuss why government intervention (i.e. law) is necessary in this case.

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

(sigh)

What is expected to happen with US law in 2019 - another Disney extension?

I wouldn't be surprised. I am kind of surprised that we haven't heard rumbling already but with all the moves Disney has made maybe they are afraid of drawing too much attention to themselves and will wait.

I still don't understand why Disney has historically been so paranoid of Steamboat Willie entering the public domain anyway - Isn't Mickey protected well enough by trademark (which is perpetual so long as it's defended) that copyright on a 1928 cartoon is no longer instrumental in maintaining the proprietary protection of the character?

Copyright is as much (if not more) about power and control as is is about anything else. It's one more hammer in their toolset to whack others on the head with.

Don't forget that Disney really knows the power of public domain. Could you imagine if "Snow White" was allowed to enter the public domain? Anyone would be able to retell that story to their children without worrying about performing a copyrighted work in public without a licence!

Well they can do that anyway. Snow white is a fairy tale that's existed for hundreds of years. What's copyrighted specifically is the disney version of it.

Just a reminder: the Constitution requires that copyrights be of a "limited times".

If we keep pushing the year back in perpetuity, we should be honest about the fact that we're violating the Constitution.

Well thanks to the generosity of the OTO basically all of Crowley's public works have been available for 20 years now. They basically allow people to share his works because sharing has encouraged more sales of his physical books which they earn income from producing.

Mere sharing is quite different from the ability to produce derivative works. Crowley works entering the public domain should be a boon for his accessibility as fanfic anthologies become publishable.

I live in Italy. Can I get (legally) the works of Willa Cather and G. H. Hardy (the mathematician)? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_in_public_domain they enter the public domain in 2018 as well.

How exactly does CHE GUEVARA not make it into the picture list?

The most famous picture of him is presumably not out of copyright...

Now that Disney absorbed 20th Century Fox, is there a way to know what movies' copyright are controlled by them ?

Hoping that Canada sticks with 50.

shower thought: now that Disney owns Star Wars, it will never be public domain

(I often drop this into PD threads so sorry if you’ve seen this before, but) the Standard Ebooks project[1] that I contribute to takes PD texts, updates them with better markup and a high quality house style, adds PD cover artwork, then releases them again back into the public domain. Although I’m outside the US the project is US-based, so I’d love to see a yearly update interval again there for both texts to produce and sources of cover art.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/

Thank you for the link, and thank you for your effort! I will certainly look into this!

No thanks needed: it’s fun, reuses my front-end skills, teaches me Python (I’ve been helping out with the build system as well), and gets me reading a bunch of books I’ve not touched before. The best sort of hobby :)

I first stumbled on your project when I was stuck in a hospital, and I want to say that it was a great diversion, and the releases I read were all very high quality (on Moon+ Reader for Android). So really, thank you.

Well, if no thanks then, I am glad you have this hobby and I am glad you posted this, at a very timely moment of the year, which coincides with me needing to burn some extra vacation days (because nothing is created, nothing is lost, except accrued vacation days). Cheers!

Thanks for your project, I've downloaded some ebooks and it was great to read them. I would just like to let you that, at least on my ereader (sony prs t1), the book covers do not show at all. I looked at the epub source and I think I saw some svg in the cover, it was probably that.. It's an old ereader..

Maybe you could file a bug at https://github.com/standardebooks/tools ? Alternatively, I had a similar problem with my Kobo and Calibre, which was messing with the file in some way even though I had all conversion options disabled. I just use Finder to copy them over now.

Done, thanks!

https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/issues/63

Thanks for this project! If not for this, I probably wouldn't have read The Communist Manifesto.

I wonder, if the translation of a book is in the US public domain, does that imply that the original is also in the US public domain? I'm curious because as a native French speaker, I would love to see the original French books there too.

I wonder why the "Through the Looking Glass" does not have the Tenniel art. It's in the public domain.

There was some discussion about this: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/standardebooks/WTEIRmRmmDs...

tl;dr: it was felt that for the quality of available scans it wasn’t worth including them. That’s not to say they couldn’t be added in a later edition though were better quality scans to become available.

I’m currently working on Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, for which the images are essential. Planning to try and trace and hand-amend the images into high quality SVG as part of the production process.

I wonder if SVG would kill the naive look of "Flatland's" art. Or perhaps, maybe more likely, the author would have preferred mathematically precise art. Good luck.

I’ll start with vectorising the scans and go from there, rather than recreating them. You’re right, that wouldn’t fit at all.

Is there a list of all the artists whose works won't but should, thanks to Disney, corrupt politicians, et al?

Yes, the Center for Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School publishes exactly such a list every year.

Here's the one for 2017:

https://law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2017/pre-1976/

and since this seems to be down, here's a mirror:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170201214420/https://law.duke....

I find this list to be way more interesting. Thanks!

Once/if Dr. Seuss enters public domain you're going to see that everywhere. The entire world will turn into a Seuss wonderland. Or at least I can dream it will.

Nothing created after Mickey Mouse will ever enter the public domain in the United States.

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