2018 Is the Last Year of America's Public Domain Drought
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If you're a company like Disney, renewing certain properties should really make you think after it starts to cut into the balance sheet. Most works wouldn't generate enough revenue to justify the renewal and would fall into the public domain. Disney wouldn't be holding thousands of unrelated works hostage.
So, While your idea ensures public domain for many works I fear it extends the biggest players their perpetual rights because they can afford it as a result of their scale.
They'll lose some initial money of course, if everyone could produce Mickey Mouse shirts, but Disney et. al. would have to come up with new tricks, new icons and try to make new things instead of the constant barrage of rehashed garbage media we get today.
I'm not in favor of long copyrights, but I think in the case there would be a real cultural loss if there was unfettered access to this particular icon. Does that justify full control by Disney at this late stage? Probably not, but some middle ground with increasing costs (maybe an increasing percentage of profit from that brand?) might be worth trying.
The whole system is pretty messed up at this point, so why not test out some interesting ideas? As a side benefit, maybe Disney and others like them won't fight it quite so hard, as it would be costly but not the existential threat to their core brand they see come up every couple evades.
As a counter argument look at Snow White. That story is in the public domain. I think you’d be hard pressed to make a case that that has harmed society.
Regardless Disney will continue to have a trademark on the Mouse. So, it will continue to be a cultural icon for the company. We’ll just also have steamboat Willie generics in the marketplace as well.
Look: sight unseen, having no prior knowledge, I would put money down that I could find a thousand unique images of Mickey Mouse created in 2017 or earlier.
That's just how the internet works, and copyright doesn't hold much sway on that front.
this is full of hypothetical, while we exactly know what would happen because we have concrete case studies to work from, like the old star wars expanded universe.
That ship has sailed already (actually, Magica de Spell is kind of sexy...), so I don't think it's a valid argument :)
The greater damage from blanket copyright extension is the long tail of works that no one would pay to keep copyright on, but are still protected with the same inflexible term as an ongoing piece of IP like Mickey.
The problem is still with the concentration of the media. There is no price you can put that Disney cannot bulk pay for everything they own that wouldn't be destroying any competition from the little copyright holders. So in effect it could decrease competition with the only upside of increasing the government income.
Global GDP before the 50 year mark.
After 30 years if it's not generating $1B a year you let it go. That would make most creations pretty cheap to keep for the first 15 years, corporation level expensive from 15 years to 25 years and global phenomenon level only after 30 years.
If that sounds too aggressive maybe double it only every 2 years.
They should trademark them, instead of relying on copyright.
As you say it might even be unclear who to talk to. How would I protect my self from liability? I mean we’ve had free software licenses of various kinds for quite a few years now, and lawyers are still uneasy about the whole thing.
These rules are being abused to stifle innovation and competition, simple as that. I don't have any problem in principle of some exponential scale, but it just seems like a solution for a non-problem.
Let's take a few steps in the right direction and see what happens?
Note that the parent comment says "why should we allow entities to monopolize IP _long after the creators are dead". Reducing copyright length to a more sane level would prevent exactly this: How on earth is arresting and mildly reversing the ceaseless march of extended copyright terms "swinging to the opposite extreme?"
It is extreme in the sense that current copyright extremely favours major companies. Going the opposite way extremely disfavours major companies with IP that spans centuries.
You have to find a compromise so that both companies and everyone else is happy with.
The compromise is simple. Allow copyright extensions indefinitively on an individual basis in exchange for a fee. If mickeymouse is profitable to disney then let them have it. They will get it at any cost anyway and destroy a lot of things in the process. Sacrificing perpetually profitable IP is a small cost in exchange for all the works that are no longer profitable which is probably more than 99% of all works.
There's no chance Disney will be happy with any solution which involves losing any level of control over any copyright they currently own (or will own in the future).
Although they would, I'm sure, be happy for other people to have to pay to maintain their copyright, making it easier to plagiarise poorer creators.
It also presents another problem: one of the objectives of copyright is to reward innovation. If you created something new, it makes sense to let you profit from it for a time. But if you can profit from it forever, you have no reason to innovate more.
Not innovating more goes against one of the objectives of copyright. It's also bad for the economy, for the people, for everyone. We need innovation.
Perpetuating private control over what was already promised to be in the public domain is the extreme.
Anything taken out of former copyright limits probably already is in the public domain even in spite of the legislation without compensation to those who have standing, which just happens to be the American people. Legal has never pursued that avenue. Pity.
As for your username, wow.
the copyright needs to be an entity by itself and not tied to the author.
it needs shortening but any proposal with 'original creator' center and foremost is basically ignoring the reality of modern content production
There's a handful of ways to do it if you are not going to center copyright terms around the life of the original creator, some of which I think are better than others but I'll try to leave most of my opinion out of this.
1. You can center it around first publication. In this scenario you actually do not automatically retain copyrights unless you actually publish, and then you would likely need to define in detail what publication is.
Is sharing in an email message or WhatsApp "publication"? I would argue not, but the law would need to reflect this. Again without spinning this discussion off into a tangent, there's probably multiple ways you could write that into the law, but some language like "made available to the public for free or for a fee" etc. or whatever the American legalese equivalent of that sentence would be. IANAL
2. You could center it around the registration date with the Library of Congress. Again, in this scenario you do not actually automatically retain copyright, and while it massively simplifies the letter of the law, it shifts more of the burden to the Library of Congress to retain records. In this scenario, you would file a registration with a full copy of the work or specifications or some other means of defining it in the case of things like statues. Probably the main advantage of this is that the Library of Congress then has a full copy of the text, source code, blueprints, etc. that it can then automatically publish itself upon the copyright's expiration.
Anything you do though, I would do it for a fixed term, say, just to pick a random number out of the air, 50 years and no more. No renewals, just one copyright term and that is it. You can choose to relinquish it to the public domain before that time has come to pass but you could not extend it.
A compromise would be to meet someone in the middle, say like on the original term of Copyright, 14 years plus a single 14 Year extension to the Original Creator if they are alive
The problem is that the Constitution specifies "exclusive rights for a limited time", which the supreme court appears to have interpreted as _any finite timespan_ [1].
Of course, that only establishes an upper bound. congress is free to introduce legislation to weaken current protections.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft#Supreme_Cou...
BTW, I am absolutely not advocating that current definition of intellectual properties is correct or even fair. I am just saying that assuming if this definition was ideal, wouldn't above make sense?
It really is not.
What makes you believe that it is?
> When you die, you have right to transfer these properties to your designated heir.
A great many people who don't get to inherit their wealth have been questioning this mantra for centuries, probably longer (albeit more cautiously).
When this is an easy and _legal_ thing to do (perhaps a link from the author of that comment to YouTube). I’ll say we’re starting to see a working copyright law.
I’m not sure a perpetual renewal helps with that.
OTOH another issue a new law should address is how to make sure originals of a work are preserved for the public at all. Original recordings of music albums f.ex.
So perhaps a required registration, bundled with a way to save an original work could be a good thing. It would be like the coyleft licenses that require the work in its “preferred” from to be made available.
I'm in favor of making the fee increase exponential though, just to make sure the things do eventually end up in the public domain. Say the first 20 years are free. Next 10 years are some nominal fee, maybe a couple of hundred bucks, but then you have to renew every 10 years and the fee increases one order of magnitude each time. Would Disney be willing to pay 20 billion dollars to keep Star Wars out of the public domain in 2077? Of course a billion dollars might be pocket change by then, who knows?
For the vast majority of other commercially successful works, the original 20 years would probably be a very reasonable cutoff: few would generate seriously more than $1M in revenue to justify the copyright extension.
Same should apply to patents.
It's also a "big government" idea, but having a central database for copywritten works would be a boon IMHO. It could have the year of creation, author, and a price with a contact/payment system for using the work instead of the huge hodgepodge we have now. I don't think anybody would disagree that finding the actual rights holders and negotiating licenses is anything but a nightmare on older works. It could also keep a copy of the original work for release when the copyright expires, the same way the Library of Congress keeps a copy of every book. Storage requirements would be high, but they could be paid through the fees people pay to keep their stuff in copyright. This would also mean a return to explicitly registering for copyright on a work, but IMHO that's a good thing. If you don't care enough to register why should the government care enough to protect your work? Registration should be dead simple, upload a copy/good description of the work to your copyright account and bam, you're registered. The only requirement on the upload is that the format must not be locked or proprietary, there must be an open/free viewer available.
Downside of this system is that it's massive. Just absolutely enormous. Makes healthcare.gov look like a Geocities page. Huge number of man hours to maintain it every year. It ends up being the cultural database of the US very quickly.
A central database of copyrighted works would be great for preserving it. A lot of copyrighted work is usually published anyway (else you use an NDA, not copyright).
Explicit registration, as long as it's indeed just registration, might have some merit, too. But I wonder how would it work for evolving copyrighted works, especially code. E.g. GPL leans heavily on copyright. How often should a GPL'd codebase be re-submitted to registration? I suppose explicit registration could be but an optional extra safety measure.
The point about evolving works is a good one. It's kind of silly to have someone register a copyright on a blank page because they plan to add to it every week for a year. I'm also not sure how to handle a case like "We registered Photoshop in 1987, should the copyright expire in 2007 even though the 2007 version is completely different from the 1987 version? But can an artist add 1 microscopic dot to his painting every year and extend the copyright indefinitely for free?" This is where the rubber meets the road with IP law.
I do kind of like the idea of very old versions of software entering the public domain even though the current version is still under copyright.
If you want to go nuts with this, you could have a link from the big copyright database to Github or any similar repo and have a rolling copyright on the release. Code older than commit X is now public domain... I'd be wary of depending on external sources though, the Internet loses stuff all of the time and through negligence or vindictiveness the external sources would be lost. It's probably too much to ask the government to run govhub.
If you are interested in general stuff on copyright, you might want to try Cory Doctorow's books [1] which talk about information and copyright or the articles he published on it at Boing Boing [2]
Personally, I'm old-fashioned and get my short-story fix via traditional SF magazines like Interzone (UK) and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (USA).
If it's hard SF you're looking for, one site that might be worth a look is Compelling Science Fiction [1]. Here's a HN post about it some time ago [2].
P.S. Okay, I'll recommend looking at Locus [3], which covers the SF world. You might be able to get some good recommendations of current SF stuff from there.
P.P.S. This is self-advertistment, but I maintain a Goodreads list of books I've read and would like to read [4]. It's mostly on SF and Science / Nature stuff, but if you are interested in that, you may find some interesting stuff on it.
[1] http://compellingsciencefiction.com/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13106748
[4] https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5876605-kam-yung-soh
However, Disney also has trademarks on Mickey Mouse, etc., so using Mickey’s likeness in commercial ways would still be a legal minefield.
We really have no chance on this issue, the interests in seeing works enter public domain simply aren't commercial enough to supply the requisite lobbying dollars.
Edit: role -> rule
http://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2012/02/guerra-pujol-o...
FDR won four presidential elections and scared the right so badly that they got a constitutional amendment to limit future "damage" to two terms.
The only way to run a modern political campaign is with lots of cash, so the cash must be procured somehow. Your two options are to level the playing field with public funding of campaigns (unlikely to happen in the wake of Citizen's United) or for a candidate to raise small dollar donations. The Sanders campaign proved that the latter is possible.
And if you find one, well... one person can't do much in politics.
Both of these arguments were put before the Supreme Court in 2003 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft), and the argument lost 7-2. Somewhat unusually, the it was not a party-line decision.
Can the Supreme Court be lobbied to act in favor of the uber-rich copyright holders? Are they disclosing their conflicts of interest?
http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_le...
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There were two points in this argument when I should have seen where the court was going. The first was a question by Kennedy, who observed,
"Well, I suppose implicit in the argument that the '76 act, too, should have been declared void, and that we might leave it alone because of the disruption, is that for all these years the act has impeded progress in science and the useful arts. I just don't see any empirical evidence for that."
Here follows my clear mistake. Like a professor correcting a student, I answered,
"Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all. Nothing in our copyright clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion about impeding progress. Our only argument is, this is a structural limit necessary to assure that what would be an effectively perpetual term not be permitted under the copyright laws."
That was a correct answer, but it wasn't the right answer. The right answer was to say that there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of briefs had been written about it. Kennedy wanted to hear it. And here was where Don Ayer's advice should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer was a swing and a miss.
Everyone keep saying about bribes, but yet nothing is being done.
This is like everyone would know Johny from 2B raped and murdered Marry from 7C, but yet noone is going to do anything about it.
Take a politician down, and a new one takes its place.
If you protest, they put the police to attack protesters. If people get together to fund a campaign to change things, big corporations get 10000x more money on a bigger campaign.
What do you suggest people do?
2. Use the proceeds to bribe politicians to pass legislation to extend the copyright period
3. GOTO 1
Or, if you published something today as a work for hire, it'd be covered until 2103. Which isn't quite 2108, but surely Disney and their congresscritters will get you that extra five years at some point before it goes into the public domain.
The first time was with the Copyright Act of 1976. That was a major rewrite of US copyright law (probably the most extensive rewrite ever) whose main purpose was to bring US copyright law more in line with that of the rest of the world in preparation for the US joining the Berne Convention.
That included making copyright terms in the US match the terms from most of the rest of the world (life + 50 for works of individual authors, publication + 75 years for works for hire).
Despite the lazy "they bribed politicians" theories others have offered, I've not been able to find any information on whether Disney spent any money lobbying for this. They were almost certainly in favor of it, but it had such widespread support that I doubt they would have needed to.
The other extension of Disney copyright terms was in the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which they certainly did lobby for.
Here's how it's likely to happen. Somebody will float a trial balloon to extend copyright. We will try to oppose it. Because it's an election year, our opposition will have some leverage - the threat of immediate retaliation on those who don't vote the way we want. If our opposition is loud enough, the bill will stall...
... until after the election. Then it will pass, despite the howls of outrage, because then we'd have to remember who betrayed us for two years before we can do anything about it, and they suspect that our memories aren't that long. (And if our memories are that long, we'll have two years of other issues to dilute our outrage on this one.)
I hope I'm too cynical.
Society as a whole benefits greatly from a rich public domain. The starting point in IP law is that there are no rights in ideas. Then from that starting point, we start to carve out exceptions that make sense from a market perspective.
We grant trademarks, because the market benefits from being able to identify the source of a thing.
We grant patents and copyright protection, because they incent innovation, and innovation is good for the market.
The protections that copyright law affords have more than rewarded Walt Disney for his innovations. The Constitution specifically requires that copyright protection be limited in term. In my mind, the time has come for Mickey to drop into the public domain.
So... same side?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tom_Bell%27s_graph_showin...
> Films are literally disintegrating because preservationists can’t legally digitize them
This is fair use. archive.org works on legality of such activity.
For a real-life example posted here recently, a scholar on Shel Silverstein's work was forbidden by his estate to quote anything of his. [0]
> it forbade me not only from reproducing images for this one article, but from ever reproducing any of Silverstein’s work—song lyrics, poems, images, whatever—in any context. Ever.
This is what he had to say on how fair use played into the situation:
> You may have heard of something called “fair use.” One would think fair use was custom built to protect scholars and artists who want or need to reproduce excerpts from copyrighted work in the service of education or art or scholarship—and one would be right. But whether we’re protected or not, most presses prefer to play it safe and make scholars request permission.
These institutions that preserve films also have donors and institutions they are beholden to for funding. Claiming fair use won't protect you from a massive and costly court case from a Hollywood juggernaut's top lawyers. Film studios especially have an incentive to litigate against work like this because a lot of their back catalog has become relevant and profitable to re-release since people have gotten into classic films and the associated works.
[0]: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/10/my_shel_sil...
If Disney can hold a trademark on Mickey Mouse, all the old movies could enter the public domain but you still wouldn’t have a right to make your own Mickey Mouse movies or t-shirts.
So it seems what they are really trying to protect is Fantasia or whatever. Specific movies. Not iconic characters.
In a somewhat relevant WTO dispute between US and China,
"The International Intellectual Property Alliance, a coalition of U.S. entertainment and software industry groups, has claimed piracy in China costs them more than $3.7 billion in lost sales." [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-usa-wto/china-u-s-t...
I can claim piracy in China costs me 18 billion dollars.
It’s a bit of a legal gray area. I don’t think anyone has settled the question about whether trademarking characters runs afoul of the constitutional prohibition on perpetual copyright.
Based on how much money Disney has put into absorbing every trademarked franchise ever (Marvel, Star Wars, etc.), it seems like they’re willing to bet on those trademarks being enforceable.
A perverse effect (I think) of trademarks is that the owner of a trademark has to sue to protect it from infringement: otherwise, it becomes a common mark, not a trademark, and is usable by anybody.
- "“Sherlock Holmes” Is Now Officially Off Copyright and Open for Business" [ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sherlock-holmes-no... ]
Because the thing it is protecting is a luxury. It is unnecessary. No one will die if Mickey Mouse remains copyrighted in perpetuity, and the progress of humanity won't be stunned because you can't make youtube clips out of Winnie the Pooh.
You can just stop buying Disney merchandise if you don't like them. There is more public domain art than you can consume in a hundred years. Disney will stop lobing for copyright extensions once it no longer profitable.
Oh, and stop using Facebook while you are at it.
We should just get rid of the public domain exception and recognise intellectual property as normal everyday property, not something that can magically becomes ownerless one day. Communism has been tried and it doesn't work. Let's not repeat the mistakes of the past.
On the other hand, I do hear the plight of preservationists &c. There should be a lot more rights granted to people to use copies of other people's property. For starters, all non-commercial use should be allowed, so that old movies could be digitised and stored in better formats. After all, the studio doesn't own the tape or the DVD that contains the movie, it owns the movie itself and the type of media it's stored on shouldn't matter. This probably would also mean that noncommercial free peer-to-peer filesharing would also be legal, but honestly, if you can't compete with torrent sites, which blast thirty porn popups and show you a dozen false download links, your business probably deserves to die.
It wouldn't be like that.
The fact that companies can own IDEAS don't sound bonkers to you? We should begin the conversation at that, not at the fact that the owning of ideas expires after some time.
> It would be like if you woke up one day to see a family of squatters living in your house
It's definitely nothing like that. A proper analogy would be saying you woke up one day to see someone else has the permission to copy (and sell copies of) your house. While you might not like it, it doesn't take away things you already have.