Party Like It's 1925 on Public Domain Day | Hacker News Reader

Party Like It's 1925 on Public Domain Day

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160 pointsapollinaire39 comments

The Great Gatsby is up for free on Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/f-scott-fitzgerald/the-gre...

There's also the great 1925 WWI novel by Ford Madox Ford called No More Parades: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ford-madox-ford/no-more-pa...

(The 3rd part of the series becomes US-PD in 2022.)

I figured y'all would post it right away, and I linked to the standard ebook from my web-book page at http://great-gatsby.com Big fan of your group's work!

Wikisource got both the 1925 and 1953 reprint online and proofread against the scans within 8 days. EPUBs and MOBIs available too!

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby

I put The Great Gatsby on the only place that matters, npm (obviously), the other day:

1. https://npmjs.com/package/great-gatsby

2. https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/1345098048184094720

So give it a few weeks and you’ll have multiple copies on your machine from unrelated software installs.

I made http://www.great-gatsby.com last week as a web-book project to practice responsive design.

Since ebooks are generally superior with bookmarks and more features, I tried to compensate by at least by making the chapter navigation, text sizes, and line spacing at multiple screen sizes enjoyable. I used Tailwind CSS and Alpine JS for static pages which became a little wonky at times, but I'm okay with it.

So does Steamboat Willie enter the public domain in 3 years?

I was hoping that would come up! No, probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#S...

I think this source, linked from that wikipedia page, is actually more directly enlightening: http://copyright.nova.edu/mickey-public-domain/

Don't get too excited. No one really wants to watch Steamboat Willie, and if you want to use a Mickey Mouse character, it will need to look like Mickey circa 1928.

Mickey Mouse is basically the Kardashians of cartoons. No one's really sure why he's famous any more, and he never really did anything that interesting do begin with.

A little tangential, but are there any ongoing efforts to reduce the incredibly long term of copyright that have a shot in hell of success? I’m pleased that the periodic re-extensions that defined my youth have stopped, but would be saddened of that we’re the end of the story.

Usually it takes a Big Visible Event to nudge something like that into happening, and I can’t picture what that’d be. Failure of imagination, perhaps.

I'm not sure if there's an effort to shorten copyright (unfortunately), but the fact that things are starting to enter the public domain again is already a big win for culture.

I imagine companies like Disney would lobby pretty hard against shortening copyright. A possible middle ground would be to return to the regime where copyright had to be registered and renewed regularly, with a cost to doing so.

The cost should be exponential. First 20 years free. Ten years more costs $10,000. Another ten $20,000. Etc.

Under this model, it would cost about $2.5M to maintain a copyright for a full century. If a work still remains valuable, you’re looking at spending millions annually on renewals, with the cost doubling every decade. It’s an incentive to innovate rather than collect royalties on the old stuff forever.

I’ve seen this and similarly structured ideas floated since the Slashdot days, and they resonate with me—but there’s never a corresponding path to actually get buy-in from legislators. Feels similar to, but distinct from, a tragedy of the commons situation—the commons would benefit from supporting something like this, but there’s no organizing to make it happen and insufficient individual incentive to do it on behalf of the general public.

Beyond the tragedy of the commons w/r/t the general public, the other problem (or maybe a specific aspect of the same problem) is that the commercial beneficiaries of shorter copyright are companies and projects that don't exist yet. It's hard for hypothetical future businesses to lobby against existing current businesses.

This scheme would seem to be of most benefit to the rich and successful, or bigger companies, while smaller companies or mid-level authors would be screwed over. especially ones who had a hit late in their career and could stand to profit off of their earlier works but didn't waste the money to keep them in copyright, not having had the money to waste.

I agree, though this could probably be prevented by ensuring one can renew copyright freely up until their death or at least well into their life. If a company is capitalizing on works that were made 30 years after an author's death, I think it would be reasonable for it to cost a pretty penny.

Such a system only benefits the exact people and companies which we don't want abusing the copyright system. Why would Disney bother paying their lawyers millions of dollars to lobby for another extension when they can pay a small (comparative to royalties they receive) fee to automatically have it extended?

Agreed, even if you add two 0’s to that number, it would still benefit Disney (et al), and skew the system negatively for smaller content creators.

Small content creators benefit almost nothing from content >20 years old anyway, rare exceptions notwithstanding. Having a real tax on the most valuable IP would be a net benefit.

You could set it up so the fee funds small grants for artists.

Unsure why this is being downvoted, perhaps because it sounds like socialism. But grants for artists or something like UBI are actually great.

Disney would benefit, but if their cost doubles each year, would it be worth it? Given the formula:

    / 0              (n < 20)
    \ 10000*2^(n-20) (n >= 20)

When 'n' reaches 30 (years) you’re already looking at ~$10 million dollars. A number like that looks like it benefits the big players, but what about 40 years? That’s ~$10.5 billion for one year. Disney’s going to have to think twice about if it’s worth it to keep paying. Add another 5 years, and now they’d be paying a third of a trillion dollars for one year. I don’t think they’d even reach that point before dropping it.

The big problem with copyright is that some things don’t make sense to have copyrighted for 20 years, but some do (depending on who you ask, this may not be true). This becomes a problem when multi-billion dollar corporations own the copyright to something. That scale of money wasn’t a thing in the late 1700s when copyright was written into the Constitution.

> This becomes a problem when multi-billion dollar corporations own the copyright to something. That scale of money wasn’t a thing in the late 1700s when copyright was written into the Constitution.

Don't be confused by the numbers; that scale of money was most definitely a thing in the 1700s. Whether you measure it in 2020 USD or bolts of cloth isn't really relevant.

If you're a small content maker but financially rely on works you've created more than 20 years ago, you're doing something wrong. Try creating something new.

The difference is that the renewal fee is a real tax on IP, whereas Disney paying lawyers mostly benefits lawyers.

I don’t mind if Disney still owns “Snow White” a century from now, if they’re paying a $100M tax to do so.

Such a fee on each copyrighted work is a huge burden even for a large corporation. They’d choose carefully what they want to retain.

Disney doesn't own Snow White, it's a public domain story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White

I don't care if Disney still owns their rendition of Snow White 100 years from now, so long as they're paying 100m a year for the privilege.

So some poor independent author who make a few thousand a year from selling a self-published book should lose his copyright after ten years if he can't cough up $10,000? That sounds downright evil and completely against the original spirit of copyright law.

Why do you think only people with the big bucks should enjoy copyright protection? Who are you trying to benefit here?

Honesty I think the world as whole would be better off as a whole. A handful of small authors not receiving royalties after two decades is a small price to pay for a world of Mickey Mouse fan fiction.

Let people declare value of their copyrighted material. They then must pay x% of it's value each year as tax for the gov protecting it. Anyone is allowed to bid on the ip and if they give a higher price, the author is allowed to raise their assessment or sell it.

Nice system that taxes huge ip and allows small authors to keep their stuff(or cash out).

Underrated proposal.

I suppose a lot of countries wouldn't even consider it, because they don't want to be kicked out of trade agreements which have imposed the life + 50 or 70 year system.

> things are starting to enter the public domain again is already a big win for culture.

Is it? It's interesting for a handful or iconic works, and it'd be interesting if copyright terms were significantly shorter, but right now, as a culture, we've mostly lost interest in things entering the public domain. We still got a Great Gatsby movie, but it was already a $2 paperback, and I assume people aren't that eager to publish fan fiction for it.

> I imagine companies like Disney would lobby pretty hard against shortening copyright.

That, and in a world with shortening copyright, they wouldn't have pushed so hard on promoting Mickey Mouse, and with Star Wars coming up on 50 years old, maybe they wouldn't have invested in the Star Wars universe when randos could make their own movies and theme park lands.

Some of this IP is more recognized and loved because of long copyright terms.

Legal reforms are unlikely, but there have been some voluntary efforts.

Creative Commons used to have a "Founders' Copyright" [0] program that emulates the original U.S Copyright system. You enter a contract and delegate your copyright to CC, CC adds your work to a maintained list. After 14 years (or 28 years if renewed), CC grants permissions to allow unrestricted uses of your work by others. Tim O'Reilly was a prominent supporter, a few O'Reilly books were supposed to be published under this program [1]. Unfortunately, this program is no longer active. I'm not sure why, but I guess it was due to maintenance cost.

The new experimental Copyleft Next License [2] also includes a Sunset Clause. It's a strong copyleft license, but 20 years after the initial publication of a work, the copyleft requirements no longer apply, it automatically degenerates to a MIT-style license. I like the idea - If nobody cares about a long-obsolete version of a copylefted program, you may as well to maximize its remaining value by allowing unlimited uses (as long as new code is still being written, the copyleft of the current version remains in effect). Perhaps not good for all programs, but suitable for many.

AFAIK, a general license suitable for all works doesn't exist yet. But it should be easy to write one, for example...

> Copyright (C) 2021 segfaultbuserr. All rights reserved. An irrevocable License is granted hereby: 20 years after the initial publication of this Work, you may reuse the Work in accordance to the conditions of CC-0 in Appendix. Meanwhile, you may not use, distribute or modify the Work without the explicit permission from the author.

> Appendix: [CC-0 text]

The proprietary license used before expiration can also be replaced with any other licenses.

[0] https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Founders_Copyright

[1] It's also unclear whether anything has ever been actually published under Founders' Copyright by O'Reilly. The website says, "we're applying to hundreds of out-of-print and current titles, pending author approval." But did any author approve it?

[2] https://github.com/copyleft-next/copyleft-next

The o’reilly GNU make book was released under the GNU free doc license.

How does it work now with copyleft licenses? If I gpl my code, does that no longer apply after the same number of years as a copyrighted work? How does the law handle a continually evolving code base?

The copyright would expire as for any other work, but it's of hypothetical interest given the length of copyright terms. Once the copyright expires, anybody could use the code however they liked, without bothering with GPL requirements.

> How does it work now with copyleft licenses? If I gpl my code, does that no longer apply after the same number of years as a copyrighted work?

Copyleft is implemented using the copyright system, so it's the same as any other copyrighted works: lifetime + 70 years, so 100+ years. It's practically forever for computer programs - computers in our current forms won't even exist at the point of copyright expiration. In my opinion, regardless of how a copyrighted work is licensed (copyleft or proprietary), it's counterproductive and harmful to innovation. I consider that ~20 years is a more suitable duration.

The situation is absurd that the BIOS of the original IBM PC, or Commodore 64's ROM, and all other computer software from a similar era are still copyrighted, it can be a serious problem in the retrocomputing scene since redistributing them is illegal. Even for a copylefted project I believe it's harmful: if today we cannot make GPLv2 be compatible with GPLv3 or GFDL, we certainly cannot make it to be compatible with GPLv8 in the future. For example, Linux kernel contains a large number of algorithm and data structure implementations that are efficient and clean, but they often cannot be used even by GPL'd projects because Linux is GPLv2-only, what a pity. Also, the point of copyleft is to prevent re-privatization. But if my program will become obsolete to the point where it's too worthless for anyone to re-privatize, I'd be happy to let others to copy some still-useful code snippets like a linked-list implementation under a permissive license.

> How does the law handle a continually evolving code base?

Copyright of the code in old versions will expire, copyright of the code in new versions remain in effect, thus, the ongoing project as a whole remains copyrighted.

Thought experiment: Foo v1.0's copyright has expired, you pick up the project and use the public domain code as the basis to develop Foo v2.0 and release it under GPL. Now, if you inspect the project line-by-line, the existing lines are still under the public domain, but your new lines are GPL'd. As a result, Foo v2.0 as a whole, is a GPL'd project. Any derivative works and forks based on Foo v2.0 are GPL'd as well. But others are free to use code that already exists in Foo v1.0. The situation is similar to a change of license by the copyright owner. Old version = old license. New version = new license.

Yes. Technologies that make copyright infringement easy and consequence-free effectively reduce the duration of copyright terms to almost nothing whether the copyright industry wants it or not.

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