Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

It sucks that the copyright period in the US is so ridiculously long, but it still makes me happy to see stuff finally entering the public domain again.

I don't care much about Betty Boop and I don't really care about Pluto and Mickey all that much, but I'm very excited for The Maltese Falcon's novel being available, since I think that that one could actually be adapted into something pretty modern.

Also, All Quiet on the Western Front is very arguably one of the very best movies ever made, and certainly one of the very best of the 30's if nothing else, so I am very much looking forward to fan restorations.

View on HN

The copyright period is long? If you are Disney, you can get it even longer because the U.S. Congress will do it for you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Yup, any time a friend gets all misty-eyed about Disney, remind them that Disney is the main driver behind absurdly, abusively long copyright.

No they aren't.

This is an internet myth pushed by certain sci-fi writers doing incompetent research.

Disney were certainly in favour of the US's most recent copyright extension, but the main driver of it was the need for the US to move to a similar period to the EU for international treaty reasons.

The EU had moved to Life+70 years as a model because it unified to the longest period in the block when it unified the copyright period across the entire EU, under the logic that no copyright owner should have their term reduced as a result.

The longest period in Europe was Germany, and Germany's long copyright period was the result of lobbying from local German publishers, nothing to do with American companies.

It's really a bit of US exceptionalism to think Disney had much to do with it.

The parity excuse is always trotted out, but notice that nobody actually does parity. That US law doesn't deliver the same thing as the existing EU law, it just increases all the US limits with "parity" offered as justification.

That's on purpose to allow the same parties (if not called out by the public) to run to the EU to demand more "parity" increasing the EU limits too. Back and forth forever.

Regardless of whose fault it is, I think copyrights are too long. I think they were considerably more appropriate before the copyright extension act.

I'm not sure that this is correct. Spain used to be life+80 (a copyright term that dates back to 1879) and this got reduced to life+70 (but only for authors who die on or after late 1987, so this is a long way from affecting PD status) with EU-wide rules.

the exact details of EU copyright rules and lengths are probably difficult to work out, at least as difficult as saying what the laws are regarding what constitutes a felony in the United States, since that really depends on what state you're in.

But I would have to say that yes, it is mainly the EU that drives longer copyright, because EU copyright is not based on a model of doing things to help society but because there is a moral right of ownership that is possessed by the creator of a work. This of course explains why often something is out of copyright in the U.S but still under copyright in the EU but I don't think I have ever heard of the reverse applying (I'm sure HN can come up with an edge case though)

The situation with public domain in part because most US government works are public domain and PD isn’t even possible in some European countries—related to moral rights.

Yet they didn’t get copyright extended again in the 27ish years after, and Mickey is in the public domain (well steamboat willy).

I don't care much about Betty Boop either, and I do care, like you, about The Maltese Falcon - but mostly I think that a version of The Maltese Falcon starring Betty Boop is definitely something I'd like to see!

I've been bad... but I'm not all bad, boop boop de boop!

> It sucks that the copyright period in the US is so ridiculously long

Do you mean for humans? We have this weird asymmetry where copyright law applies to humans but a large company training an LLM is not subject to copyright law at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com