Why Isn't Gatsby in the Public Domain?
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I find this overextension of copyright laws maddeningly frustrating. My previous comment (unfortunately) still stands:
Also still under copyright:
"I Have a Dream" until 2038[1]. This is particularly frustrating because the copyright holders include the estate of the person who delivered the speech, but not the estate of the two other people who wrote it (and likely most of it) - not to mention the fact that, by any web-era definition, it was a public performance and also a 'general publication'.
"Happy Birthday" (certainly in the EU until 2016, and potentially in the US too until 2030, though this is disputed[2]).
There is also one movie - whose name escapes me now - which entered the public domain and was then put back under copyright protection subsequently.
In the case of "I Have a Dream", think of the societal cost of raising two generations of students without a complete copy of the speech in their textbooks (as is generally the case).
Alternatively, think of how a 2012 version of "I Have a Dream" would happen today. If hundreds of cell phone recordings of the speech were distributed halfway around the world within mere minutes after the speech, of what relevance would copyright protection be?
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_a_Dream#Copyright_disput....
I have heard on several occasions that the reason it is currently so popular is because it went into the Public Domain and was shown on many channels due to this.
Whether that is actually the case no one knows for sure.
There's very few movies which are so critically acclaimed (top 100), which can appeal to adults and kids alike. It's subject is both completely commonplace, and the most important thing there is.
Also, how many good Christmas movies are there? It's got to be in the top 5 Christmas films, at least.
(And while the same can be said of several films now considered classics, such films were generally unconventional (at least for their time) in a way that It's a Wonderful Life really isn't)
The closest analogy I can think of while remaining in the realm of the arts is Vermeer, who was a fairly typical Dutch genre painter unrecognized in his time and ignored for two centuries. Nowadays he is popular and beloved, but unlike Rembrandt who is held as a great master or van Gogh who is held as a quixotic genius, Vermeer himself is taken as wholly mundane; his works simply have some "je ne sais quoi" that resonates with the average person.
"A man who hates his life to the point of suicide is shown by a guardian angel how much the other people around him depend on him. As a result of seeing what the world would be like without him, he changes his mind about the suicide and ends up embracing the life he has, recognizing the simple yet wonderful things about it for what they are."
is not a conventional Hollywood story. Do you have any other examples? I'm mostly interested not because I want to prove you wrong, but because I actually want to be wrong and I want to watch these movies if they exist. Groundhog Day is the only other one that comes to mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changing_of_the_Guard_%28Th...
I'm also not sure that what you describe is a non-conventional Hollywood story: "Person has hard life (or a good life that hits a serious problem), is about to give up, finds something to have faith in, warm fuzzy ending" is a pretty generic tale.
I've seen quite a bit of film, but honestly, if it's really that generic, what are some other examples?
The spirit of Christmas Present is Dionysus, and I think this is the Santa archetype either in prototype or metaphor. Portrayal of wealth is great social commentary. The entire play is almost entirely devoid of Christianity, the only mention of God in the whole play, is interesting. Time travel? The future represented as death? Awesome.
One of the effects of the film's popularity in the 1980s is on the popular perception of runs on banks and of bankers - I wonder how much American views of the recent financial crisis are colored by the grim visage of Mr. Potter?
Since number of views affect popularity, it is possible that a classic is a classic because it became public domain. By extension, would more public domain improve things for everyone?
Imagine someone lives beneath a volcano and knows that at some point an eruption will destroy his house such that he no longer extracts economic benefit from it. Do you think that the way he builds his house (e.g. using straw, or stone) will differ based on whether the eruptions come every 10 years or every 100?
If artists are motivated by the economic incentive afforded by copyright, then the level of that motivation is variable based on the length of copyright.
While that's undeniably true, I think the objection is to your leap from observing that motivation significantly increases with term length at term = 1 day, to concluding it's still significantly increasing at term = life+70yrs.
Economic incentive can be measured and modelled, and while there isn't that much research into this, there is some. One Cambridge study (Pollock [2007]) found that the optimum length of copyright term is ~14 years (any longer and the economic benefits of works going into the public domain outweigh further increases in incentive to produce). Now, yes, economics models should be taken with a large grain of salt (especially ones when it's unfeasible to test their predictions). But it's a start, and certainly there don't seem to be any econ studies supporting a length anywhere near life+70 or longer.
I can only interpret it as sincere, or very deadpan.
It's a kind of hypersensitivity that acts as quality control. Instead of firing off sarcasm quickly without too much thought and cheaply pointing it out with a "sarcasm" badge, you only get to make jokes or be sarcastic if it is very, very well thought through.
I actually got away with (meaning - positive karma) a joke the other day, although I later pointed it out in a reply to somebody who didn't realize it. Still - felt like an accomplishment and I suppose that's how it should be.
And for what it's worth, I consider myself reasonably capable of considering arguments in favour of opinions that differ from my own. On many occasions I have changed my mind about an issue based precisely on arguments that persuasively challenged my assumptions or beliefs. I just have an expectation that those arguments should not be ridiculous.
Engineers keep creating their entire lives, if they can help it. Why incentivise artists to capitalise endlessly on their 'one big break'? :/
Edit: or indeed by endlessly charging licensing fees for their particular idea, which is inexplicably considered to be tremendously more timeless than a similar concept in engineering. :/
Unlike copyright, a patent gives you a true monopoly over its subject - you can prevent other people from using an idea even if they came up with it independently. At their worst, patents can stifle further developments in a field. Copyright, even with a ridiculously long term, at least has the property that you can't use it to stop other people doing things independently, so it can't block whole fields in the same way. So the length disparity isn't necessarily unjustifiable.
Is this illegal for me to bring my Kindle to the U.S.?
The same book search on http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=gatsby shows nothing.
I am not a lawyer. It seems to me that copyright has nothing to do with your possession of a work that you obtained legally. It involves publication, duplication, public performance, and so on.
A bit more about The Great Gatsby and copyright is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/09/robert-mccrum-co...
About copyright terms in various countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_...
(While we're discussing copyright for classic books, some might be interested to learn about the copyright for Peter Pan.)
So apparently The Great Gatsby has been public domain in canada for 20+ years already!
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/money-behind-great-ga...
Too bad the book never got the recognition it deserved in his lifetime.
http://www.people.vcu.edu/~bmangum/fitzstories.html
I've also heard that all the 19th century novels were so long because originally they were serialized, and the author was basically paid per chapter.
That's exactly how A Tale of Two Cities was written.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/may/23/behind-...
Film rights may not have included a royalty, and even if they did have historically been more subject to "creative accounting".
Why does the health care system suck? because: profit.
Why do our politicians suck? because: profit.
Why do we go into war without a care? because: profit.
Why is corn syrup subsidized but not salad? because: profit.
Yay 'murica.
There's http://gutenberg.net.au/ (no formal relationship with Project Gutenberg) which makes works available that are public domain in Australia (but not the US), and this has The Great Gatsby.
My parents have a copy of Mein Kampf on their bookshelf; not because they're Nazis but because it tells us a lot about what happened.
This is the academic tragedy of copyright. We have better educational materials for the Civil War than WWII because memoirs and such are free from the civil war.
How does Germany plan to address that aspect? Or is this more of a symbolic effort intended to communicate disapproval and repudiation of Hitler's plan?
I don't have much experience with patents but thought I had read that they were 12 and renewable with maintenance for another 12. I guess I was wrong.
Usually a good idea to research your opinions further into the realm of facts before posting, then.
Publishers and media consumers have a less balanced relationship. Publishers can spend more to influence legislation. So, in practice, copyright monopolies go on forever.
If you have a patent on some mechanism, nobody else is allowed to use that mechanism without your approval, and minor variations are not sufficient to bypass that.
There is no copyright.
Here is an email campaign to nag him towards good stewardship, for those interested: http://www.openmedia.org/froman?utm_campaign=Froman
The EFF also has a summary of the changeover: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5647596
If you're in the US or Europe, I'd advise you not to find those links.
(Actually to be fair, I don't think "instead" is quite the right word there.)
Disney have introduced things like single watch video tape (need to be sent back somewhere to be rewound); limited life DVD (special materials, sent in sealed envelope, as soon as it's opened it starts to oxidise); and they still have pretty horrible unskippable trailers and warnings and etc.
That's why they only threw on a few more decades (of course I expect them to go at it again when that extra time runs out) and didn't start that fight much earlier than they did. They still made that stuff after all, even during a time when copyrights were shorter, then they decided to get it raised.
They then slammed the door behind them by repeatedly lobbying for extended copyrights any time their 85 year old Mickey Mouse comes close to being out of copyright.
There's a reason why the copyright extension act is commonly referred to as The Mickey Mouse Protection Act: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
I remember well the original DIVX at Circuit City:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
I honestly think that failure was a huge reason why Circuit City failed. They built up so much ill will from a technically literate audience.
> Flexplay is a trademark for a DVD-compatible optical video disc format with a time-limited (usually 48-hour) playback time. They are often described as "self-destructing" although the disc merely turns black and does not physically disintegrate. The same technology was used by Disney's Buena Vista Home Entertainment under the name ez-D.
While it's got some silly doublespeak there, the end result is that the DVD actually lets me skip the trailers. I have a lot of other children's movies that I have to mash the "skip" button or even (horror of horrors) have to fast forward the front-matter.
If I make a contract with someone that says I get exclusivity to publish and sell their works, and in return I give them some money, in what way do we need to do copyright assignments?
You don't, and in Germany, there's no such thing as copyright assignment - Urheberrecht is part of the author's moral rights and inalienable[1].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_Germany#Transf...
2) Copyright as it was when the book was written: It allowed for works to be copyrighted for a period of 28 years from the date of publication. Like the Copyright Act of 1790 before it, the copyrighted work could be renewed once for a second term of equal value.
but really, it's the publisher that needs the incentive to invest in fitzgerald's creative work that copyright is about here, yeah?
Looking at it this way, I'm thinking that paid copyright renewals are the right way to go. Have the initial copyright last maybe 10 years, then require the rights holder to pay a small fee (something like $50, maybe?) to renew the copyright for another decade. If a work isn't making the author at least $5 a year, it probably belongs in the public domain.
In any case, the fact that there is a deep-pocketed rights holder for those works means that those works are being cared for, to some degree at least. The ones we really have to worry about right now are those that are lost and forgotten before their copyright expires.
Remember that when you go into a big chain bookstore, all the books you are seeing have already outperformed most by getting shelved by a major retailer.
Copyright exists for the benefit of society; how does society benefit by being forced to pay the descendants of F. Scott Fitzgerald just to produce copies of his work? Copyright terms were extended after The Great Gatsby was written, so it is entirely bogus to claim that we might not have it without the absurdly long copyright terms we have today.
Let us be honest, it hasn't existed for this purpose for 30+ years. It now exists to protect corporate profit centers and main franchises that big business doesn't want to enter public domain so other people could distribute their work for free and create derivatives without getting sued into oblivion.
The difference between straight labor and creative work is that the artist is, in theory, building an exploitable asset. They only time they get paid directly for their labor (and labor alone) is when they're operating under a work for hire agreement (e.g. a major studio movie).
In this case, the vast armies of cast and crew are just like the RR workers. They clock in, do their day, get paid for that - and only that - then move on to the next job.
It's a rare instance where a capital-intensive creative work (which can include novels when you factor the cost of print runs, distribution, and promotion) don't involve the backers insisting on substantial control. In this sense, it's pretty similar to VCs backing startups.
If the creative talent manages to self-fund and self-distribute, it's not that they're getting paid over and over for one effort. They're commending royalties because they managed to play several roles at once.
How are laborers not building an exploitable asset? When last I checked, that is exactly what they do: they build exploitable assets for others.
Really, it sounds like you are arguing that Fitzgerald's publisher should be able to charge for his work in perpetuity.
Of course, an intelligent reader would have been able to infer that's exactly simply by reading the very next line. And because this is HN, I don't make a habit of dumbing-down the discourse to a third grade level. But hey, I'm not afraid to be servicy, so if spoon-feeding is what you need, well, there you go.
And now that I've discovered that reading comprehension isn't your strong suit, I can understand why a subtle detail like the distinction between "rent" and "royalties" (which I was careful to make) would have sailed straight over your head. So where more diligent readers would register my acknowledgement of the differences between tangible and intangible assets and by extension, my awareness of the distinct sets of laws that pertain to each, you turned a comprehension failure on your part into an deliberate oversight on mine, before misconstruing your own error as open advocacy on my part for an end to term limits on copyrights.
To which all I can say is...riiight.
Well, OK. That just proves he didn't need 70 to "forever less one day" in order to write it.
But the evidence is strongly on the side that he needed at least 50 years. I mean, did you see him writing Gatsby before the 1909 copyright act? No, you didn't, because before that, he'd have somewhere around 40 piddling years of copyright protection. But the 1909 act passes and sure enough, Gatsby comes out less than 15 years later.
Is my sarcasm detector off? Or are you just a really bizarre troll?
If you have any sources about Fitzgerald's take on copyright terms I would love to read them, but without that you have absolutely no basis with which to say that there is "strong evidence" that he required more than 50 years.
I'll also point out that it's hard to write about the roaring '20s before the Copyright act of 1909.
Through Copyright, All Things Are Possible!
Hail Copyright!
Yep. It's almost as if such an argument would be too absurd to take seriously.
If you had a house, you don't expect it to become part of public domain after 100 years. You neither expect wooden table you made in weekend or jewelry you designed to be automatically in public domain after X years. Infect you would probably argue that government has no right to confiscate your property and it should rather be inherited by whomever you desire forever after your death. Why music/books/software that you create should be any different?
The idea behind copyright is to enrich the public domain, not to enrich rights holders.
What are you talking about? No one has a problem with limited term copyright like you are talking about. We have a problem with infinite term copyright.
How does retroactively extending copyright length provide any of the benefits you are claiming?
> Why music/books/software that you create should be any different?
They aren't any different. You are allowed to bequeath music, books, software (sometimes) to people. Haven't you ever given a CD away?
If you are trying to refer to intellectual property, then you are talking about a made-up right. The only reason we even grant this made-up right is because there is a quid pro quo. If there is no cultural/societal benefit to enforcing this made-up right, then why shouldn't we unmake it?
Well, some of us do. But it's certainly not the majority, even here.
This really just boils down to some people being mad that they can't make money off derivative works because other people are making money off the original work. Boo hoo.
I guess somebody didn't learn this lesson in kindergarten, and still wants to whine and complain in an effort to effectively nationalize what is rightfully private property.
"Hey, wait, get your own ideas." -- Society.
If there were owners of VH's IP who were opposed to this kind of casual use, I'd have no problem using a different handle. Unless the name is also generic French name, I'm not sure if it is or not.
Meanwhile, I leave you this: http://mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
If you want to protect it, go hire your own police and build your own courts; stop using mine.
In an ideal society, I wouldn't be opposed to those seeking copyright enforcement paying the costs, although the costs would presumably eventually be passed on to the infringers. We will never see such a society in our lifetimes, though, so it's a somewhat moot point.
But there is nothing inherent or "rightfully" private property about things you create - it's a right granted by governments in order to promote creative behavior that is seen as good for society at large.
The 20th and 21st centuries have seen giant entertainment industries lobbying for an ever-expanding copyright term. (Some people say endless, because it has expanded faster than time has passed.) In addition, they have successfully created a cultural belief that physical property and intellectual property should be treated the same despite the fact that they are inherently different. (When I take your wallet you no longer have it, but when I take your ideas we both have them.)
If anything, the 20th century saw a massive effort to privatize our shared public culture as it was created. You can make the argument that we are better off as a result of this privatization, but it's simply incorrect to frame this as people trying to nationalize what is inherently private property.
Anyone can claim ownership of anything. Doesn't make it so.
No creative work has value unless it is substantially derivative.
One day you will die and on that day you will lose everything you have.
One of these rights is not like the others. One of these rights is not the same. Can you guess which right...?
"Belonging to" is just what we agree on together for a short time. In the end, everyone dies and no one gets to keep anything.
Also, consider KMP string matching algorithm. Who owns that idea?
Mendeleev (Mendeleyev) spent part of his life re-discovering and re-inventing stuff... because most of the inventions and discoveries took time to spread to his native Russia.
And Mendeleev's own Periodic Table was re-discovered :) by Lothar Meyer
If it was private then no one would have the ability to copy it. If you keep your works private, you get infinite copyright.
If you care so much about your "private property", keep it entirely to yourself. That's maximum "security".
'But wait', says the "owner" - 'I want to make money off of it!'
Ah! Well, you're saying you want to introduce it to society? You want to have something of that societal construct of "money" in return for your private property?
'Yes, I worked very hard for this and it should be obvious that I deserve to be rewarded!'
And of course you should! So, let's see, you really did something great there, here is a thing for you: "Copyright Protection". We like your work so much, that we want you to be the only one in control of making profit from it for a long time.
'But I want more!'
Alright, actually, we want you to be that person as long as you live.
'But I want more!'
What, you mean more than... for life? Sheesh, alright, just because it's you: Society will extend it for you for decades after you have died.
'But I want more!'
Sheesh, alright, let's say we add some mucky legal stuff where you can name rights-holders who can "protect" your copyrights far beyond those limits, proportional to how much money you put into it.
'But I want more!'
Wait a second - what more do you want?
'I want forever. I also want all the money. For me and mine and myself.'
Well, turns out, you're just a mortal like all the other humans that make up the society that you are so happy to profit from in blissfully ignorant entitlement and so unwilling to give back to in return.
Should have kept it to yourself.