I had gotten used to that site showing what is not entering the public domain, thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. (What a horrible thing to have your name on.) It's good to have something to celebrate again. It looks like Winnie-the-Pooh will be on the list next year.
If we allowed this to happen, we'd have major motion picture Star Wars blockbusters that were basically fan fiction levels of quality. Can you imagine?
There still are a huge number of fan fiction movie projects. They just end up on YouTube now rather than going to Cinemas.
If we're we're inundated with low quality fan films, Cinemas simply wouldn't screen them. At the very least, we'd have a chance to see alternative interpretations and tellings of stories involving some of our favorite characters.
I'd rather see a passion project set in the Star Wars IP than any of the recent multi-million dollar films.
I was quite sure that they did mean that that was what happened, but looking at the number of other replies I'm starting to think that I'm the one that misunderstood.
The duration of copyright protection was much shorter when I bound childhood expectations. It was a copyright extension act of congress that monetized all the commercial art in my childhood into my adulthood. My parents did not suffer this legal abuse.
Perhaps you are making assumptions about my age. The extension from reasonable to unreasonable affected many works from my childhood on schedule to enter the public domain during my 30s and 40s.
Before globalization and huge logistical advances there was barely any way to capitalize on works in the public domain... your parents probably didn't benefit nearly as much as you may think. Also, calling this "legal abuse" in any way is just insulting to true abuse and detracts significantly from your comment.
Ah, yes, it was so hard for authors to benefit from their works 95 years after their death. Now it's so easy, and inspires authors to produce great new works even in afterlife.
> Ah, yes, it was so hard for authors to benefit from their works 95 years after their death. Now it's so easy, and inspires authors to produce great new works even in afterlife.
There are a few near-future scenarios that intersect in interesting ways:
The possibility of life extending interventions such that average life expectancy climbs first toward, and then perhaps past, the century mark (life-of-the-author plus anything starts to look ridiculous).
The possibility of uploading whether it is a true digitization/emulation or 'just' a simulation of a particular consciousness given enough data.
Cryogenic preservation and revivification.
Legal decisions on whether such events count as 'death' for purposes of copyright, debt, inheritance, etc.
Legal decisions on the personhood and potential emancipation of digitizations, simulations, emulations, etc.
Legal decisions on the criminal and civil culpability of such simulations etc. (if considered persons, or their owners if not) for their originals' acts (such as copyright infringement).
The copyright status of works created post-mortem by such entities, whether they are considered persons or not (such works might simply be considered or passed-off as 'unpublished', for example)
If nothing else, I'm pretty sure that there will be attempts to hack around any legal uncertainty with various permutations and combinations of corporate personhood, copyright assignment, work-for-hire agreements, and smart contracts to get to some desired result regardless of how the legal environment changes, but those still might fail in 'interesting' ways.
All of which is to say that we might very well get in
to a situation where it is possible to provide incentives for the creation of new works by dead authors, legally speaking. At which point the public, and the public domain, will be well and truly screwed over.
There's an amazing story by Spyder Robinson that expolres exactly that: Melancholy Elephants, http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html It was published in 1983 and won Hugo Award for Best Short Story. It's as relvant today, as then. Even more relevant.
Melancholy Elephants is about how eventually every possible permutation of content will have been created and recorded because they belong to somebody and it will become impossible to create anything new (the story is less concerned with the ability to create anything non-infringing). Frankly, I think that particular worry is overblown as it presupposes that no knowledge will ever be lost.
Personally, I'm rather more concerned about the works that will be lost because they are owned.
BTW, would it surprise you to learn that Spider Robinson is a copyright maximalist?
> barely any way to capitalize on works in the public domain
I think this wrongful take on what capitalism should and shouldn't be allowed to take from the public domain, and why to detract from your comment. However, not as much as the incorrect take on history: Many people capitalized on works in the public domain before the Mickey Mouse taking laws. Please grace us with better research the future. This has been too typical.
There's some Gutenberg affiliates set up in other countries that host content which is not public domain in the US but is public domain elsewhere (Australia and Canada have some notable additions as a result of years where they didn't line up with US law). It looks like Gatsby is on Gutenberg Australia.
You aren't imagining it. The Great Gatsby was in public domain for a few years until the Copyright Term Extension Act 1998 added 25 more years.
This created a complications because lots of classical works that were in the public domain had to be removed from sites like Project Gutenberg. Apparently, popular, long dead authors are supposed to support their great grandkids from those royalty checks.
I wrote a school book report on The Great Gatsby from the text hosted on Project Gutenberg. And when I had an interest in looking at the text again imagine my surprise to find it no longer listed.
Their original works are all in the public domain in every jurisdiction, but classically (hah) the problem has been that copyright is applied to re-set scores. Luckily, there are a good number of modern scores dedicated to the public domain that were based on scans of the originals. A good starting place is https://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page
No, although I once recorded myself playing Beethoven and posted it on Facebook and the audio got muted by a stupid algorithm that thought I was violating some Sony recording of some artist.
I don't know whether to feel honored that my playing was decent enough to be (mis-)recognized by the algorithm as a professional artist or sad that I got muted.
To celebrate this, the Internet Archive recently held a video contest to use public domain film and audio material from 1925. My piece won 1st place. https://archive.org/details/danse-de-alienes
I think it would be beneficial for code (for software that's published) to be subject to these laws, too. Any one know why such laws apply to art but not to code?
As robin_reala indicated, they do. This wasn't clear for along time and it didn't really matter because computer companies bundled software with their hardware; it wasn't something that anyone was particularly interested in selling independently. But this started to change and, over time, it was established that copyright did apply to software.
(One reason why copyright might not have applied to software is that it's "just" a set of instructions. We're seeing this argument repeated at some level with the Google-Oracle tiff over APIs.)
I’m sure this means Gatsby won’t be taught in high schools anymore because that’s a ton of money for publishers to lose out on if schools can just print out 50 copies for pennies.
I’m not even mad either. No high schooler can possibly relate to that book in any meaningful way. Good forbid an English teacher picks a book palatable to high schoolers.
yeah I remember not reading any Mark Twain in high school
“no high schooler can possibly relate to that book in any meaningful way” yes nobody has ever had messed up feelings about social status or unrequited love or what are you talking about
Might it be because if the teacher reads the n-word out loud they’ll lose their job? If they don’t read it out loud the students will pester them until they do?
I read the Great Gatsby in high school, not too too long ago, and it instantly became my favorite book. I would guess that English teachers pick it because it’s a short, fun read with lots of issues to discuss and lots of literary merit. I’m glad to see it’s finally in the public domain.
A benefit if it being in public domain is a variety of new editions to teach from.
Cheap paperbacks containing just the story and which cost just above the cost of its paper and ink. Slightly fancier versions with introductions by literary scholars. Thick annotated editions with every allusion and reference explained with lengthy footnotes.
It’s tough to read Shakespeare without some annotations, and those are generally copyrighted. Which is one reason I have never been able to find a good free ebook collection.
The Great Gatsby was the only book I had to read in high school that connected with me in any lasting way. What I get out of the text has changed considerably over the years, but that doesn't make my high school self's interpretation less meaningful.
The actual list the article references... (and strangely, mostly plagiarizes?)