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January 1st is Public Domain Day. Throughout the year, works for which copyright has expired enter the public domain and become available for anyone to use in any way. In the US, copyright was originally only for 14 years with an option to renew for an additional 14. Now it is the life of the author plus 70 years. It is described in the US constitution under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 as having the purpose of promoting science and useful arts. However, with "life+70" that promotion is not able to happen, the stream of freely available ideas and resources has been forcibly dried up. So every New Year's Day, Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain publishes a list on what we would have had with sane copyright under the old rules:
Public Domain Day is January 1st of every year. If you live in Canada or New Zealand, January 1st 2018 would be the day when the works of René Magritte, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Jean Toomer, Edward Hopper, and Alice B. Toklas enter the public domain. So would the musical compositions of John Coltrane, Billy Strayhorn, Paul Whiteman, Otis Redding, and Woody Guthrie. Canadians can now add a wealth of books, poems, paintings, and musical works by these authors to online archives, without asking permission or violating the law. And in Europe, the works of Hugh Lofting (the Doctor DoLittle books), William Moulton Marston (creator of Wonder Woman!), and Emma Orczy (the Scarlet Pimpernel series) will emerge into the public domain, where anyone can use them in their own books or movies. (You can find a great celebration of some of these authors here.)
What is entering the public domain in the United States? Not a single published work. Once again, no published works are entering our public domain this year.
Source : Public Domain Day: January 1, 2018
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Tuesday January 02 2018, @09:44AM (9 children)
And it never will. The moment "Steam Boat Willy" is in danger of becoming public domain, expect to see more Disney money flying at lawmakers to extend copyright yet again.
The entire idea of "public domain" has become so foreign in the US, I suspect neither companies nor individuals would be able to cope with anything entering the public domain. It is just assumed that everything and anything is owned by a big corporation, and unless you have a fleet of lawyers at your disposal, you don't want to test that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Tuesday January 02 2018, @11:26AM (3 children)
It will go on until enough people get pissed.
For now, politicians can keep teasing us with things like abortion, gay rights, gun control, weed, who can use which bathroom, almost anything that can keep us all worked up while they milk the cow.
I don't think any of us will actually force a Congressman's hand on it. It just isn't tolerated. They can just wave their hand and cooperating police forces will remove the dissenter. But its OK for Congressmen to force other's wishlists on us as long as its done with the pen and handshake.
Wag the dog.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday January 02 2018, @01:31PM (2 children)
Even without these distractions, copyright is an abstract concept that's hard to get the average Joe and Jane excited about. Most people tend to primarily consume recent pop culture works, so whether stuff goes into the public domain after a couple decades or a century (or never) isn't a pressing question that impacts their lives in any meaningful way.
Unless you're an artist looking to reuse material or someone who deals directly with licensing in your job or something, it's probably not on your radar. Even those who get threatened prosecution for piracy are generally dealing with recent media, so changing the date of copyright expiration won't matter for them. (The MPAA isn't generally going after people pirating movies from 50 years ago, since that's not where the money is.)
There are of course take-down notices that might impact random people who upload to YouTube or whatever... But again, I doubt most people confronted by an occasional thing like that are going to recognize the distinction of whether such a notice would happen with modified copyright dates (particularly given the absurd things that have been subject to take-down notices... They can appear completely arbitrary).
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 02 2018, @01:42PM (1 child)
I still can't get people excited about privacy.....
....too busy with blah of the day and "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about!", which is what the Jews of Nazi Germany, what...1938ish were saying when asked to register at the local police station.
Sheeple.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday January 02 2018, @03:57PM
How did other bad laws get repealed? It took a lot of public scoffing and years of pressure to overcome the entrenched interests that had positioned themselves to benefit from the status quo. When fines from enforcement seem to benefit a municipality (or at least key officials and their cronies) more than the bad reputation hurts, they don't want to give that up, regardless of the merits. That was the case with the national 55mph speed limit, and alcohol prohibition and now marijuana prohibition. The way Jim Crow voting laws were repealed was a little different, involving a great deal of external pressure. The moment that pressure was blocked, Jim Crow was reincarnated, and in response the external pressure ratcheted up. Now they're removing not just those unfair voting rules, they're also removing Confederate monuments.
The pressure to drastically reform copyright is low but steady. Keep scoffing at those law, that's perhaps the best way to keep up the pressure. And privacy? Need more outrage over 14 year old girls busted for sexting and forced onto the sex offender registry, and such, to get further with that.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @01:25PM
I'd like to take this chance to suggest everybody James Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
http://www.thepublicdomain.org/download/ [thepublicdomain.org] (Don't give any money to Amazon though...)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Tuesday January 02 2018, @01:38PM (2 children)
That is why it is important for us Little People to claim copyright explicitly on everything we create and release so that we retain some semblance of personal freedom through ownership of our own efforts. It's why licenses like Copyleft are crucial to our freedom.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:21PM (1 child)
Here's the problem with us Little People using copyright in our own defense: It's a civil matter. Which means that in order to enforce it, you need to know that the big corporate giant stole your stuff, and then convince and probably pay for a lawyer to file suit. By contrast, the big corporate giants have entire departments of lawyers whose job it is to sue Little People over copyright violations.
I'm of course assuming you're referring to us plebians, and not people roughly the same size as Peter Dinklage.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:49PM
I do mean us plebians. The big corporations have been very busy fighting with each other over their own scraps of "innovation" through their cross licensing deals.Then there were the patent trolls. Next came the ones trying to claim public domain works as their own because of some idea of corporations having a divine right to owning stuff because share holders or something. If more Little People actively and explicitly declared copyright on things that they create and publish (online or anywhere else) eventually it would have an effect on the more egregious attempts by corporations to claim intellectual/imaginary property as "theirs." I had some informal training from corporate lawyers and such over the years about these things. As you can imagine, the good lawyers really understood the issues. The PHBs generally inhabited a fantasy land where they believed what they wanted. It was shameful and embarrassing.
The short summary is this: publish as much stuff as you can (specially source code and designs for contraptions) under a clear copyright and license it using something like the GPL, BSD, Creative Commons or some Open Source license. The more "obvious" stuff that's out there in public, the more its shared, the harder it will be for the Imaginary Property thieves and pirates to limit our freedoms and keep us poorer than we need to be by denying us access to our ideas.
Personally, I have released lots of rather silly source code under the GPL because some of the stuff I've done, although to me trivial and absurd, is the sort of thing that stupid/evil corporations and PHBs try to claim as Intellectual Property. I could tell you some stories, but I haven't the time or the energy. But I will mention the time a colleague was asked to submit an array of structures in C as an Invention Proposal...
God help the human race (and I'm an atheist).
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03 2018, @01:57AM
When we were discussing the Pacifica simulcast of "1984", I linked to the text, freely available elsewhere (.au, as I recall).
As TFS notes, there was originally a balance where the creative types got their LIMITED protection and we got their stuff, which became gratis and libre within a human lifetime.
That bargain has been degraded again and again.[1]
Only a fool would honor a contract that is obviously 1-sided such that it screws him.
[1] It doesn't even resemble the "receive a stipend to support your continued production" original.
You obviously can't produce after you're dead.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]