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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @07:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the free-the-mouse dept.

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

via BoingBoing


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  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by takyon on Tuesday January 02 2018, @06:07PM (5 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday January 02 2018, @06:07PM (#616809) Journal

    Submissions have always been edited or discarded by the editors. Maybe you should log in and post to your journal if you have a problem getting content onto the front page.

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  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:31PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:31PM (#616876)

    I have no problem, but it is clear there is quite a bias going on. The only positive change I've seen is a reduction in the massive editorializing by TMB and other submitters. Maybe editors should use some sort of ranking system, or has been said before create a "spill over" front page, maybe title it like "Soylent Enquirer" to illustrate that the article quality should be regarded as tongue-in-cheek.

    This isn't meant as a criticism of hard working volunteers but the system that betrays the values it vocally supports. I find it hypocritical to allow garbage trolling by EF while restricting story submissions. I find comment trolling to be a much worse problem for this site, it drives away moderate readers and creates an echo chamber. I often ignore stories, but I often read hidden comments just to see what started a thread and I'm often disappointed when its some trolling garbage instead of a meaningful but controversial comment.

    I often hear complaints about "leftist" censorship, and it appears that anger is being heaped up aristarchus because he is such an easy target. Hypocrites, but then again I've been saying that for a while!

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday January 02 2018, @10:22PM (2 children)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday January 02 2018, @10:22PM (#616928) Journal

      Something like 5 of every 6 submissions is accepted, probably a much higher rate compared to Slashdot. We've tried to keep politics to 1-2 a day maximum, and preferred articles that aren't complete flamebait. If you read some aristarchus submissions that linger in the submission list, it should become clear that posting them would drive users away. They'll look for a tech site with closer to zero politics. Even editing the commentary off of them usually leaves something that would only be suitable for "Soylent Enquirer".

      Disallowing "garbage trolling" would necessitate the removal of anonymous commenting. Suddenly, the criticism you offered above could not be posted, or could be deleted based on mob consensus or something like that.

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    • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @10:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @10:52PM (#616947)

      Poor Aristarchus! He's kind of the Harry Truman of SoylentNews!