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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: 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].