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Two lawyers are still fighting to keep Buck Rogers from entering the public domain, something which should have begun 70 years after the author's death. Philip Nowlan, the stories' author, died in 1940 and so his works should have joined the public domain starting 2010. Part of the strategy from the copyright trolls has been to drag out the process with multiple lawsuits.
Back in October 2015 we brought you the story of the Buck Rogers Copyright Trolls, two lawyers who were fighting to keep Buck Rogers from entering the public domain using the discredited Sherlock Holmes system of licensing. Two and a half years later, Louise Geer and Dan Herman are still at it, using every trick in the book to keep a beloved tale out of the public domain, where it firmly belongs. Along the way the pair have stiffed multiple law firms, and currently are abusing a Bankruptcy Court in Pennsylvania in a Hail Mary effort to...well, it's not exactly clear what they're trying to do.
From Boing Boing : The continuing saga of Buck Rogers and the Copyright Trolls
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @01:01PM (9 children)
Copyright can suck my dick. Amirite??
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @01:49PM (7 children)
Be careful, copyrights can bite
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @02:25PM (6 children)
Not GNU! GNU copyrights are perfectly crafted legalese to ensure every free software programmer is entitled to compensation every time a tech billionaire uses free software to gain another billion in unearned profit.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Monday July 02 2018, @03:20PM
There are no GNU copyrights. There are just copyrights. GNU has licenses. Those licenses are designed as a hack using copyright licenses as a mechanism to ensure the freedom of the software with the force of law.
As was discussed back in the Groklaw daze, there was a case where a judge did view the license as an agreement or contract, and the consideration exchanged for the rights in the license was that you kept the software free. And the copyright owners could expect to receive this compensation, and that compensation was just as valuable as a monetary compensation if that is what the copyright owners wanted instead of money.
Tech billionaires and poor people alike use open source software every day. The authors and copyright owners of the open source or free software seem perfectly happy with this arrangement -- or they would have choosened a different license.
For some odd reason all scientific instruments searching for intelligent life are pointed away from Earth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @03:25PM (4 children)
wat
Is this really the best you've got? What you're describing is a feature of BSD and MIT licenses.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @04:01PM (3 children)
I must be using them wrong, helpful advice appreciated.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Monday July 02 2018, @05:32PM
Realbotix, they're doing a head for RealDolls. Which, by the way, it's the same company. And it's going to be like Siri. Like Cortana. Like Alexa. Or the Google one. But with blowjobs.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday July 02 2018, @06:36PM (1 child)
Error 517 : Dick stuck in fan blade - did not generate proper callback and did not get logged.
Zero stars. Would not buy again.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday July 03 2018, @11:58AM
> Error 517 : Dick stuck in fan blade - did not generate proper callback and did not get logged.
I guess your dick has systemd in PEED 1.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @02:24PM
Gutenberg has 2 of the works in public domain: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/31334 [gutenberg.org]
Other works are might be pirate-able but no one really cares enough to bother uploading them by the looks of it.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing is the result of the author's memorial fund's board of trustees going through the motions of hiring lawyers to protect the IP through the spending of the fund's coffers. I know there are a lot of museums for painters, authors and "philanthropists" operating under such arrangements all over the world.