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Works from 1925 are now open to all! The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School's blog covers the famous works which rise to the public domain on January 1st, 2021.
On January 1, 2021, copyrighted works from 1925 will enter the US public domain,1 where they will be free for all to use and build upon. These works include books such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (in the original German), silent films featuring Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and music ranging from the jazz standard Sweet Georgia Brown to songs by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, W.C. Handy, and Fats Waller.
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessley into the past."
F. Scott Fitsgerald, The Great GatsbyThis is not just the famous last line from The Great Gatsby. It also encapsulates what the public domain is all about. A culture is a continuing conversation between present and past. On Public Domain Day, we all have a “green light,” in keeping with the Gatsby theme, to use one more year of that rich cultural past, without permission or fee.
1925 was a good year for music. Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton were some of those active then. Though some consider it the best year so far for great books and many classics were published then, among them is the original German version of the all too relevant The Trial by Franz Kafka.
Previously:
(2020) Internet Archive Files Answer and Affirmative Defenses to Publisher Copyright Infringement Lawsuit
(2020) Internet Archive Ends “Emergency Library” Early to Appease Publishers
(2020) Project Gutenberg Public Domain Library Blocked in Italy for Copyright Infringement
(2020) ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ Turns 120
(2020) University Libraries Offer Online "Lending" of Scanned In-Copyright Books
(2019) The House Votes in Favor of Disastrous Copyright Bill
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday January 02 2021, @05:36PM (15 children)
Anyhow.
"Also, under the 1790 law you would only have to provide the complete compiled program to the copyright office."
Nope. There's no provision to copyright any 'compiled program' in the 1790 law whatsoever. Copyrightable material consisted of "maps, charts, and books."
And you don't have to go all the way back to 1790 for that; even as late as the 1970s it was obvious to both lawyers and computer scientists that copyright could only apply to computer programs as source code - this is why so much of the important early code (BSD is one major place you see this) wasn't copyrighted.
There was a choice - to copyright you would need to disclose the code in full, or you could rely on keeping it a trade secret instead. Choose one. If you rely on trade secret law and you do your due diligence you can probably keep the code secret for a good while, but once it leaks, it's out, and you can't go back and change your choice.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 02 2021, @07:39PM (14 children)
Registration only gives you the right to statutory dameges🐜.
Also, for computer software, you do not have to deposit the entire source. A sample is sufficient, or a hex dump of the binary, or a copy of the binary code, without the source.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2021, @09:09PM (2 children)
Copyright being automatic and not requiring registration is from the Bern convention, which the US joined in 1989. The 1790 law only protects registered works and requires complete publication. Samples are not sufficient.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 02 2021, @09:40PM
If you produced a printout of source code in 1790 you'd be accused of witchcraft and the source would be burned as "magik from that era's equivalent of Beetlejuice.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2, Informative) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 03 2021, @12:36AM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday January 02 2021, @11:55PM (10 children)
The phrase "even today" which you repeat here makes it clear you don't understand what we're talking about.
It's not "even today" it's an extremely new thing. This was all invented late last century and did not exist in the time period we're discussing.
We were talking about the effect of going back to the 1790 regime, and one of them would be that all this stuff goes away. Copyright only applied to registered works, period.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 03 2021, @12:14AM (9 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday January 03 2021, @12:23AM (8 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 03 2021, @12:47AM (7 children)
Doesn't even require a statement saying "this work is copyrighted by whoever."
So every single original computer program is copyrighted upon saving. No need to register. No need to provide the source. And if you want to register it, you can provide a binary of the program in machine-readable form. What good will it do trying to sell copies of the program is compiling it results in a copyright violation? Still can't use or sell the resulting program, as the binary is copyrighted, same as the source code.
In effect, it's a "look but don't touch" situation. If you go this route, you can let people look at but not copy or compile the source.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday January 03 2021, @01:05AM (6 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 03 2021, @03:07AM (5 children)
News flash, American laws only apply to Americans. Which only amounts to less than 5% of the world.
And increasingly America is like an unhappy incel - going it's own way.
And given that America is going to lose its status as the largest economy later this decade, maybe by the middle of the decade there will be even more incentive to ignore US policies.
Surprise, surprise, when you have as long a history of not playing nice as the USA, it should be no surprise people don't want to deal with you except on their terms.
And other countries may decide to retaliate for past injustice by invalidating US patents and copyrights. Let them develop their own products in competition.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday January 03 2021, @03:10AM (1 child)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 03 2021, @03:53AM
However, those terms never applied to software. That also never applied anywhere else in the world.
So if we can't go back to the 14 year term yet, we have to look at the current reality. You insist on using American law. I ignore American law because I'm not American. Like 95%+ of the world, and most Americans.
So what's your point whining that your law doesn't apply to anywhere else in the world?
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday January 04 2021, @12:56AM (2 children)
Even with less than 5 percent of the world's population, I haven't find a larger single-language media market allowing political satire than the USA.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday January 04 2021, @02:14AM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday January 05 2021, @04:20AM
English is indeed an official language of India, spoken by 129 million Indians as of the 2011 census. That's maybe two Britains and smaller than the anglophone population in the USA. Thus India's population alone doesn't necessarily make it wise for a business to pursue a strategy of forgoing revenue from the United States in favor of revenue from India.