Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
Isn't there also the problem of transfer of ownership? I mean say you own a studio like Universal or Paramount back in the day and due to financial problems (which the real studios had) you have to sell off your old films to another. Does your copyright automatically transfer over to the new owner of the film so that they can claim to be the only one with the right to publish the work in question? Such has been argued in the past in other media besides books. Conde Nast has tried to claim that they own a vast number of Old Time Radio programs and that if someone wants to have them they have to pay through the nose for a handful. They have tried it with pulp magazines as well such as The Shadow and I wouldn't be surprised if they had tried to argue that they own Doc Savage as well. I think there's a problem with that mentality though. It smacks of greed. If you have to pay $40.00-$60.00 for a handful of OTR programs on CD or a similar amount for old fiction who would be able to afford it? Only the rich, that's who.
|
As Doc to Senor Gorro in the movie..."No problem at all." Copyrights, under law, are just like trading cards, they can be bought, sold, swapped, ect. If it doesn't help the creator, that doesn't matter either, despite all the pious crap about protecting the rights of the creator. Ask Sir Paul McCartney about his early Beatles copyrights.
What is protected is the middlemen's right to exploit copyrights. (In the US, preferably forever minus 1 day.) Make no mistake, that's what all the legal wrangling and extensions are all about.
As to Doc. It is still under copyright in the US. The earliest the first Docs could come out of copyright is either 2021 (for the Laurence Donovan Docs d. 1950 - 1950 + 70 + 1 = 2021), or 2029 (treating all Docs as "work for hire" - 1933 was the first year that Doc was published, so for the Docs published in 1933, it would be 1933 + 95 + 1 = 2029.)
In Canada, (under the standard Berne treaty, without extensions), 159 of the Docs are certainly in the Public Domain, due to the authors deaths, and possibly all of them, should they be considered "works for hire" which have a 50 year + 1 term. (I'll look it up on my sticky and report back.) (They actually were works for hire. The authors were paid a flat fee, never received royalties, and with one exception, never had their names appended to their works. Those are the standard definitions for work for hire. but whether or not it would be worth the court fight, who knows...)
And Conde Nast
does own the copyright, as they bought Street and Smith, a long time back...