What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012?

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Those works are still available for others to modify as they see fit. Society has no right to the Disney stuff unless Disney says so.

Unless copyright law says so, you mean. Not that there is much difference between the two ('Mickey Mouse Protection Act', anyone?)

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by mbovenka

Unless copyright law says so, you mean. Not that there is much difference between the two ('Mickey Mouse Protection Act', anyone?)

Copyright that expires is legalized theft.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

So it is up to those that do care to write to the copyright holders and offer to do the work for them, to turn those books into e-books. The only issue will be that the copyright holders see no market at a reasonable price.

No, first the issue is finding the copyright owner. For an author who died in 1940 in the US, the living heirs, if any can be identified, may be two or more generations removed--if the rights weren't assigned to a publisher that went bankrupt in 1965.

It doesn't help that a lot of books don't give clear and accurate copyright information--they don't mention whether the text itself is in the public domain, or covered by an earlier copyright and only the formatting and introduction are covered by the new date.

(as you can see in this forum most people expect such titles to sell for $3-4. If there is no cost involved they might well reconsider.

I don't "expect" titles to sell for $3-4. I just don't buy many that cost more than that; those books are obviously seeking a different market demographic. I don't usually buy shoes that cost more than $40, either, although I don't begrudge the existence of more expensive types.

"What should have entered the public domain this year" is a very relevant topic--it's showing what the copyright act of 78 took away from the American people. Those books (and movies and songs) should belong to all of us now; that was the reason for granting the monopoly of copyright in the first place--that was our supposed benefit for allowing the exclusivity.

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Those works are still available for others to modify as they see fit. Society has no right to the Disney stuff unless Disney says so.

You're missing my point.

Disney was able to use those works because they entered into the public domain. And interestingly, when Disney used those works, they had entered the public domain much more quickly than they do now in the U.S. Had any of them sat in limbo for an extended period (as can happen under the current law), maybe some would never have come out again and would have ended up forgotten.

It's funny because Disney lobbied hard to extend copyright, so now works published in the U.S. after 1978 or so won't enter the public domain for a much longer period, increasing the risk that they are forgotten and entirely lost to future culture.

I'm not saying there should be no copyright, just that maybe the public is losing out when the copyright period goes on and on like it does now. Copyright is supposed to be a careful balance between the public as a whole and content creators.

[Daithi]

Here are a few works that are available in death +50 countries, but not in countries like the U.S.

Ernest Hemingway -- available this year
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell To Arms (1929)
To Have and Have Not (1937)
The Old Man and The Sea (1952)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Death in the Afternoon (1932)

Dashiell Hammett -- available this year
Red Harvest (1929)
The Maltese Falcon (1930)
The Glass Key (1931)
The Thin Man (1933)

Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
The Waves (1931)
To the Lighthouse (1927)
A Room of One's Own (1929)

Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep (1939)
The Long Goodbye (1954)
Farewell, My Lovely (1954)
The Lady in the Lake (1943)

Dorothy L. Sayers
Murder Must Advertise (1933)
The Nine Tailors (1934)

Josephine Tey
The Francise Affair (1949)
The Daughter of Time (1951)

James Joyce
Finnegans Wake (1939)
most of Joyce's other works are already in the public domain

[Daithi]

Here is a list of works not in the public domain in even death +50 countries, but would have been in the public domain in the U.S. had Congress not changed the law.

The Sound and the Fury (1929) by William Faulkner*
As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner
Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner
Tortilla Flat (1935) by John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
Cannery Row (1945) by John Steinbeck
East of Eden (1952) by John Steinbeck
Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury
Invisible Man (1953) by Ralph Ellison
The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Passage to India (1924) by E.M. Forster
Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding
Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell
1984 (1949) by George Orwell
The Fountainhead (1943) by Ayn Rand
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
Native Son (1940) by Richard A. Wright
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) by James M. Cain
Double Indemnity (1943) by James M. Cain
The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) by Agatha Christie
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1934) by Agatha Christie
Murder on the Orient Express (1934) by Agatha Christie
And Then There Were None (1939) by Agatha Christie
Strangers on a Train (1950) by Patricia Highsmith
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) by Patricia Highsmith
The Three Coffins (Carr) by John Dickson Carr
Rebecca (1938) by Daphne Du Maurier
The Mike Hammer Collection (1947) by Mickey Spillane
I, the Jury (1947) by Mickey Spillane
My Gun is Quick (1950) by Mickey Spillane
Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) by Mickey Spillane
Fer-de-Lance (1934) by Rex Stout
Too Many Cooks (1938) by Rex Stout
The Caine Mutiny (1951) by Herman Wouk
I, Robot (1950) by Isaac Asimov
Foundation (1951) by Isaac Asimov
Foundation and Empire (1952) by Isaac Asimov
Second Foundation (1953) by Isaac Asimov
The End of Eternity (1955) by Isaac Asimov
The Caves of Steel (1954) by Isaac Asimov
The Martian Chronicles (1950) by Ray Bradbury
Childhood's End (1954) by Arthur C. Clarke
I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson
The Hobbit (1937) by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Return of the King (1954) by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Two Towers (1954) by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by C. S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters (1942) by C. S. Lewis
Death of a Salesman (1949) by Arthur Miller
The Crucible (1952) by Arthur Miller
The Iceman Cometh (1940) by Eugene O'Neill
Inherit the Wind (1955) by Jerome Lawrence
Waiting for Godot (1952) by Samuel Beckett
The Glass Menagerie (1944) by Tennessee Williams
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) by Tennessee Williams
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) by Tennessee Williams
Our Town (1938) by Thornton Wilder
The Yearling (1938) by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Charlotte's Web (1952) by E. B. White
The Natural (1952) by Bernard Malamud
From Here to Eternity (1951) by James Jones
The Naked and the Dead (1948) by Norman Mailer
All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque
The Great Escape (1950) by Paul Brickhill
Tales of the South Pacific (1946) by James A. Michener
The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
The Big Sky (1947) by A. B. Guthrie Jr.
Hondo (1953) by Louis L'Amour
Sea Of Grass (1936) by Conrad Richter
Shane (1949) by Jack Schaefer
A Coffin for Dimitrios (1944) by Eric Ambler
Casino Royale (1953) by Ian Fleming
Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950) by C.S. Forester
The Werewolf Of Paris (1933) by Guy Endore
The Second World War (1948) by Winston S. Churchill
History of Western Philosophy (1946) by Bertrand Russell
Being and Nothingness (1943) by Jean-Paul Sartre
Nausea (1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre
Philosophical Investigations (1953) by Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Second Sex (1949) by Simone De Beauvoir
Silent World (1953) by Jacques Cousteau
Seven Years in Tibet (1953) by Heinrich Harrer
Annapurna (1952) by Maurice Herzog
The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks (1948) by David A. Embury
Out of Africa (1937) by Isak Dinesen

* -- Faulkner's works will be in the public domain in death +50 countries next year

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Daithi

Here are a few works that are available in death +50 countries, but not in countries like the U.S.

... All of which would be in the public domain in the US if copyright hadn't been retroactively changed, if the contract under which they were published hadn't been changed without consent of one of the parties involved.

I don't even care if Disney manages to keep control of The Mouse forever. I want the *rest* of American culture and art from the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s released to public. Maybe a change in the law that says "if it's not still actively in production and available for sale to the general public in 50 years, it enters the public domain."

Ebooks and digital movies could interfere with that--a publisher/production house could put a collection of lousy scanned PDFs or low-res digital movies out for $200 each and claim to make them "available for sale"--so maybe it'd need a codicil that requires a minimum number of sales or dollar amount. If it's not making $1000 a year for *someone* after 50 years, it deserves to be released for public use. The tax dollars on less than $1000 worth of sales isn't worth the tax dollars to tie up the courts to defend it from infringement.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

You're missing my point.

I caught your point and realize that Disney capitalized on PD works, but copyright in and of itself doesn't stifle creativity. Nothing wrong with buying the rights to make a movie. Without PD, Disney still would've been successful.

We disagree on copyright. I think it should last forever. The public has no right to gain free use of someone else's creativity just because a period of time has elapsed.

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

We disagree on copyright. I think it should last forever. The public has no right to gain free use of someone else's creativity just because a period of time has elapsed.

Wow.



Anyway, what I really don't understand is retroactive copyright extensions. Copyright is an incentive to create, if the creators already made something based on some monopoly period as an incentive, why extend it after that? What are you incentivizing at that point?

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

Anyway, what I really don't understand is retroactive copyright extensions. Copyright is an incentive to create, if the creators already made something based on some monopoly period as an incentive, why extend it after that? What are you incentivizing at that point?

I'm very serious. Copyright should exist to protect property rights in perpetuity; not to grant them for a limited period of time.

[Ninjalawyer]

Even the drafter of the U.S. Constitution saw the benefit of a limited copyright. Why should a creator have a "right" to a monopoly on their expression but the public have no right to the benefit of using other's expressions? How does this even make sense when the purpose of copyright has always been understood to be a balancing between encouraging creators with a limited monopoly versus the harm caused to the public by tying up the expression of ideas?

Duke put it better than I could:

The public domain sounds really valuable, but I’m in favor of intellectual property, is there a contradiction?

Quite the contrary. You’ll be happy to hear that the public domain is a vital, indispensable part of our intellectual property system, and the inputs in the public domain are just as important to its function as the outputs protected by intellectual property. As Judge Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals put it: “Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it’s supposed to nurture.” Without the public domain, there would be little to protect with intellectual property rights — if copyright lasted long enough to lock up Shakespeare’s works, much of the literary canon would vanish; if data, theories and formulae were subject to intellectual property protection, then scientific progress would grind to a halt. So the intellectual property system needs both the incentives provided by exclusive rights and the freedoms provided by the public domain, and the key is to find the appropriate balance between them.

Edit

I don't know if I've had a conversation take this kind of hard-left turn since a family relation expressed the belief that the moon landing was faked (I'm not sure if she meant all of the moon landings or just the first one).

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

Even the drafter of the U.S. Constitution saw the benefit of a limited copyright.

He was also a slave owner. IOW, wrong on slavery, wrong on copyright.

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I don't even care if Disney manages to keep control of The Mouse forever. I want the *rest* of American culture and art from the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s released to public. Maybe a change in the law that says "if it's not still actively in production and available for sale to the general public in 50 years, it enters the public domain."

Would you care if all art was kept under lock and key forever?

It seems that required registration with required renewals every decade or so is the way to go, the system has been tried before and seemed? to work well. Perhaps it is simply greed that has kept the mouse under lock and key for so long.

[Daithi]

Copyrights that last forever are a truly bad idea. Just imagine a world where you had to pay the descendants of every work ever written. How would you track down the rightful copyright holder to Shakespeare's work, or Homer's work, or Dickens' work, or any author who is more than just a couple of generations old? We would soon run the risk of great works of art being lost forever. Actually, this is a problem we have right now. There are millions of books, songs, paintings, and movies that are disappearing from our culture forever because nobody knows who has the legal right to these works of art.

Humankind itself advances from the copying of "ideas". This isn't theft. We copy each other all the time. Someone comes up with a good idea and we copy it. Imagine science if we couldn't copy and expand upon the ideas of those who came before us. Imagine having to pay the descendants of Newton (and/or Leibniz) every time someone wanted to use calculus. After all, if Stephanie Meyers' descendants should get paid forever for the Twilight Series then certainly Newton's and Leibniz's should get paid for calculus.

Intellectual property is also simply not the same as physical property. If someone abandons physical property it doesn't disappear, and it can be reclaimed by society. When intellectual property is abandoned it can be lost to society forever. Physical property can also only be possessed by a single owner, whereas intellectual property can be copied without the original owner having the property taken from them. As Thomas Jefferson said, "he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

There is also nothing to prevent the original owner of an idea or a work of art from maintaining exclusive right to that idea or a work of art. All he has to do is keep it to himself. However, once he brings it forth and puts it into the public eye then he should have no expectation that others in the public won't expand and capitalize on that idea. It is basic human nature to learn and expand upon the ideas of those who have come before us. This is the way it should be. Ideas should spread freely between individuals.

It was England who first adopted laws that granted exclusive rights to ideas. Other countries then copied England's laws. Should England get paid for coming up with this concept? Or better yet, when England made it against the law for starving peasants to hunt in the King's forest Robin Hood was born. Maybe, just maybe, it's time for a modern day Robin Hood who steals intellectual property from the governments and corporations and gives it back to the people. <-- Sorry, I was on roll and may have taken it a little too far.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Daithi

Copyrights that last forever are a truly bad idea. Just imagine a world where you had to pay the descendants of every work ever written. How would you track down the rightful copyright holder to Shakespeare's work, or Homer's work, or Dickens' work, or any author who is more than just a couple of generations old? We would soon run the risk of great works of art being lost forever. Actually, this is a problem we have right now. There are millions of books, songs, paintings, and movies that are disappearing from our culture forever because nobody knows who has the legal right to these works of art.

How do you track down property owners after several generations?