George Orwell is out of copyright. What happens now?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2021/jan/01/george-orwell-is-out-of-copyright-what-happens-now

by headalgorithm • 6 years ago

193 91 6 years ago

paulgb2• 6 years ago

Note that while this applies to the UK [edit: not US, thanks boomboomsubban] (and some other life+70 countries), the copyright on his work has already expired in some countries.

In Canada, the copyright term is life + 50 rather than life + 70, the minimum under the Berne Convention. In Australia, only authors who died after 1955 (Orwell died in 1950) get life + 70; authors such as Orwell are "grandfathered in" to life + 50.

IIRC (although I can't find a source now), this confusing patchwork of copyright was the root cause behind the infamous deletion of some copies of 1984 from Kindles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...

boomboomsubban• 6 years ago

Note that while this applies to the US

It doesn't. His books are still covered under whatever law set up 95 years since publication, so it's a decade until his earliest releases enter public domain and ~25 for 1984.

paulgb2• 6 years ago

You're right, thanks. I've edited it.

m463• 6 years ago

On the other hand, the US gets The Great Gatsby today

MichaelZuo• 6 years ago

Do you know how this interacts with NAFTA 2.0? If a work can be used for profit in Canada and not in the US...

quercusa• 6 years ago

That would be the 'Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

082349872349872• 6 years ago

Thanks, that explains why Such Such Were The Joys is available on an australian site, yet the TFA seemed to say it was still tied up.

(I wonder to what degree my heterodox take on 1984 is due to the fact that I read SSWtJ, in combination with The Spike and other essays, well before having read 1984 itself?)

bawolff• 6 years ago

In Canada, the copyright term is life + 50

Not for long, trump pressured us to change to life+70 which is probably coming sometime next year. :(

mcv• 6 years ago

Why is life+70 so standard? Even life+50 seems excessive. I can understand life, I can understand protecting copyright for a number of years after death so something written just before an author's death still benefits their family. But to preserver the copyright of works written when they were young, for literal generations after their death, that's just plain ridiculous.

Also, life shouldn't even matter once the copyright is not in the hands of the original author anymore. Just give copyright a set length from time of publication (30, 50, or even 70 if necessary), unless it's held by the original author, in which case it's the maximum of life or that number. That already seems way more than necessary. Anything more than that is just monopolisation of culture and has nothing to do with protecting the interests of the author or the initial publisher.

kwere• 6 years ago

laugh in Disney copyrigths...

heelix• 6 years ago

I look forward to some interesting Disney adaptations. Wonder how they will portray the Eastasia princess.

jinpa_zangpo• 6 years ago

I think a Disney version of Animal Farm is more likely. Animated talking animals are Disney's wheelhouse. I can see Napoleon and Snowball singing a duet as the opening song.

xkde• 6 years ago

It’s been done: https://youtu.be/2b-CMtKhTl0

Though I suppose we’re not above remakes.

gotoeleven• 6 years ago

I hope they make a modern version of 1984 where Winston is forced learn a lot of new pronouns.

kevin_thibedeau2• 6 years ago

It needs to be a woke version where Julia is the strong female lead sent to root out corrupt officials like Winston.

waterhouse2• 6 years ago

So someone could publish a version of 1984 that had certain characters completely expunged from the text, and others added.

5cotto• 6 years ago

Ironic considering Orwell plagiarized the plot of 1984 in the first place.

rightbyte• 6 years ago

Plagiarized of what by who?

maskedoffender2• 6 years ago

He was inspired by C. S. Lewis' that hideous strength.

karaterobot• 6 years ago

I downvoted this, since it's a drive by insult without any kind of support provided.

wrycoder• 6 years ago

If plot plagiarism was a crime or even morally reprehensible, half the books in my town library would have to be destroyed.

TuringNYC• 6 years ago

> So someone could publish a version of 1984 that had certain characters completely expunged from the text, and others added.

No real need to publish anything, we're living a variant of it every day. Without much creativity, we could map so many day-to-day things in 2020 to items in 1984.

Jerrrry• 6 years ago

We are much closer the Brave New World than 1984.

YuccaGloriosa• 6 years ago

"a robot from 1984" Isn't that a reference to a robot dancing style popularised around the time period of the year 1984. Not robots dancing in the book 1984?

Digit-Al• 6 years ago

Yes. The actual lyric is "dancing to electropop like a robot from 1984" and it does, indeed, refer to a robotic dance style done to electronic pop music. A dance style that is always more effective when aided by strobe lights.

Also, there were no robots in the book "1984".

WarOnPrivacy• 6 years ago

I like that this story examples how creativity can ramp up, when copyright gets out of the way.

njharman• 6 years ago

And how the copyright monopoly robs our culture. With some of David Bowie's contribution to Art being denied and forever lost.

mark_l_watson• 6 years ago

He was so far ahead of his time.

I just started reading “Burmese Days” which reflects his life as a policeman in the British Empire, experiences that affected his views on life.

JNRowe• 6 years ago

I recently pimped an Orwell biography in a different thread¹, but I'll do so again. Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth is a really well written and thoroughly researched treatise on Orwell.

I found the passage of his life from Eton through Spain to his final books far more interesting than his actual writings(with the possible exception of Road to Wigan Pier).

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25474279

mhh__• 6 years ago

His "As I please" lectures, particularly on the practice of calling people fascists, could've been written tomorrow they're so prescient.

hertzrat• 6 years ago

I strongly recommend down and out in London and Paris as well. He decides to live as realistically similar to a poor person for a while in a gonzo-like journalism experiment with a lot of interesting scenes and observations

atlgator• 6 years ago

Now they turn 1984 into an instruction pamphlet.

PsyCrops• 6 years ago

Or a microdot on playing cards distributed to communist countries.. similar to this concept: https://bicyclecards.com/article/a-map-inside-the-cards/

motohagiography• 6 years ago

I would expect we can finally release editions with new introductions that address important criticisms of Orwell's privileged perspective, written by people of historically underrepresented groups, use them as a tool for educators to teach young people about the arrogance of male protagonists clinging to ideals of individualism that were artifacts of colonial domination, and without all the problematic representations of institutions of global justice.

Surely.

choward• 6 years ago

eyelidlessness• 6 years ago

Agree. A year seems a lot more reasonable.

esarbe• 6 years ago

Are you sure about that?

Myself, I think that copyright today has been grotesquely distorted away from its original intent; the furthering of the arts. Especially in the U.S. and E.U., the media oligopoly has had enormous success in transforming (cough perverting) copyright into a mechanism that benefits the copyright holder to the detriment of anyone else.

But we see that copyright can also be an effective tool for protection of the arts and sciences; see copyleft. Here we have an ingenious way of turning copyright on it's head, by protecting the rights of all involved parties. (Stallman might be a nutcase, but if that's the case, he's a genius nutcase.)

So I think it's fair to have 'longer' copyright periods. Longer than a year, I mean. The duration we have in patent law (~20 years) seems rather fair to me. Enough to turn (some) profit, not enough to rob four generations of the stories and characters that were an important part of their childhood's culture.

elvis70• 6 years ago

I guess that doesn't apply to translations?

retrac• 6 years ago

Generally, translations of literature are considered copyrightable in their own right, as translating literature is fundamentally a creative act. The translator would hold a copyright for their specific translation.

lordleft• 6 years ago

I was surprised that Orwell’s work wasn’t under more permissive copyright terms given his democratic socialism. I’m looking forward to his work reaching more people.

slim• 6 years ago

in his time copyright was not limiting the spread of knowledge an culture a the time, since distribution of printed books was capped by the logistics. it could easily take 50 years for your book to reach every reader on the planet

samizdis• 6 years ago

FWIW, most of Orwell's works, including essays, have been available for many years at https://orwell.ru/

These include "Such, such were the joys", referenced in the Guardian article when it states: "Neither will anyone be allowed to trespass on all the material that came to light post-1950 and which Davison painstakingly assembled in his compendious George Orwell: The Complete Works (1998). This includes Such, Such Were the Joys, the notorious account of his tribulations at a character-forming Sussex prep school, first published in the US in 1952 but not issued in the UK until as late as 1968, for fear of libel proceedings."

That essay is here, and has been for a long time:

https://orwell.ru/library/essays/joys/english/e_joys

tashi• 6 years ago

I think you might be misunderstanding the point of the article. They're talking about the hurdles you have to jump in order to reprint or adapt his writings, not just read them.

humaniania• 6 years ago

That makes me wonder why Russia would be interested in spreading Orwell's ideas.

lasagnaphil• 6 years ago

I think you're overthinking this. it probably would be just a Russian hobbyist who's interested in archiving Orwell's works. (Also since these are in the public domain in Russian territory)

throwaway2245• 6 years ago

This makes me wonder if people really accept the Western media's point of view that a population of 150 million act in unison as a singular being named "Russia".

disown• 6 years ago

You think putin is personally hosting that site? The insane lunacy when it comes to putin, xi, trump, erdogan or whichever boogeyman the media/propagandists decides to scaremonger with.

Bakary• 6 years ago

I think this is an example of the kind of armchair international relations pareidolia that shaves off much of the nuance of the real world. It tends to be mixed with main character syndrome.

It reminds me of a friend I knew who was terrified that the Chinese would search all his belongings and files once he landed in Beijing. Of course, once he got there he soon realized most people did not give a shit about what a random foreigner was up to

Can_Not• 6 years ago

I feel like it's being overlooked in this thread that mostly anyone can buy a .ru or .us domain, in fact ru domains are really affordable. A lot of country TLDs are available to non-citizens.

ofrzeta• 6 years ago

For the record, German Wikipedia has a page with creators who died 70 years ago [1]. I couldn't find a corresponding page in the English Wikipedia but as it's a list it doesn't matter too much (apart from the links to the respective WP articles).

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_Domain_Day/20...

phillc73• 6 years ago

Nice find! Almost as interesting as Orwell is George Bernard Shaw making the list.

iso8859-1• 6 years ago

Since it is generated from Wikidata, you can click the SPARQL link and adjust the language.

capdeck• 6 years ago

What used to be fiction now is just news.

tinus_hn• 6 years ago

Governments around the world start copying it like madmen!

netmonk• 6 years ago

That is why every gov is trying to copy 1984 in this dramatic and catastrophic covid19 epidemia. They dont have to pay any fee to the original author.

paulryanrogers• 6 years ago

Can you elaborate? At least here in the USA the government responses have been so spotty, inconsistently enforced, and half hearted that we seem to have the worst of all outcomes. (Elevated death rate, recurring lockdowns, ongoing community spread of the virus.)

kodah• 6 years ago

Reality steals his stories, duh

scott-smith_us• 6 years ago

"New, reformulated George Orwell v2"

(since it's an entirely new product, copyright starts over)

Jemm• 6 years ago

What happens now is that Disney creates an entire franchise around 1984 and children will only know the Disney version.

jeegsy• 6 years ago

or the children discover 1984 later when they are older

anonymous344• 6 years ago

What is the difference if a book goes to no-copyright ? It barely does not affect the price - every dealer still want it's cut and you are stuck to your digital platform provider anyway..so pay up.

And individuals can refer to the books anyway..so what's th point?

Art I understand, it's easy to copy photo or painting and put up a webshop selling a mug with photo of the painting on it.. but again if it's 100 year old painting..isn't there ANY other picture for your cup that is better ?

George Orwell is out of copyright. What happens now?

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