Access denied

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/01/public-domain

by gasull • 14 years ago

184 108 14 years ago

herge• 14 years ago

I wonder if the period of 2009-2015 will have a bumper crop of content entering the public domain in Europe because so many young people died in the Second World War.

_delirium3• 14 years ago

Depends on the country: some have explicitly extended the copyrights for people who died in the war. For example, writers who died in active service of the French military have copyright for 100 rather than 70 years postmortem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mort_pour_la_France

mullingitover2• 14 years ago

This makes a lot of sense. By extending copyright even further after their deaths, it will incent these authors to create more posthumous works!

drpgq• 14 years ago

How much does Canada's terms differ from the US?

_delirium3• 14 years ago

It's typically shorter than both the U.S. and Europe: 50 years postmortem. For example, Ernest Hemingway (died 1961) entered the public domain in Canada last year. In most of Europe (life+70) his works will enter the public domain in 2032, and in the U.S. (95 years from publication, for works published before 1978) they'll enter at staggered times starting from the 2020s.

That's why this exists: http://www.gutenberg.ca/

njl• 14 years ago

There are two competing interests here. First, Disney wants to keep control of Mickey Mouse cartoons, and it doesn't feel unreasonable at all that they should. Second, the rest of the stuff that is of little commercial value but of potential cultural value should be freed from uncertain or uninterested ownership.

The answer feels trivial to me, which means I'm probably missing something. Fixed term for a few decades from the creation of the work, maybe 30 years or 40 years. After that, you need to give a copy of the work to the Library of Congress, pay a nominal fee, and you get a 5 year extension. Take as many of those as you want.

This greatly simplifies everything. If you find a work that is older than the base term, you look it up in the copyright extension database. If it's in there, you can find out who owns the rights to it, and try to license rights. If it isn't in there, it's public domain. If somebody doesn't stay on the ball enough to renew their rights every five years, it probably isn't all that commercially valuable, and moves into the public domain.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

That's a reasonable compromise, but copyright law for the 20th century was anything but about compromise. It was about ensuring big corporate content producers are given a default of "copyright forever" with no costs or effort on their part.

After all, it is society, not the content producers, that pays the price for having no culture returned to the society that birthed it. Right up until a company like Disney finds there is no more public domain for them to take ideas from. But, like most problems we Americans have, we'll let a future generation worry about that.

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

> Disney wants to keep control of Mickey Mouse cartoons, and it doesn't feel unreasonable at all that they should.

It feels completely unreasonable to me. There's no reason why Disney should be given an exception when others aren't. It's idiotic to suggest that they should get special treatment just because their IP is commercially valuable.

crpatino2• 14 years ago

I don't think "Disney" is capable of wanting anything, since old Walt's been dead for decades now. That's what happens when you grant personhood status to abstract entities.

officemonkey3• 14 years ago

Mickey Mouse is protected by trademark.

The Steamboat Willie article is specious. Thanks to a failure to register copyrights (back when those things mattered) the Fleischer studio "Superman" cartoons are in the public domain. The world did not end. People may use and sell these cartoons, but they still have to be careful not to run aground against the Superman trademark.

The same thing would happen to Steamboat Willie.

coderdude3• 14 years ago

I disagree. Disney is the perfect example of when copyright should be extended. Disney (the man) is dead but he didn't die owning a portfolio of cartoon IP. Disney (the corporation) owned that and still has a global business that lives and dies by the fact that it can maintain its brand. I don't see any benefit to mankind if people were suddenly free to print Mickey Mouse onto t-shirts and sell them.

Contero• 14 years ago

Why is it idiotic?

I see more value in having Disney pay an appropriately large amount of money to keep their IP than I see in making sure that their specific content gets into the public domain.

Who cares about steamboat willy if Disney is going to fight tooth and nail over it? It's everything else that will expire into the public domain that I care about.

jarjoura• 14 years ago

I'm sure an idea of a similar framework gets proposed all the time, however once stakeholders look at the huge cost in it, it gets tabled.

An argument people make on Hollywood's side is that sure, there are entire storage facilities of content that should be moved into the public domain, but who is going to fund the conversion (old deteriorated 35mm film) to media usable by the mass public?

Then on the public side, who is going to manage/fund the perpetual database and management of what's public domain now and what's still copyright protected.

I'm glad that Europe is stubborn and is moving works into the public domain. As more and more good content is becoming freely accessible, it gives our policy makers here material to argue with.

joshuahedlund2• 14 years ago

> An argument people make on Hollywood's side is that sure, there are entire storage facilities of content that should be moved into the public domain, but who is going to fund the conversion (old deteriorated 35mm film) to media usable by the mass public?

I'm not familiar with this argument. My understanding is nothing has to be "funded" to be "moved" into the public domain, it just becomes public domain by default and if anyone wants to make the necessary conversions that's their voluntary prerogative (ex. Gutenberg Project). In fact I've read that public domain works are generally more likely to be preserved, and that there are loads of early 20th century works that are fading away because essentially no one is free to make copies of them to keep them around.

MartinCron5• 14 years ago

If you change it from a nominal fee to a progressively larger and larger fee, you let content owners who really care about their long-term IP ownership compensate the public for the fact that the work isn't part of the public domain, as it otherwise would be.

205guy• 14 years ago

I think there is a distinction here that needs to be made: copyright is about the marketplace, not actual ownership. If I drew a mouse cartoon and really liked it, and maybe just showed it to my kids every year, I could keep it secret and I (or my heirs) could own it forever. The public isn't owed any private works or any compensation for what could-have-been in the public domain.

But if I want to commercialize this art, then I need to release it into the marketplace. As soon as it is released, it can be copied (or there will eventually be a technology to copy it). Therefore, copyright is society's (and the government's) way of protecting my ability to profit while making my art public. In exchage for that protection, the US laws used to impose (there was not choice, other than secrecy or copyright) the release into the public domain after a certain time.

The issue is, marketplace protection (legislation, enforcement) costs money. The richness of public domain material seemed to justify the cost on society. If copyrights become perpertual, it would make sense to me that the ones who benefit should pay for it. Then again, they could argue that an open marketplace full of desireable content is valuable in and of itself (to both society and the economy).

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

I would be fine with a provision to extend copyright by paying fees, but only if the fee went up each time, like say 2^x * 100 dollars each x year over the base.

danielweber3• 14 years ago

You have to decide that kind of unit you need to pay fees on. Is "Steamboat Willie" 1 work? If a photographer releases a bunch of photos, are each of them their own work? Should he release them as a book?

TruthElixirX• 14 years ago

They're already paying fees for this in the form of lobbying. The money from your fees would go to the same people the lobby money is going to now. How does that fix anything?

darkarmani7• 14 years ago

> pay a nominal fee, and you get a 5 year extension. Take as many of those as you want.

Absolutely not! Why let them get unlimited extensions? How does that give back to the people?

jacques_chester• 14 years ago

Disney have trademarks on all their characters; that should be enough.

simonsarris• 14 years ago

It saddens me a good deal that most of us can come up with very compelling arguments that un-restricting these works would benefit society, yet there seems there's very little we could do to make even a splash of change.

In fact, I gander the comments here will soon be filled with of "here's how I would do it" comments, none of which will make a mote of a difference.

What can we do, really?

It seems insane that the reasons given hold any merit beyond a money-grab. And while I may be a bit myopic here, the "motivates content-producers" feels flimsier still than monetary arguments.

Do most creative works really need even ten years of protection? Do you suppose Shakespeare would have made more plays or less if copyright existed in his day?

lmm• 14 years ago

Well, we can vote - but this is hardly the most important issue on which we vote.

We could get a bit smarter, and lobby - but we're unlikely to be able to out-spend Disney.

Or we can ignore the legal system and share things, which is probably the most practical and effective approach. They can't imprison us all.

joshuahedlund2• 14 years ago

A lot has changed already since 1998. I don't think it is outside the realm of possibility that the current 2019 date could be allowed to lapse when it arrives, especially if we continue with raising awareness, lobbying/organizing efforts, trying to get notable/influential figures signing on to the cause, etc, for the next 6 years.

That would be a depressing "starting point" of progress, to be sure, but since it only requires inaction it might be more achievable than positive copyright reform that requires action, especially since everyone disagrees on the proper action to take.

MarkMc2• 14 years ago

I'm not convinced that un-restricting works would benefit society. If Disney gets to keep copyright on Snow White forever, about a third of the movie's profit will continue to be paid in tax.

So the choice is between (a) letting 7-year-olds everywhere watch Snow White, and (b) having more money to pay for roads, schools and cancer research. Is option (a) necessarily better?

nitrogen2• 14 years ago

If Disney gets to keep copyright on Snow White forever, about a third of the movie's profit will continue to be paid in tax.

Do you have any evidence to counteract the common wisdom that movies rarely actually make any money on paper?

So the choice is between (a) letting 7-year-olds everywhere watch Snow White, and (b) having more money to pay for roads, schools and cancer research. Is option (a) necessarily better?

Letting Disney sell Snow White doesn't magically create money from nothing. The money that isn't spent by consumers on Snow White will be spent on something else, which will eventually be taxed, funding roads, schools, and cancer research.

praptak• 14 years ago

To me the whole copyright extension issue is a good argument for justification of piracy. If the copyright industry side can just replace the social agreement (protection of works in exchange for them going public after a reasonable amount of time) with one they like more, why would it be immoral for the content consumers to to the same?

I'm talking about the ethical side, not legalities. The fact that said consumers lack the lobbying power only makes their actions illegal, not immoral.

martincmartin• 14 years ago

Because two wrongs don't make a right.

TheAmazingIdiot• 14 years ago

And trite sayings don't mean they are correct, either.

The social contract in the constitution was to grant people with limited exclusivity for works they created. Patents have roughly stayed within that parameter (with exception to patent abuses on design and software).

For copyright, it was originally 17 years, extendable another 17 years. Works released in 1981 (my date of birth) will expire in 120 years. I will be dead before they are in public domain.

The social contract was 'reneogiated' by campaign donations, without input from the people. The supreme court found that forever extensions the way congress is implementing them as 'constitutional' and it was Congress's problem.

So yes, I believe that should open up the debate on piracy as a legitimate solution.

wpietri3• 14 years ago

Absolutely. For example, Americans have come to realize that the wrong of British tyranny was not made right by the wrongs of rebellion and war.

CoffeeDregs4• 14 years ago

>To me the whole copyright extension issue is a good argument >for justification of piracy.

There's very little pirating of content that is over 20 years old, so I'm not sure how the copyright extension thing would justify piracy...

StavrosK2• 14 years ago

People grant protection to works on the provision that these works become freely available after N years. The copyright industry just goes ahead and extends this unilaterally, just because they want to. Why should the public keep up its end of the deal when the copyright industry doesn't?

darkarmani7• 14 years ago

You mean because there were no good music artists like Elvis and the Beatles 20 years ago? Or even Michael Jackson for that matter?

ANTSANTS• 14 years ago

Maybe not as much when compared to piracy of new releases, but very little? That's simply not true.

How do you explain the majority of modern independent music being heavily inspired by 80s pop and 90s hip-hop, especially when most of the producers are too young to have remembered listening to it over the air? What do you say when you look up an old music video on Youtube, and 70% of the time, the top comment is from a teenager? "Today's music sucks I'm 12 and none of the kids in my class listen to this but I think it's awesome like this if you're watching this in 2012!!!" has even become something of a cliche or a running joke at this point.

How do you explain What.cd, probably the largest private torrent tracker in existence, being largely dedicated to preserving and distributing out of print music? Anyone can find the latest Skrillex album on The Pirate Bay, but the true music lovers come to sites like What.cd to discover and trace the lineage of what they'll never hear on the radio.

How do you explain the ROM piracy scene, loved both by nostalgic 30-somethings and kids who never owned a Nintendo? How do you explain the people that spend months or even years painstakingly reverse engineering old, obscure games and translating tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of text, just to give them the treatment they wish had been available to them on a store shelf as children? What about the ones that do it completely anonymously, never receiving real credit for their contributions to history, in fear of legal repercussions or being socially stigmatized based on the subject matter of the works they translate?

Ditto for the anime/manga scene, where there is a seemingly endless supply of interesting old works in need of a translation?

How do you explain the continued love for classic films, from everything Disney's put out, to the original Star Wars trilogy, to Blade Runner, and so on?

There is a lot of cultural value in media that isn't exactly fresh. Private collections have allowed us to preserve the physical artifacts of human creation over the centuries, but a manuscript sealed in the tomb of a museum quickly fades from the public consciousness. The magic of internet-enabled piracy is that it has allowed us to keep mankind's creations culturally significant long past their expiration date, on an unprecedented scale. Today, we don't just remember the most standout works from previous decades that our parents passed down to us (or the ones their parents passed down to them). We discover things that few cared about when they were actually created, and give them a new life that their creators could never have predicted.

I suppose it may be hard to understand if you aren't in the thick of it, but so much of our modern culture is about appreciating and drawing inspiration from the past that an assertion like there's very little pirating of content that is over 20 years old completely baffles me.

darkarmani7• 14 years ago

There is the justification that no content will ever be put back into the public domain.

If copyright is never going to expire, what does it matter how old the content is that is getting pirated?

(i'm not saying there is a justification, but i can understand the OP's logic)

pessimizer• 14 years ago

>There's very little pirating of content that is over 20 years old

There's an enormous amount of pirating of content that is over 20 years old.

_b8r0• 14 years ago

> There's very little pirating of content that is over 20 years old

As someone else pointed out there's a lot of decent old music, as well as older films (Star Wars or Snow White anyone?). One thing people forget is that there's a lot of Software that's getting older. There's plenty of older games that are being pirated but there'll come a point when OSes we use now reach that age.

wnight• 14 years ago

If there isn't much piracy then there aren't many purchases (often none) so there's no justification for an extension.

But earnings themselves aren't a justification, it's the public good that comes from the further works you create while striving for more royalties that are the justification for this expensive and wasteful bureaucracy.

And there's no reasonable argument for 150y copyright, but the very stories copyrighted (Snow White, etc) are a powerful argument against copyright at all. With modern copyright on the works they borrowed, Disney never would have existed - unable to pay for access to cultural heritage.

ovi256• 14 years ago

I can see how you can land in trouble as a pirate when you travel to a country with longer copyright. For Canadians, Hemingway for example is already public domain. Would a Canadian travelling with a Kindle full of Project Guttenberg downloads of Hemingway land in trouble with the US, EU or other customs ?

It would be in the publishers interest to obtain a few scary convictions for the chilling effect. I could see how auditing software would become useful: software that would tell you what content to take off your iPod when travelling to a certain country. Such software would need an accurate database of copyright status for each content in each country. I predict an open source source database of this type will be created in the future.

officemonkey3• 14 years ago

The issue isn't ownership of the file, it's the act of copying. If the Kindle owner made copies of Hemingway's works in the U.S., then he would get in trouble.

orionblastar2• 14 years ago

Well first I would argue that modern copyright law is Unconstitutional and eventually it will go to the Supreme Court and will be struck down. Then we'll be back to the original copyright laws.

As for the justification of piracy, I suppose it is some form of protest? Instead of paying for copyrighted materials, just pirate them in protest of unfair and Unconstitutional copyright laws? Wouldn't it just be better to do a boycott of organizations that lobbied government to pass such laws and only buy from organizations that oppose those laws? Not only that but there is enough free and open source software, media, and ebooks and materials that ones doesn't need to buy the commercial copyrighted stuff anymore and still not pay much.

Stuff older than 20 years still gets pirated, old DOS apps, old 8 bit computer ROMs and Disk files for emulators, old movies and TV shows. Most of the older stuff lacks DRM malware and runs really fast as compared to the modern stuff that is bloated with rootkits and phone-home activation code checkers.

goodcanadian• 14 years ago

> Well first I would argue that modern copyright law is Unconstitutional and eventually it will go to the Supreme Court and will be struck down. Then we'll be back to the original copyright laws.

It has gone to the supreme court and was upheld: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft

MartinCron5• 14 years ago

a good argument for justification of piracy

Which, by the way, is indistinguishable from rationalizing the sentiment of "I want stuff without having to pay for it"

paganel• 14 years ago

> "I want stuff without having to pay for it"

I don't want to rationalize stuff, but I've just finished reading Locke's "Two Treatises on Government", one of the guys that started all this "the only true freedom is the protection of property"-thingie, and I just want to add that irrespective of the fact that one might agree or not with Locke's views you have to take into consideration that it has not always been like this (i.e. private property being "sacred" etc). In fact, Locke starts by arguing against people (Filmer and others) who were saying something of the like that the monarchs of the time had an irrevocable right to rule (and presumably to own everything under the skies), handed down (the right to rule) to them from generation to generation since Adam (the Genesis Adam). To say nothing of the 20th century madness that afflicted almost half of the known world, I'm talking about the Marxist/Leninist views on property.

What I want to say is that what constitutes "property", "to own stuff" etc. has not always been "set in stone" as a "moral" thingie (whatever definition of "moral" you want to come up with). So people for whom piracy is "immoral" are taking a very short view of the whole thing, and possibly also deluding themselves into thinking that what is "moral" is almost by definition "immortal" and forever. They should take a more pragmatic view.

jlgreco4• 14 years ago

How is that so different from "I want to keep the rights to a cartoon I drew for ever and ever and ever.."?

guard-of-terra3• 14 years ago

I have had a lot of stuff without paying for it (directly). Education, medical care, air even. What now?

MarkMc2• 14 years ago

Where do you draw the line?

"I am poor and rich people pay too little tax so it is ethically OK for me to steal from rich people"

"I am a native American and white people robbed my ancestors so it is ethically OK for me to steal from white people"

...etc

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

why would it be immoral for the content consumers to to the same?

Because they have nothing to lose. I only ever hear this argument from people who have no IP of their own in the market. I think shortened copyright terms would be good public policy, but the fact is that as a consumer you don't have any kind of moral claim on others' work.

UnoriginalGuy• 14 years ago

Actually we do.

The social contract is "we will protect your works, but in exchange everyone gets them after a time." This is true for patents and copyright.

We did our part, we protected their works for the period agreed, but instead of them doing their part (releasing them freely) they changed the rules at the last minute.

You make it sound like this is some small business or individual we're dealing with, which is simply a mis-characterisation. The people who made these works are dead, these are corporations.

GFischer• 14 years ago

I've seen plenty of IP holders arguing otherwise.

A prominent example is Notch, the creator of Minecraft, which is also a member of the Pirate Party.

mullingitover2• 14 years ago

By 2019 it'll have been 49 years without a single work entering the public domain. And somehow I doubt that we'll even get there, the goalposts will likely get moved again before 2019.

And people wonder why there's such widespread disrespect for copyright.

wpietri3• 14 years ago

Only if we let them move the goalposts. We stopped SOPA, and we can stop this. Personally, I plan to spend money both money and time on this battle when it happens.

Anm• 14 years ago

I also agree with purchasable extensions, as long as the prices increase exponentially from a very modest price in the first renewal.

Further, I think there is room to tie trademark into the process for media properties. In cases like Steamboat Willy, the character reflect a trademark for the Disney business. If it were applied as such, one might argue that a public domain version of the film (which could be seen as a product in the trademark domain) might be freely distributable but not modifiable without risking trademark infringement. This protects the free flow of information to later generations, as well as provides the company a means to protect the its brand from confusing or abusing variants/remixes. Further, registered trademarks already require regular renewal from a living person or operating business.

Not sure how one would apply that music and non-fiction (or if one should even try); seems about useful as copyrighting N seconds of silence.

(Obligatory: I am not a lawyer.)

mcculley2• 14 years ago

It's only tangentially related, but I had to make a comment: http://www.economist.com/comment/1835110#comment-1835110

I happily pay for my subscription to The Economist and enjoy reading it on my iPad. But they don't even allow you to select a single word in an article, which would make it possible to look things up in a dictionary.

This kind of limitation to attempt enforcement of copyright is part of the whole problem right now.

netrus• 14 years ago

I doubt that they do it to prevent copying. I can access every article from the newspaper on their website as nicely formated HTML.

mcculley2• 14 years ago

You have to go out of your way when writing an iOS app to prevent selection/copy in text views. They had to at least think about it.

wpietri3• 14 years ago

Oh, that's not a copyright thing. It's more "you must be this tall to ride this ride." The Economist is snooty; if you need to look up the words, they don't want you.

OGinparadise7• 14 years ago

Can someone make the argument about why should Disney be forced to give up copyright to Mickey Mouse? Or The Beatles to the music they created?

crpatino2• 14 years ago

Because the creations are presumably so good that will remain valuable long after the authors or any kin they'd personally care about are dead.

seabee• 14 years ago

Because releasing it into the public domain would benefit people more than it hurts Disney?

That's not the right question to ask anyway. Copyright only exists insomuch as government grants it - thus they can take it away if they please, or after an arbitrary duration. You should really ask how long is reasonable for a creator's work to be protected, and just how many generations of his descendants should inherit that right.

orionblastar2• 14 years ago

Our founding fathers wanted to encourage competition and innovation. Copyright was given as a temporary protection of works for the owner, and after a certain amount of time the copyright fell into the public domain and then anyone could use it for free. This allowed small businesses and individuals to be able to compete with the copyright holder, and encourage the copyright holder to keep innovating new copyrights as the old ones expired.

But with the current system, copyrights never expire, and copyright holders don't innovate like they used to do. As a result our economy has gotten worse, and unemployment keeps going up, and the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is denied.

The US Constitution Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 has been violated by these modern copyright laws.

And I quote:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

OGinparadise7• 14 years ago

Personally I see patents and copyrights as different, very different (I know that the expiration time are different too). There's a huge difference in innovation and benefit to the society when it comes to a Viagra patent and Mickey Mouse.

It's my opinion of course.

darkarmani7• 14 years ago

They were given the copyright only with the limitation that it would expire someday. You have the argument backwards.

Can any one make the argument why we should give Disney an unlimited monopoly on the content they create? Why should we pay for courts and systems to enforce their artificial scarcity, if they cannot uphold their side of the agreement?

OGinparadise7• 14 years ago

"They were given the copyright only with the limitation that it would expire someday. You have the argument backwards."

Maybe not, if it's something I invent or write, why does someone have to give me rights over it? They shouldn't take them instead... "shall not."

I understand how the constitution is written but

jimhefferon• 14 years ago

The standard of "xx years since the death of the author" can be quite awkward when the author is not prominent. Imagine if computer code was "10 years since the death of the author" and you found something on an archive. Better is "xx years since creation."

danielweber3• 14 years ago

Yes, while we can fight about the length, it should be a flat length. Young people who make works shouldn't have them last longer than old people who make works.

jimworm• 14 years ago

The last copyright extension might be the last Disney could push for. If they pushed it significantly further, they would lose the copyright of their older works to the Brothers Grimm.

Walt Disney's first animated film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" was published in 1937, 74 years after the death of Jacob Grimm. The Mickey Mouse copyright extension is 70 years after the death of the longest surviving creator.

That said, they could lobby to increase copyright terms for post-1927 works only, or corporate works only and leave natural persons out in the cold. It's uncertain whether these moves would be too politically extreme for Disney.

Access denied

Related Stories