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Artists and writers whose works enter the public domain in 2018
- slazaro 9y agoIs there a list of all the artists whose works won't but should, thanks to Disney, corrupt politicians, et al?
- pavlov 9y agoYes, the Center for Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School publishes exactly such a list every year. Here's the one for 2017: https://law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2017/pre-1976/ https://law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2017/pre-1976/
- rusk 9y agoand since this seems to be down, here's a mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20170201214420/https://law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2017/pre-1976/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170201214420/https://law.duke....
- hmhrex 9y agoI find this list to be way more interesting. Thanks!
- cableshaft 9y agoOnce/if Dr. Seuss enters public domain you're going to see that everywhere. The entire world will turn into a Seuss wonderland. Or at least I can dream it will.
- 1812Overture 9y agoNothing created after Mickey Mouse will ever enter the public domain in the United States.
- alberto_ol 9y agoI live in Italy. Can I get (legally) the works of Willa Cather and G. H. Hardy (the mathematician)? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_in_public_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_in_public_domain they enter the public domain in 2018 as well.
- fatwa 9y agoGood for poor people but too bad for the families of these artists/writers, as they won’t be able to benefit from it anymore. This is why government regulation is terrible.
- josephagoss 9y agoI think 70 years after the creator died is really enough.
- hvidgaard 9y agoSeriously? 70 years after the original author is dead, it's terrible that others cannot continue live off it?
- schtitt 9y agoHm yeah, except without government regulation there would be no copyright in the first place..
- kakarot 9y agoWhat? Copyright itself is a regulated affair. Not only that, but our idea of "intellectual property" rights is a modern notion. Familiarize yourself with the Copyright Act of 1976 [0] before you start making the claim that copyright expiration is somehow "government regulation". It's the only good part about the the act. The copyright and IP law in general have been abused to do some very greedy shit. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976 https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92appa.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92appa.pdf
- Houshalter 9y agoNot just poor people. Walt Disney wasn't poor, but he made massive use of public domain works. Now his family cries into $1000 bills about how allowing his works to go into public domain will cut their income by 1%. Give me a break.
- reificator 9y ago> This is why government regulation is terrible. Uh... The copyright system is government regulation. The government says that in exchange for producing a creative work, you have exclusive rights to publish that work for a "limited" time. > bad for the families of these artists/writers, as they won’t be able to benefit from it anymore That benefit was purely due to government regulation. > Good for poor people Good for society in general IMO, because even very old works often inspire new ones. Imagine that the greek and roman pantheons were under copyright, and anyone writing about Zeus would be sued for infringement.
- robin_reala 9y ago(I often drop this into PD threads so sorry if you’ve seen this before, but) the Standard Ebooks project[1] that I contribute to takes PD texts, updates them with better markup and a high quality house style, adds PD cover artwork, then releases them again back into the public domain. Although I’m outside the US the project is US-based, so I’d love to see a yearly update interval again there for both texts to produce and sources of cover art. [1] https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/
- JKCalhoun 9y agoI wonder why the "Through the Looking Glass" does not have the Tenniel art. It's in the public domain.
- robin_reala 9y agoThere was some discussion about this: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/standardebooks/WTEIRmRmmDs/discussion https://groups.google.com/d/topic/standardebooks/WTEIRmRmmDs... tl;dr: it was felt that for the quality of available scans it wasn’t worth including them. That’s not to say they couldn’t be added in a later edition though were better quality scans to become available. I’m currently working on Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, for which the images are essential. Planning to try and trace and hand-amend the images into high quality SVG as part of the production process.
- JKCalhoun 9y agoI wonder if SVG would kill the naive look of "Flatland's" art. Or perhaps, maybe more likely, the author would have preferred mathematically precise art. Good luck.
- robin_reala 9y agoI’ll start with vectorising the scans and go from there, rather than recreating them. You’re right, that wouldn’t fit at all.
- 9y ago
- b3lvedere 9y ago"Wondering what will enter the public domain through copyright expiration in the U.S.? Like last year, and the year before… Nothing" (sigh)
- walterbell 9y agoWhat is expected to happen with US law in 2019 - another Disney extension?
- 1_2__4 9y agoHow could anyone possibly predict anything else, given the US government right now?
- vkou 9y agoThe US government right now is waging a war against the commons. As such, it's pretty easy to predict that they will, with no fanfare or controversy, pass a law that enriches large corporations at the expense of everyone else. Trump signing the Mickey Mouse Act of 2019 would be the least surprising thing about his presidency. Him not signing it is certainly possible (Even a broken clock is right twice a day), but it would be surprising and unexpected.
- LoserNerd420 9y agoThat's why he's getting these "commons" a tax break and trying to fix their shitty health care? Idiot.
- averagewall 9y agoIt did stop the TPP trade agreement which would have extended copyright terms in other countries.
- jccalhoun 9y agoI wouldn't be surprised. I am kind of surprised that we haven't heard rumbling already but with all the moves Disney has made maybe they are afraid of drawing too much attention to themselves and will wait.
- drpgq 9y agoHoping that Canada sticks with 50.
- caiob 9y agoHow exactly does CHE GUEVARA not make it into the picture list?
- justincormack 9y agoThe most famous picture of him is presumably not out of copyright...
- sudouser 9y agoshower thought: now that Disney owns Star Wars, it will never be public domain
- sjs382 9y agoI've had this Slashdot comment bookmarked since 2009: https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1306857&cid=28736323 https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1306857&cid=2873632... In the USA Copyright lengths are very simple. Anything older than Mickey Mouse is public domain and everything else is still copyrighted. Edit: Typo--fixed the year.
- Z-Widwil 9y agoThank you for sharing this. I legitimately hope that something will change, and I won't have to share your comment in 2035.
- beloch 9y agoHonestly, I wish they'd just issue a special exception for Disney instead of screwing up the entire system because they don't want to appear nakedly corrupt.
- diggernet 9y agoMy idea for Disney-appeasement without special exemptions: Let copyrights be extended for 14 years at a time, indefinitely, with the requirement of registration and a token filing fee. Anyone who cares can keep their copyright for as long as they want, if they just care enough to fill out a 1 page form. Anyone who doesn't care that much (or no heirs, or whatever), the copyright expires. Bonus side effect: for everything still in copyright, there is a database you can look up current contact info for licensing.
- regulation_d 9y agoPretty sure that would violate the Equal Protection Clause.
- wiz21c 9y agoNow that Disney absorbed 20th Century Fox, is there a way to know what movies' copyright are controlled by them ?
- Joakal 9y agoCopyright schemes are almost always for the distributors, not the creators. Let creators enjoy the full benefits of copyright by returning the ownership back to creator after 10 years. After a decade, it is expected that creators will be able to command bigger cut as compensation for popular works and thus, inspire more creators to publicly deliver works due to the expectation of more appropriate and fair level of compensation from interested distributors. Otherwise, creators are discouraged from independent creation of works if it's believed that they will suffer perpetual loss of copyright ownership in exchange for a minuscule payment. Similar scheme exists in Europe: http://evolver.fm/2012/02/29/why-mastered-for-itunes-wont-defuse-a-copyright-time-bomb/ http://evolver.fm/2012/02/29/why-mastered-for-itunes-wont-de... As it stands, distributors can say "well, sell us the copyright for a dollar and we might give you a cut. No, not a licence, the copyright! At least you'll get a lot of exposure? Hehehe" The current scheme has a lot of economic encouragement for indy creators to aim for live music, book signings, etc. Where creators need can be present and needed.
- BeetleB 9y agoHmm... Not sure what to think about this. The real question is: What role should publishers/distributors have, and be allowed to have? From a writer's standpoint, I think it was common not to grant the publisher a perpetual license. The publisher would offer the author an advance and get exclusivity. If the book made enough money to cover that advance, the copyright would revert to the author (publisher may still have license to keep publishing, but not exclusivity). In today's world, people can and do make big money self publishing on Amazon, so the hold publishers had has reduced. The argument makes less sense now than 20 years ago. If you want to argue that self publishing is still a crap shoot compared to traditional publishers, then we have to recognize the great value publishers can bring to the author, and discuss why government intervention (i.e. law) is necessary in this case.