8 ms·

What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2011?

253 points by follower 16y ago

mrleinad 16y ago
I'd like to know what DID enter the public domain, more than getting sorry for what did not.
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
  I think Plato's "Republic" will enter the public domain next year, although legislation is pending.
- gojomo 16y ago
  Unfortunately, because of discontinous extensions, no published works are entering the US public domain again until 2019: http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday Of course, whether any actually enter the public domain then depends on Congress not retroactively extending copyright terms again. Perhaps Congress will choose a term of 'heat death of the universe, plus one day' — which the courts could still uphold as technically 'limited' per the Constitution.
- follower 16y ago
  In addition to the (currently down) http://www.publicdomainworks.net/stats/year/2011 http://www.publicdomainworks.net/stats/year/2011 link provided by 2mur this blog entry also talks about what entered the public domain this year: http://blog.okfn.org/2010/10/18/which-works-enter-the-public-domain-in-2011/ http://blog.okfn.org/2010/10/18/which-works-enter-the-public... Also, my interpretation of the original post is that it's not a mere lamentation but also a reminder to question the current state of copyright and public domain legislation. Who benefits? Who loses? To what degree? And why? And it does so with concrete examples.
- ootachi 16y ago
  Most legal analysts now believe that no more works will ever enter the public domain. Copyright is perpetual.
panacea 16y ago
The 'public domain' hasn't been what's acceptable to share according to lawyers for quite some time now.
2mur 16y ago
http://publicdomainday.org/node/37/ http://publicdomainday.org/node/37/ http://www.publicdomainworks.net/stats/year/2011 http://www.publicdomainworks.net/stats/year/2011 Edit: Oops, meant that to be a comment to mrleinad
ajays 16y ago
The current copyright law is a prime example of the impotence of the electorate in the face of the power of Big Money. It is in the public interest to have works move into the public domain, so that others can build upon them (I'll refrain from linking to the myriad talks by Lessig and others about how the current copyright system is broken). And yet Hollywood keeps buying the legislators and perpetuates this broken system.
- javert 16y ago
  There is a compelling natural rights justification for intellectual property. It typically gets ignored (e.g. by people like Lessig). Basically: The product of a human being's work is rightfully his property; that's part and parcel of living in a civilized society. Doesn't matter if that work is entirely "intellectual" or not. The fact that it's physically easy to steal intellectual property does not make it right. People who make arguments about natural rights typically also think that if people's natural rights are not respected, that is going to ultimately be a net loss for society. I agree with that in the case of intellectual property. If people's intellectual property rights are not respected, it will not be profitable to develop intellectual property. Although we shouldn't shun abstractions, it's also important not to shun concretes. In this case: you claim that it's important for the public good to move works into the public domain. Well, how is it good for the public to move Horton Hears a Who or Sports Illustrated into the public domain? Much less Waiting for Godot.
  - macrael 16y ago
    But how is that argument extended that your natural right over your work should be extended for 70 years after you die? Why should that period keep getting longer?
    - javert 16y ago
      I don't have any specific opinion on how long it should be, as long as it's at least author's life plus some FIXNUM amount of years, to cover for the case where someone wants to invest in your work, but you might get hit by a bus tomorrow.
cookiecaper 16y ago
Copyright law is really disappointing here. How do such long terms contribute to the progress of sciences or the arts? The writers and main contributors to most of the pieces named are dead. The publishers have made their cash time and time again and now most of these pieces are by no means "hot sellers", though they may be of cultural or historical interest. And, there's 40 years left before the copyright expires. All this does is allow two extra generations to leech off of the creativity of their fathers without actually contributing anything themselves. Same goes for the two subsequent generations that fill the publishing houses that originally print these works. Do we really believe that Lord of the Rings or Lord of the Flies would not have been written or published if the copyright term was only 28 years (in fact, they _were_ published when the copyright term was 28 years)? It should be evident that cultural experiences will be generated even if the money doesn't flow down for 100-200 years (not that there won't be money anyway -- they'll just have to do something useful with the property, just like anyone else). The whole thing is just patently ridiculous. What do we gain by refusing to allow free commentary or contribution on Lord of the Rings? Tolkien is dead and gone and made a comfortable existence on his work I'm sure. If he was concerned with ensuring his posterity and publisher would have money from his work, he could have taken various measures to do so, like divesting large amounts of money to them in his will. It is ridiculous that all of society and culture has to suffer because of corporate lobbyists that don't want Disney et al to lose money. It's not like the publishers are being robbed here, they've made more than enough money on these properties and now it's time to share. Intellectual property was never meant to trap ideas -- it was meant to make their sharing plausible and reasonable (before the internet, there was significant overhead involved with publication and wide dissemination of such material). Now we just have leeches looking to ensure their own fat paycheck at the expense of free culture. I would be very happy to see a copyright law of 28 years since publication or less with no extensions, applied retroactively to all works under copyright in the United States. I don't see why life of the author should be considered -- if someone writes a good story, that's great, but 28 years of unlimited monopoly on that is quite enough. And note that public domain doesn't mean the copyright holder can't make money anymore -- it just means he has to provide something that the market deems valuable, instead of standing as a gatekeeper and profiting off of everyone else's imagination.
- 16y ago
praptak 16y ago
The deal between copyright holders and society was changed retroactively in favor of the former. Why then should the latter uphold their end of the deal, i.e. not pirate?
- gridspy 16y ago
  The issue isn't getting a copy of the original work for free. Of greater concern is the penalty for creating derivative works - so we can't have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_and_Zombies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_and_Zombies
  - profgubler 16y ago
    Actually, I would believe you could have had that even if it was in copyright, as it would be considered parody. Would it not?
    - ootachi 16y ago
      Depends. Parody is covered under fair use in the United States and is subject to the same test used to determine fair use.
    - nitrogen 16y ago
      It probably depends on how much of the original text and plot were used in the parody. It would certainly be considered illegal to write Harry Potter and the Zombie Hallows now, just by virtue of using the same characters as the original.
xenophanes 16y ago
About copyright in general: Micky Mouse is still in active use. Can anyone tell me some reason that Warner Brothers should be allowed to make a Mickey Mouse movie just because it's old now? One other example: sales of Ayn Rand's books currently help fund the spreading of the ideas from the books, after her death. That seems fair enough to me. Why shouldn't books sales be able to fund promotion of the book's ideas as long as people keep buying the book?
- avdempsey 16y ago
  I'll bite. I don't care if WB makes a Mickey Mouse movie. Walt is dead. We're not talking about the state stealing "Rearden Metal" shortly after its invention. Generations have grown up with this character and it seems just as outrageous as state-based exploitation to hold this character captive forever. How does inifinite copyright extension do anything but favor the sad corporatism you oppose? Entire generations will never re-sow the seeds of these cultural works. If you're on this planet to tell the next great Mickey Mouse story then you better be lucky enough to get the right spot inside Disney. So I don't see any compelling Randsian arguments here. Each generation should get a shot at profiting (or simply engaging publicly) with the cultural fruits of a prior generation. Creators will be fine.
  - blasdel 16y ago
    I wouldn't even consider Mickey Mouse to be a character - he hasn't been used that way by Disney for at least 50 years, and never had much character development to begin with even when he 'starred' in minstrel cartoons. Mickey Mouse is a logo, deserving of trademark protection and nothing more.
    - pavlov 16y ago
      Mickey is an actively used character in European-drawn Disney comics. He's usually either a serious detective protagonist, or just a friend of Donald or Goofy. For all his detective skills, he somehow has never figured out that Goofy is the same person as Super-Goofy (there is a peanut plant in Goofy's backyard that turns him into a Superman-style hero).
bhickey 16y ago
Why was Eldred v. Ashcroft argued on 1st Amendment grounds? There seems like a relatively straightforward argument from the Takings Clause.
- woodrow 16y ago
  Lawrence Lessig explains how he "lost the big one" here: http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_le...
julius_geezer 16y ago
"Under the pre-1978 copyright law, you could now teach history and politics using most of Toynbee's A Study of History (vols. 7-10 were first published in 1954) or Henry Kissinger's A World Restored, or stage a modern adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's A Time to Love and A Time to Die for community theater." As far as I know, you can teach a class using Toynbee or Kissinger; the students just have to find copies. As for community theater, they put on works far more recent--one friend appeared several years ago in "Dancing at Lughnasa" (1995), another in "Lips together, Teeth Apart" (1991; or whichever MacNally play gave him a chance to shed his clothes--"Love! Valor! Etc" of 1994 maybe). What the terms are, I can't say; but it doesn't seem to run anyone broke. I do agree that the copyright extension gone beyond reasonable bounds. The critic Hugh Kenner made an interesting case that the extension of copyright in the United Kingdom about 100 years ago had a dramatic effect on the public's impression of what literature was, creating a discontinuity in perception that made the modernists' work appear to have come about without its actual context.
forensic 16y ago
How do international books fit into this? Lord of the Flies and Tolkien among others are British books. If they enter the public domain in Britain, does that enable Americans to use them even if they are still copyrighted in the US?
- a_m_kelly 16y ago
  That's an interesting question. My [minimal] understanding of copyright law suggests that whether the book's in public domain in Britain has no bearing on the rights granted to Americans to use it. If it is in the public domain in Britain, that doesn't give you a free license to start photocopying the book and reselling it here in the US. Those rights are assigned to a party here in the US. (and thanks to some oddness in the publishing world (or laws that help curb uncompetitive practices, the same company can't own the rights to a work in both the UK and US.) I don't know enough about this to speculate on your importation and use of a book in the public domain elsewhere. I suspect personal use of the materials is fine. You could likely import a public domain copy of the work from England and as long as you don't adapt, resell, translate or otherwise re-purpose the work you'd be in the clear. I've got a friend who works for a company that does a lot of international rights work in publishing. I'll ask him and post back here, since now I'm curious. (these sorts of byzantine international arrangements are one of several ways, along with translations, that authors of books have been able to make a reasonable living, selling the rights to the same book several times and being able to quickly drum up a blog post for slow news days with pictures of the Czechoslovakian cover of their most recent book.)
  - barrkel 16y ago
    This "interesting question" is, as I understand it, the basis for the usual ratcheting up of copyright terms. One side says "we must harmonize with the other side", but they go a little further, and then harmonization happens on the other side, and so forth.
- drdaeman 16y ago
  Look here: http://publicdomainday.org/disclaimer http://publicdomainday.org/disclaimer "...the fact that the works of a given author are in the public domain in a jurisdiction does NOT mean (unfortunately) that those works are also public domain in other jurisdictions. If you need to be sure about the status of a given work, check your national copyright law and, if needed, a lawyer. For 2011, just as an example of how fiendishly complex copyright laws can be, we are told that Isaac Babel, the great Russian author who died in 1940, will NOT enter the public domain in Russia, his home country. In Russia, in fact, the terms of protection of oppressed authors begin with the date of rehabilitation, which for Babel was 1954. Another feature of the Russian copyright law is that the terms of protection of posthumous works start with the date of publication, which means that Bulgakov's masterpiece, "Master and Margarita", first published in 1966 (26 years after Bulgakov's death) in Russia will be under copyright until 2037."
jleyank 16y ago
I might be mis-remembering, but doesn't (L)GPL rely on copyright law for its status? If so, then there's at least one bit of IP that's "properly protected" by copyright law.
- follower 16y ago
  Yes, you remember correctly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft) but GNU would have an issue with the term "IP". :) I don't have a link but my impression is that part of the need for the GPL to exist in the first place is due to restrictions of copyright and the GPL uses copyright to enforce itself as a way of reacting against the system which it would rather not exist.
  - Jach 16y ago
    I have a couple links: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html (Why IP is a bad term.)
follower 16y ago
I wonder if anyone has ever considered that existing copyright legislation puts authors' lives at risk by making the term: date of death + N years? There's a short story in that at least but now I'm too afraid for my life to write it. :)
dfhtkyu 16y ago
----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------
Sukotto 16y ago
According to Rufus Pollock of Cambridge University, the optimal copyright length is 14 years. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/research-optimal-copyright-term-is-14-years.ars http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/research-optimal-... http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optimal_copyright.pdf http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optimal_copyrig...
leon_ 16y ago
At least our dark lord Cthulhu is public domain.

253 points by follower 16y ago

mrleinad 16y ago

I'd like to know what DID enter the public domain, more than getting sorry for what did not.

erikpukinskis 16y ago
I think Plato's "Republic" will enter the public domain next year, although legislation is pending.
gojomo 16y ago
Unfortunately, because of discontinous extensions, no published works are entering the US public domain again until 2019: http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday Of course, whether any actually enter the public domain then depends on Congress not retroactively extending copyright terms again. Perhaps Congress will choose a term of 'heat death of the universe, plus one day' — which the courts could still uphold as technically 'limited' per the Constitution.
follower 16y ago
In addition to the (currently down) http://www.publicdomainworks.net/stats/year/2011 http://www.publicdomainworks.net/stats/year/2011 link provided by 2mur this blog entry also talks about what entered the public domain this year: http://blog.okfn.org/2010/10/18/which-works-enter-the-public-domain-in-2011/ http://blog.okfn.org/2010/10/18/which-works-enter-the-public... Also, my interpretation of the original post is that it's not a mere lamentation but also a reminder to question the current state of copyright and public domain legislation. Who benefits? Who loses? To what degree? And why? And it does so with concrete examples.
ootachi 16y ago
Most legal analysts now believe that no more works will ever enter the public domain. Copyright is perpetual.

panacea 16y ago

The 'public domain' hasn't been what's acceptable to share according to lawyers for quite some time now.

2mur 16y ago

http://publicdomainday.org/node/37/ http://publicdomainday.org/node/37/ http://www.publicdomainworks.net/stats/year/2011 http://www.publicdomainworks.net/stats/year/2011 Edit: Oops, meant that to be a comment to mrleinad

ajays 16y ago

The current copyright law is a prime example of the impotence of the electorate in the face of the power of Big Money. It is in the public interest to have works move into the public domain, so that others can build upon them (I'll refrain from linking to the myriad talks by Lessig and others about how the current copyright system is broken). And yet Hollywood keeps buying the legislators and perpetuates this broken system.

javert 16y ago
There is a compelling natural rights justification for intellectual property. It typically gets ignored (e.g. by people like Lessig). Basically: The product of a human being's work is rightfully his property; that's part and parcel of living in a civilized society. Doesn't matter if that work is entirely "intellectual" or not. The fact that it's physically easy to steal intellectual property does not make it right. People who make arguments about natural rights typically also think that if people's natural rights are not respected, that is going to ultimately be a net loss for society. I agree with that in the case of intellectual property. If people's intellectual property rights are not respected, it will not be profitable to develop intellectual property. Although we shouldn't shun abstractions, it's also important not to shun concretes. In this case: you claim that it's important for the public good to move works into the public domain. Well, how is it good for the public to move Horton Hears a Who or Sports Illustrated into the public domain? Much less Waiting for Godot.
- macrael 16y ago
  But how is that argument extended that your natural right over your work should be extended for 70 years after you die? Why should that period keep getting longer?
  - javert 16y ago
    I don't have any specific opinion on how long it should be, as long as it's at least author's life plus some FIXNUM amount of years, to cover for the case where someone wants to invest in your work, but you might get hit by a bus tomorrow.

cookiecaper 16y ago

Copyright law is really disappointing here. How do such long terms contribute to the progress of sciences or the arts? The writers and main contributors to most of the pieces named are dead. The publishers have made their cash time and time again and now most of these pieces are by no means "hot sellers", though they may be of cultural or historical interest. And, there's 40 years left before the copyright expires. All this does is allow two extra generations to leech off of the creativity of their fathers without actually contributing anything themselves. Same goes for the two subsequent generations that fill the publishing houses that originally print these works. Do we really believe that Lord of the Rings or Lord of the Flies would not have been written or published if the copyright term was only 28 years (in fact, they _were_ published when the copyright term was 28 years)? It should be evident that cultural experiences will be generated even if the money doesn't flow down for 100-200 years (not that there won't be money anyway -- they'll just have to do something useful with the property, just like anyone else). The whole thing is just patently ridiculous. What do we gain by refusing to allow free commentary or contribution on Lord of the Rings? Tolkien is dead and gone and made a comfortable existence on his work I'm sure. If he was concerned with ensuring his posterity and publisher would have money from his work, he could have taken various measures to do so, like divesting large amounts of money to them in his will. It is ridiculous that all of society and culture has to suffer because of corporate lobbyists that don't want Disney et al to lose money. It's not like the publishers are being robbed here, they've made more than enough money on these properties and now it's time to share. Intellectual property was never meant to trap ideas -- it was meant to make their sharing plausible and reasonable (before the internet, there was significant overhead involved with publication and wide dissemination of such material). Now we just have leeches looking to ensure their own fat paycheck at the expense of free culture. I would be very happy to see a copyright law of 28 years since publication or less with no extensions, applied retroactively to all works under copyright in the United States. I don't see why life of the author should be considered -- if someone writes a good story, that's great, but 28 years of unlimited monopoly on that is quite enough. And note that public domain doesn't mean the copyright holder can't make money anymore -- it just means he has to provide something that the market deems valuable, instead of standing as a gatekeeper and profiting off of everyone else's imagination.

16y ago

praptak 16y ago

The deal between copyright holders and society was changed retroactively in favor of the former. Why then should the latter uphold their end of the deal, i.e. not pirate?

gridspy 16y ago
The issue isn't getting a copy of the original work for free. Of greater concern is the penalty for creating derivative works - so we can't have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_and_Zombies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_and_Zombies
- profgubler 16y ago
  Actually, I would believe you could have had that even if it was in copyright, as it would be considered parody. Would it not?
  - ootachi 16y ago
    Depends. Parody is covered under fair use in the United States and is subject to the same test used to determine fair use.
  - nitrogen 16y ago
    It probably depends on how much of the original text and plot were used in the parody. It would certainly be considered illegal to write Harry Potter and the Zombie Hallows now, just by virtue of using the same characters as the original.

xenophanes 16y ago

About copyright in general: Micky Mouse is still in active use. Can anyone tell me some reason that Warner Brothers should be allowed to make a Mickey Mouse movie just because it's old now? One other example: sales of Ayn Rand's books currently help fund the spreading of the ideas from the books, after her death. That seems fair enough to me. Why shouldn't books sales be able to fund promotion of the book's ideas as long as people keep buying the book?

avdempsey 16y ago
I'll bite. I don't care if WB makes a Mickey Mouse movie. Walt is dead. We're not talking about the state stealing "Rearden Metal" shortly after its invention. Generations have grown up with this character and it seems just as outrageous as state-based exploitation to hold this character captive forever. How does inifinite copyright extension do anything but favor the sad corporatism you oppose? Entire generations will never re-sow the seeds of these cultural works. If you're on this planet to tell the next great Mickey Mouse story then you better be lucky enough to get the right spot inside Disney. So I don't see any compelling Randsian arguments here. Each generation should get a shot at profiting (or simply engaging publicly) with the cultural fruits of a prior generation. Creators will be fine.
- blasdel 16y ago
  I wouldn't even consider Mickey Mouse to be a character - he hasn't been used that way by Disney for at least 50 years, and never had much character development to begin with even when he 'starred' in minstrel cartoons. Mickey Mouse is a logo, deserving of trademark protection and nothing more.
  - pavlov 16y ago
    Mickey is an actively used character in European-drawn Disney comics. He's usually either a serious detective protagonist, or just a friend of Donald or Goofy. For all his detective skills, he somehow has never figured out that Goofy is the same person as Super-Goofy (there is a peanut plant in Goofy's backyard that turns him into a Superman-style hero).

bhickey 16y ago

Why was Eldred v. Ashcroft argued on 1st Amendment grounds? There seems like a relatively straightforward argument from the Takings Clause.

woodrow 16y ago
Lawrence Lessig explains how he "lost the big one" here: http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_le...

julius_geezer 16y ago

"Under the pre-1978 copyright law, you could now teach history and politics using most of Toynbee's A Study of History (vols. 7-10 were first published in 1954) or Henry Kissinger's A World Restored, or stage a modern adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's A Time to Love and A Time to Die for community theater." As far as I know, you can teach a class using Toynbee or Kissinger; the students just have to find copies. As for community theater, they put on works far more recent--one friend appeared several years ago in "Dancing at Lughnasa" (1995), another in "Lips together, Teeth Apart" (1991; or whichever MacNally play gave him a chance to shed his clothes--"Love! Valor! Etc" of 1994 maybe). What the terms are, I can't say; but it doesn't seem to run anyone broke. I do agree that the copyright extension gone beyond reasonable bounds. The critic Hugh Kenner made an interesting case that the extension of copyright in the United Kingdom about 100 years ago had a dramatic effect on the public's impression of what literature was, creating a discontinuity in perception that made the modernists' work appear to have come about without its actual context.

forensic 16y ago

How do international books fit into this? Lord of the Flies and Tolkien among others are British books. If they enter the public domain in Britain, does that enable Americans to use them even if they are still copyrighted in the US?

a_m_kelly 16y ago
That's an interesting question. My [minimal] understanding of copyright law suggests that whether the book's in public domain in Britain has no bearing on the rights granted to Americans to use it. If it is in the public domain in Britain, that doesn't give you a free license to start photocopying the book and reselling it here in the US. Those rights are assigned to a party here in the US. (and thanks to some oddness in the publishing world (or laws that help curb uncompetitive practices, the same company can't own the rights to a work in both the UK and US.) I don't know enough about this to speculate on your importation and use of a book in the public domain elsewhere. I suspect personal use of the materials is fine. You could likely import a public domain copy of the work from England and as long as you don't adapt, resell, translate or otherwise re-purpose the work you'd be in the clear. I've got a friend who works for a company that does a lot of international rights work in publishing. I'll ask him and post back here, since now I'm curious. (these sorts of byzantine international arrangements are one of several ways, along with translations, that authors of books have been able to make a reasonable living, selling the rights to the same book several times and being able to quickly drum up a blog post for slow news days with pictures of the Czechoslovakian cover of their most recent book.)
- barrkel 16y ago
  This "interesting question" is, as I understand it, the basis for the usual ratcheting up of copyright terms. One side says "we must harmonize with the other side", but they go a little further, and then harmonization happens on the other side, and so forth.
drdaeman 16y ago
Look here: http://publicdomainday.org/disclaimer http://publicdomainday.org/disclaimer "...the fact that the works of a given author are in the public domain in a jurisdiction does NOT mean (unfortunately) that those works are also public domain in other jurisdictions. If you need to be sure about the status of a given work, check your national copyright law and, if needed, a lawyer. For 2011, just as an example of how fiendishly complex copyright laws can be, we are told that Isaac Babel, the great Russian author who died in 1940, will NOT enter the public domain in Russia, his home country. In Russia, in fact, the terms of protection of oppressed authors begin with the date of rehabilitation, which for Babel was 1954. Another feature of the Russian copyright law is that the terms of protection of posthumous works start with the date of publication, which means that Bulgakov's masterpiece, "Master and Margarita", first published in 1966 (26 years after Bulgakov's death) in Russia will be under copyright until 2037."

jleyank 16y ago

I might be mis-remembering, but doesn't (L)GPL rely on copyright law for its status? If so, then there's at least one bit of IP that's "properly protected" by copyright law.

follower 16y ago
Yes, you remember correctly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft) but GNU would have an issue with the term "IP". :) I don't have a link but my impression is that part of the need for the GPL to exist in the first place is due to restrictions of copyright and the GPL uses copyright to enforce itself as a way of reacting against the system which it would rather not exist.
- Jach 16y ago
  I have a couple links: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html (Why IP is a bad term.)

follower 16y ago

I wonder if anyone has ever considered that existing copyright legislation puts authors' lives at risk by making the term: date of death + N years? There's a short story in that at least but now I'm too afraid for my life to write it. :)

dfhtkyu 16y ago

----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------ ----- http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com ------

Sukotto 16y ago

According to Rufus Pollock of Cambridge University, the optimal copyright length is 14 years. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/research-optimal-copyright-term-is-14-years.ars http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/research-optimal-... http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optimal_copyright.pdf http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optimal_copyrig...

leon_ 16y ago

At least our dark lord Cthulhu is public domain.