21 ms·
What will enter the public domain in 2022
- DantesKite 5y agoThis is the worst site I've ever visited. By far. It is acutely annoying. Like if I had to design something to frustrate a person, this would be the platonic ideal.
- WoodenChair 5y agoWell, that's a super annoying design. Listicles are popular for a reason.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoThe fact I'd need to go check this every day (or check it on the last day) to see everything is... inane.
- wolpoli 5y agoPlus there is a newsletter subscription popup box with no close button, but you have to somehow figure out that you need to click in the grey area outside to close.
- fullstop 5y agoThere is a close button in the far upper right. Also, clicking outside of the box dismissed the popup. I did not test pressing escape.
- lapetitejort 5y agoMight be faster to link to the Wikipedia page [0]. As an American some names that stick out to me are Sinclair Lewis and Ludwig Wittgenstein. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_in_public_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_in_public_domain
- willis936 5y agoAnd Jim Morrison, though moot because The Band Formerly Known As The Doors still sells their music and I'm certain has kept the copyright hot.
- PowerfulWizard 5y agoFor those of us who are helplessly impatient, run this in console: document.querySelectorAll(".countdown-calendar__door").forEach(e => e.classList.add("will-open"))
- Arainach 5y agoIs THAT what's going on? What an awful, miserable, hostile website. Please stop trying to do silly Javascript tricks and just give me text and pictures.
- imachine1980_ 5y agoWon't somebody please think of the engagement
- dang 5y agopublicdomainreview.org is a good site. It has obviously been a labor of love for many years and I've never known them to do shitty engagement tricks.
- croddin 5y agoThen this to show all of the titles document.querySelectorAll(".door-front").forEach(e=>e.remove())
- dheera 5y agoI love this, and wish there were a community browser that auto-offers the most popular JS hacks to fix UX. Similar this can be done for JS paywalls and to get rid of annoying newsletter and GDPR boxes without agreeing to them.
- mdaniel 5y agoThat's the problem ViolentMonkey and sites like https://greasyfork.org/ https://greasyfork.org/ are trying to fix but as with many "community contributions" the quality is all over the place
- jurassic 5y agoThe 1950 United States census will also be released by the National Archives in April 2022. There will be much rejoicing among genealogy nerds.
- bombastry 5y agoIn addition to its annoying layout, this site bizarrely decides to mix public domain works from the various different major copyright systems together (life + 50 years, life + 70 years, the old American system of 95 years). For example, Nabokov's first novel in Russian, Mary, is listed because it was published in 1926; he died in 1977 which means in virtually every non-American country, that work will still be copyrighted until 2028. They also include Jim Morrison who died in 1971, whose death is only relevant to the countries still on the life + 50 years system. However, it seems like very few of the Doors' songs give just Morrison songwriting credit. This means that only a small handful of Doors songs will be in the public domain in those countries and most likely this will not apply to the recordings either. For American readers, the best way to find out what will be entering the public domain is to go directly to the Wikipedia pages for the "1926 in literature"[1], "1926 in film"[2], etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1926_in_literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1926_in_literature [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1926_in_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1926_in_film
- nbabitskiy 5y agoAre there any countries that enforce copyright as much as the US do? I have no idea when a book legally enters public domain in Russia, since any book I can think of is a couple clicks away. Literally anything: Nabokov, Rowling, etc Edit: come to think of it, it's pretty universal. Libgen and bookfi are not exactly Russian. There's probably little difference whether a book is public domain unless you want to make a movie.
- duskwuff 5y ago> There's probably little difference whether a book is public domain unless you want to make a movie. Or if you want to publish other works based on the book: a translation, a critical edition, a compilation, a graphic novel...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cpach 5y ago“ Are there any countries that enforce copyright as much as the US do?” I’d say definitely yes. Most western countries are very similar in this regard.
- punnerud 5y agoAnyone with a webpage that publish everything that gets public? Could upload to YouTube and Archive.org, but we still need some place to know what is published and what is not yet found.
- karaterobot 5y agoDoes any site collect a list of works created based on works which have recently entered the public domain? The one that comes to mind is last year's movie The Invisible Man (and here I am assuming they would have had to negotiate with the Wells estate prior to 2017). But, I'd like to see a more complete list of examples.
- lucumo 5y agoThis design mimics a traditional advent calendar. I think it's kind of cute.
- nemo44x 5y agoIt's a really bad UX though. There should at least be a link to just a standard list of things.
- Kerrick 5y agoThe list would be only one item long today, because they're only enabling one item per day. In that way it reminds me of the old web dev advent calendar slash blog, 24 Ways, which was really popular in the days when IE7, IE8, and Chrome 1.0 were exciting browser releases.
- aosaigh 5y agoCan you explain why it's bad UX if it's intended to be an advent calendar?
- nemo44x 5y agoIt’s not clear at all if your not a Christian familiar with these superstitions. You expect to see a list of content that is available and instead you are using some weird Jesus birthday countdown tool which isn’t great for conveying information.
- aaron695 5y agoGreat even more reboots. Can't anyone have an original thought anymore? Disney tells us Winnie the Poo is part of our culture, because the more of our culture they own the more money they get, so our response is to fight for these old shitty copyrights? Not create a new book, or film, or interactive game. We can only copy and remake and sequel and reboot and Universe. And people think when we get UBI people can sit around all day creating art.
- thanatos519 5y agoJust tell me when I get my Mickey Mouse hentai, will you?
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoThe trademark will never expire so derivative works will be limited in scope.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoYou can use trademarks without permission, you can disclaim the origin to avoid any possibility of confusion. AIUI EU courts have frowned on attempts to extend copyright using trademarks. It feels like a lewd art piece would clearly not be from Disney in any case so trademark really wouldn't be an issue. I learnt v.recently that UK copyright since 2015 has allowed parody and pastiche (following an EU directive from ~2001), so with a disclaimer on origin you might be able to have your Mickey manga right now? I guess it will depend on whether Disney can buy another copyright extension in the USA and pay off enough people to push those changes to other jurisdictions based on very spurious notions that we somehow have to harmonise with USA. This is not legal advice and in no way relates to my employment.
- Kranar 5y agoTrademarks can not be used as a roundabout way to enforce copyrights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dastar_Corp._v._Twentieth_Century_Fox_Film_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dastar_Corp._v._Twentieth_Cent....
- echelon 5y ago> Under current copyright law, Steamboat Willie is set to enter the US public domain on January 1, 2024; however, later iterations of the character of Mickey Mouse will remain under copyright protection until 2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoSouth Park has made parody use Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters in several episodes so depending on how the hentai is designed, you might be in the clear now.
- camjohnson26 5y agoCopyright law has damaged global culture. Who benefits when the copyright to Winnie-the-Pooh takes almost 100 years to expire? Only the companies who sell licensed merchandise. Think about how many fan works we’ll never see because we bizarrely decided to grant creators a monopoly on whatever they create, even if the work enters the public mythology like with Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. The people of the country should own the stories and characters after a reasonable length of time, and 100 years is laughable.
- bushbaba 5y agoFunny as a patent is granted for much less time. You’d think patents and copyright would have the same duration
- CerealFounder 5y agoThey used to be commiserate. For whatever reason media based rent seekers lobbied better than ones with technical products.
- ggm 5y agoSpellchecker changed commensurate to commiserate. Most apposite!
- KarlKemp 5y agoPatents cover discoveries, which, as a class, are limited, whereas copyrighted works are created, and therefore (in some sense) unlimited. Or, in other words: a patent can block access to something that is potentially irreplaceable, and that would have been discovered by others, eventually. Donald Duck just wouldn’t exist without Disney. The goal of copyright is to provide some incentive for creation. At the same time, it limits the distribution of those works and the benefit that brings, an effect called deadweight loss. Those two goals—amount & quality of creation and distribution—are in perpetual conflict, and the limited time is supposed to balance them for maximum benefit. Is death + 70/95 years too long? Yes, defjnitely. I remember seeing something like 15 years being floated as the true optimum, but it’s likely to differ by category. But it’s just as annoying to often see complete ignorance or denial of the basic mechanism (I. e. “Commercial music suxx anyway” or “why should I pay for news”) (Another item on this scale: trademarks, which are entirely imbued with value by the owner’s exclusive right to use them. They are not time-limited as long as they are used because, to a first approximation, the value of “Levi’s” has nothing to do with the beauty of the word (which one could consider a limited ressource), but depends on the company’s interest in maintaining its status)
- Pxtl 5y agoWorth noting that during the USMCA negotiations under Trump, Canada agreed to extend copyright to life-plus-70 years, up from the current life-plus-50. However, Canada has a 2 year deadline (from 1 July 2020) to actually implement the change to life-plus-70.
- maxwell 5y agoSounds like the Doors may slip through.
- Pxtl 5y agoAlbums are weird and backwards in Canada because the actual recordings are 70 years flat (thanks to Randy Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive who was about to see his first albums enter public domain and lobbied the gov't to extend it from 50 to 70), but the copyright on the written composition is 50 years after death of author. This strikes me as backwards - like, I feel like there's minimal public interest in getting the specific recording of the performance of the songs into the public domain, while substantial interest in getting the songbook into the public domain so that people can cover it and make derivative works freely. And yet the length of the copyright terms is far stricter on the songbook vs the album, where one is a fixed time from recording while the other adds the lifespan of the author to the mix.
- VBprogrammer 5y agoMickey mouse? Naw, didn't think so.
- maxwell 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_in_public_domain#Entering_the_public_domain_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_in_public_domain#Entering...
- coolspot 5y agoThey will claim that the author (Walt Disney) is not dead, just frozen in sleep, so copyright doesn’t expire.
- owlbynight 5y agoThis is easily the worst UX of the year for me. Designed by an absolute alien. Do they really think I'm going to come to this site every day to see a GIS thumbnail instead of just doing a google search to find the entire, unopinionated list?
- hyfgfh 5y agorelax it`s just an advent calendar
- owlbynight 5y agoI don't mind a real advent calendar, but there's something wholly offensive to my soul about this designer spending so much time on code that only exists to needlessly strip away my freedom to overindulge... on information... that I can just Google. It's passive aggressive. User enragement. My wife does this idiosyncratic thing where she lays claim to half of a bag of snacks that has no intent to ever consume. And I know it's nonsense, but I'm forced to bend to her will and watch the second law of thermodynamics unfold at an excruciating rate. Walk through the kitchen, past the pantry, as entropy claims Schrodinger's half pack of Fig Newtons yet again. This is the website equivalent of that.
- SiliconVallet 5y agoSad reductionist stripping away creativity to leave nothing but a hollow husk of bare information, as if all information must be presented in utilitarian brutalism exclusively. You're view is about as sad as your own attempts at passive aggression.
- fnord77 5y ago> All sheet music published in 1926 enters the public domain from the linked wikipedia article
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoWinnie-the-Pooh !
- wanderer_ 5y agoAnd nobody knows what else! (actuallly I got it to work by playing with the DOM. This is Hacker News, after all...)
- tzs 5y agoOT: does anyone else remember the free Winnie-the-Pooh ebook that Apple gave away for free when they first released their ebook software and store for iPad? At some point that disappeared from my library, and does not show up in my purchase history either. Did Apple pull it for some reason?
- Teknoman117 5y agoA lot of the early SD card patents are expiring, so maybe soon we won't have to pay SD association in order to use the 4-pin data mode on SD cards.
- bluedays 5y agoSomething something bad design, give me my upvotes for saying what everyone else already said.
- wanderer_ 5y agoThere you go!
- gweinberg 5y agoTL;DR The Castle.
- Havoc 5y agoIs the site broken? Only two of the weird tile things work for me
- luisramalho 5y agoNo, it's their UX of releasing according to the current date. Like a Christmas advent calendar.
- Havoc 5y agoI see. Well that’s an unfortunate choice
- jedberg 5y agoThis comes up every year so I ask a question: If you could fix copyright, how would you do it? Here is what I would do: 1. All works must be registered in a government registry. If it's not in there it's not copyrighted. If you want to register a work from before the law passes, you have to prove you own it under the current system. This would solve the orphan works problem -- if no one can prove they own it, it becomes public domain. Basically, ownership should be recorded like actual property with a proper chain of title. It would be published on a public ledger. 2. You must renew your registration every three years. The fee for renewal will be X% of the revenue from the work, where X = years since first registration - 5 (edit: With a minimum fee of $100 to discourage hoarding useless IP). First renewal is at 8 years. Your registration fee would be recorded on the public ledger. If you want to continue to derive benefit from your work you have to pay for the privilege. After 105 years it will obviously no longer be worth it, but probably long before that. This would be reported like income taxes -- you self report your profits but if the government thinks you're cheating, they can audit you. If you have multiple works in one product (think Marvel movies) then all revenue goes to the oldest work (that way you can't avoid the fee by putting new and old characters together). If you don't renew, the work goes to the public domain. How would you fix copyright?
- indrora 5y agoThis would destroy the largest community driven around art: furries. It would also, in the process, destroy independent publishing in general, for hire artists, small businesses, and only really end up entrenching more the establishment by introducing more thing that must be maintained. Your fee structure turns my $20 shitpost profile pic commission into a several hundred dollar affair. It also provides zero of the protections that currently used de facto copyright gives. Let me give you a simple example of how your system fucks over a small independent artist, such as your typical Etsy sticker seller: Let's say I'm an artist who makes profit off selling stickers on Etsy, but not really enough to give up my day job. I sell stickers for $5 each at a $1.50/ea profit for shy of $150/yr in profits across 20 or so designs. Under the current system, I should register my designs under copyright system, but I'm granted de facto copyright under the law for most cases where someone copies my design whole cloth and making a profit from it. If I register my designs, I gain several additional, useful protections, all for the low low price of $0. I now have to do nothing in order to retain those. Better: I don't have to reveal my identity, a feature that may be useful in situations where the kinds of products I hock are considered in some way unacceptable (porn, or content the producer would prefer under a pen name). Under your suggested system, that small Etsy seller I describe now has their name and details in a public ledger (not great for sex workers, photographers who may be the target of hostile nations, contrarian writers, etc.) Then, the renewal fees become a bear. After eight years of meager profits paying for their beer tabs, the 20 designs that the Etsy seller hocks will put them on the hook for at least $2,000, likely even more. What you've described is a basic regressive tax. I've even gotten a fantastic little way around your system: All my IP is legally owned by a shell company, owned by me, who licenses my company, also owned by me, for $25/yr, the ability to use that copyrighted work. I take all the profits from that and assign all related copyright of such profits to the shell company. Now the shell company literally exists with no other assets than its licensing revenue and and IP, which can be written off as a loss in the long run. The shell company runs at a net loss over time and I pocket 100% of the profits. This is actually done today already and is why you have copyright holdings companies that exist entirely to be bureaucracy management for the system, and are the ones you see suing the shit out of teenagers pirating a copy of Aladdin so their cousins have something to watch while Uncle Joe beats his wife. How would I fix copyright? 1. Ban logo copyright. Most logos are already simple enough to be considered public domain but actually drop the entire logo purpose. Conversely, allow them to be trademarked and service marked. 2. Place heavy fines and revocation of privilege on false copyright infringement claims. One of the worst parts of our copyright system as it stands is the DMCA. While useful at its core, a lack of actual repercussions for its improper usage and SLAPP-like usage to harm the public good. DMCA strikes are used to take down material which is not actually the copyright of the filer in more cases than not. For instance, DMCA strikes take down content related to making perfectly legitimate backups of movies and other home media, commentary on that material, and otherwise perfectly legal content that is not under the copyright of the DMCA claimsnt but the claimant would rather not people know about. Currently, the only zing on the DMCA is "under perjury of law" that the claim is accurate. This is the legal equivalent of a pinky promise and a wink. It looks scary but it's absolutely the case that the DMCA gets abused as a SLAPP mechanism. When does your ability to file a DMCA complaint get revoked? Never. Read through Chilling Effects' DMCA logs. They're fascinating. Also go read TorrentFreak on occasion for their commentary on DMCA takedowns, such as this gem where someone asked Google to take down... Localhost: https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-firm-asks-google-to-block-127-0-0-1-210808/ https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-firm-asks-google-to-blo... 3. Designate what is a long term and what isn't in copyright land. I have an idea that I've kicked around for over a decade now about how to handle effectively abandoned properties and IP. It revolves around Gabe Newell's commentary on piracy: piracy is a response to a lack of availability in the digital age. There will come a point after which it is impossible to purchase a legitimate, perpetual license to something such as a book, movie, etc. At that point, all legitimate copies are on the second hand market. No revenue can be reasonably expected from that thing by the original seller. How can the original seller claim damages if they no longer offer a legitimate way to acquire the item? Once this point occurs, once no legitimate mechanism for getting a copy of something exists, especially for durable goods (such as books, but not for things like stickers), when does it become abandoned? My take is 10 years. Once a purely digital copyright work is impossible to get legitimate for 10 years, it becomes abandoned: nonprofit duplication is legal, but for-profit duplication is not. After being abandoned for 30 years, the work is released to the public domain. There's some exceptions: art has a weird place in the digital world. A fine line is drawn over what is archival and what isn't. 4. Destroy estate ownership of copyright extension. No more "the author died 50 years ago but the estate has the copyright into the next century" shit. Author died? 10 years for anything not abandoned. 5. Establishment of cultural copyright ownership/destruction of copyright on cultural heritage. Allow the LoC and other organizations to induct copyright works into a historic register of cultural touchstones. These items are considered long lived multigenerational items which should be placed into the public domain outside their usual timeline. Works over 25-30 years at minimum. 6. Fair use for incidental but otherwise prominent use of a copyright work during performance and its subsequent recording and replay. This is 100% targeted at music and other content in twitch streams, YouTube vlog channels, and more. Passing by a stall playing top40, having music in the background during an artist's stream should not affect their ability to continue. Broadening fair use is Essential.
- shmerl 5y agoCopyright term length should be scaled back.
- FalconSensei 5y agoOh, cool. A list of things that doesn't allow me to see the full list. GREAT and useless. The advent calendar thing is interesting, and I can see a parallel with waiting for this to waiting for the public domain. But it's just useless and makes me just go to google/wikipedia to get the actual list
- Filligree 5y agoI am confused about why I would care about this list, unless perhaps that’s the point. All these works are too old to be of interest to me.
- interfixus 5y agoNow I start my day saddened by the expression "A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh". As if there could be any other. Yes, I know. There could. Damn Disney.
- aosaigh 5y agoI find it hilarious that users are complaining about the UX. It's an advent calendar! It says so in the subtitle "A Festive Countdown". Did these same users complain to their parents if/when they got an advent calendar for Christmas? "Mother, this advent calendar has awful usability. Why can't I access all of the chocolate immediately?"
- defanor 5y agoPerhaps it's a matter of expectations: following the link, I expected to see a list, not some sort of an art project (which seems to be a bit broken, though maybe I didn't allow enough of scripts for it to work better). So I wasn't able to see the list there, while being curious about it, which is quite annoying. "Advent calendar" in the title would fix it. Though I've actually had a similar story with a chocolate advent calendar: thought it's a book at first, but then discovered that it isn't. I don't think I've expected a book, so probably wasn't disappointed, but likely would have been if I did expect to receive a book instead.
- antifa 5y ago"Advent Calendar" does not exist in my culture, I just see a bunch of thumbnails with an unlabeled, seemingly random, number, but only a tiny number of them can be clicked to read more.
- skoodge 5y agoUnfortunately the situation is bit complex for Ludwig Wittgenstein (who died in 1951 and whose works should enter the public domain in countries with death + 70 years copyright). Wittgenstein only published the Tractatus during his lifetime (which will enter the public domain), but all of his later works were compiled and published posthumously (as the "Nachlass") by his literary executors, most importantly the Philosophical Investigations. At the moment, Trinity College Cambridge hold the copyright to most of the Nachlass and they have more or less publicly said that they do not consider the Nachlass to go out of copyright in 2022, as there seems to be an obscure exception in British copyright for posthumously published manuscripts that would extend the copyright duration to 2039 [0]. Of course British copyright law does not directly apply to the rest of the world, but I sadly do not expect to see many public domain editions from academics in the coming years, since most of them want to stay on good terms with Trinity College. Others would perhaps like to publish an edition, but are unsure about the copyright situation. Are there any non-profit organisations that provide legal clarification in these rather complicated situations for individuals that want to publish new editions of these works? IANAL, so I would be reluctant to sink too much time into such a project if there is the chance that I might be sued into oblivion by Cambridge. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9razevgY6TA&t=1621s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9razevgY6TA&t=1621s
- ggm 5y agoI dislike the Sunny Bono and Disney laws and I dislike modern IPR life extension. But, I do sometimes think this is an overstated problem. Taking the long view, what's coming into the public domain now is good, and more will follow in due course. If not in my lifetime, the white album will ultimately be legally freely available. Of course we have to fight to maintain that inevitability, it's not like corporates won't fight back. I also think this is a junk website for something so interesting. Bad design for a simple list.