8 ms·

I don't know Fables, but I'd love to see more things going to public domain. All fictional characters and stories, after 10 years. All software stuff, API/ABI,

by bmacho 3y ago

I don't know Fables, but I'd love to see more things going to public domain. All fictional characters and stories, after 10 years. All software stuff, API/ABI, formats, UI and leaked source code, you should be able to use it, modify it, or even sell it. Everyday products like a washing machine, or a microwave, someone created a reliable and easy to produce microwave, now anyone should be able to mass produce it, and sell it cheaper. Produce and sell an iphone, a compatible, a partially compatible, an improved version, or whatever you want. And so on.

ipsin 3y ago
The Telltale Games serial "Wolf Among Us" is based on Fables. I enjoyed it, definitely. The world is based on the public domain (fairytale characters) but with many interesting touches, set in the modern world.
- pid-1 3y ago
  That was such a good game. Also RIP Telltale Games.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    There's a new company of the same name continuing work on a Wolf Among Us 2, which is one of Bill Willingham's complaints that led to the public domain PR release because Willingham still believes he was severely underpaid for his property for the first game, and that DC licensed it without his permission in the first place.
  - keerthiko 3y ago
    Telltale is more or less reincarnated, and [actively working on WAU2](https://telltale.com/the-wolf-among-us-2/ https://telltale.com/the-wolf-among-us-2/)
oaiey 3y ago
10 is a bit hard to bootstrap R&D and regain the invested money (especially when you build something over multiple years). But 20 years .. should work. Was not the original copyright for books something like 30 years.
- Pet_Ant 3y ago
  My qualm is that it can take a lifetime of pushing around a script or a novel before it gets made. Publishers and studios would have an incentive to accept every script submitted and purposely ignore it for 20 and then look at them now that they are free… ideally it’d be 20 years after it got big but that’s not enforceable and vague.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    That only works if every single publisher and studio are participating in an anticompetitive cabal who are all colluding to prevent the work from being bought, in which case you have bigger problems to worry about.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
      lol, lmao, even. What do you think studios are doing right now prompting huge strikes among actors and writers in Hollywood?
      - kibwen 3y ago
        And yet that has nothing to do with the current length of copyright, so I think you're simply proving my point?
        belenos46 3y ago
        I think he's pointing out that an anticompetitive cabal already exists, so assuming it would continue to follow anticompetitive practices is not a leap of any kind.
sokoloff 3y ago
> someone created a reliable and easy to produce microwave, now anyone should be able to mass produce it, and sell it cheaper. What part of this is not already the case for microwave ovens?
- bmacho 3y ago
  You are only allowed to produce and sell an existing product, if the original creator allows you to do. In theory you can message LG that you'd love to sell one of their older models for a fee for every sold piece, but I theorize that it would be a much better world if you wouldn't need their permission for this.
ateng 3y ago
Why isn’t there a charity that specialise in “liberating” IPs & patents into public domain?
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > Why isn’t there a charity that specialise in “liberating” IPs & patents into public domain? Google for Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, ... ;-)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Legally speaking this would involve actually purchasing those outright. Sidestepping any questions about copyright assignment and rights reversion, the main problem here would be cost. Most companies that own works anyone of us care about significantly overvalue their ownership in the work, like to the point where ownership is either not for sale or would only be offered for a ludicrous price. You'd be better off lobbying to weaken copyright protections. There are several charities interested in doing so, but they all have different kinds of baggage: donating to the FSF means Stallman's Way or the Highway, donating to the EFF means supporting Protect The Stack[0]. RPG[1] is run by Louis Rossmann who is fairly chill[2], but they're also the weakest in terms of anticopyright. Nobody wants to purely abolish or reform copyright; they want to do so as a means to achieve some other ends. Putting that aside, there's also the problem that proposals to reform copyright go absolutely nowhere. Copyright maximalism is pretty uniformly supported by almost the entire US political class[3] and even very mild reforms like right-to-repair face fairly extreme bipartisan opposition. Not even the fascist-lite (DeSantis/Trump) wing of the Republican Party is willing to kick Disney in the copyright balls. Illegally speaking, the Internet Archive is perfectly willing to publicly archive works they don't own, and they are saints for doing so. But they are also having their balls sued off. [0] To paraphrase a lot, it means "ISPs should not have abuse desks". [1] Repair Preservation Group [2] He does have a right-libertarian bent and an axe to grind against New York's government, though that can be explained by them trying to kill his business [3] Corporate leadership inclusive. Most corporations should be considered to be a kind of shadow government, not just as private entities.
TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
> All fictional characters and stories, after 10 years. Girl Genius has been publishing a page of their comic three times a week for twenty years, and the story is not yet done. I think they deserve to hold it for a little longer.
- bmacho 3y ago
  > I think they deserve to hold it for a little longer. I don't see why. I don't see why should they have the exclusive right to sell it anymore, and sue anyone that creates a derivative work based on their work older than 10 years. Also Girl Genius still would have a lot of options to make money of it. I just think derivative work should be able to appear, and more than 10 years old stuff should be free as in freedom and as in free beer. And we, as a society could choose this by modifying our laws.
- Pet_Ant 3y ago
  They would only lose ownership to their earlier strips by now. Also anything else would be fan fiction. It wouldn’t remove the primacy of author created works. I mean if I create a XXX Fables movie no one will consider it authentic or canon.
  - jzb 3y ago
    "Only" handwaves away a lot. It would put the characters into public domain and rob the authors of the ability to sustain themselves selling collections of early strips. "No one will consider it authentic or canon." Citation very much needed. When there's demand for something, people will take what's offered. I would be fine with some sort of easy licensing scheme that would allow others to write stories, etc., in someone else's universe / with their characters... but they should see a taste. Especially when we're talking about mid-tier or lower-tier creators who are probably depending heavily on that large body of work to keep the lights on.
    - bmacho 3y ago
      > "No one will consider it authentic or canon." Citation very much needed. I'm not saying that you should be able to claim yourself to be walt disney, but you should be able to sell a hand made mickey mouse plushie, or a mickey mouse comic (under your name). That's different.
jzb 3y ago
10 years is nothing. I'm against copyright maximalism and would love to see copyright terms whittled down, but 10 years is a non-starter. For every Stephen King that has a massive following and would easily earn enough in those 10 years, there's 100 mid-tier and lower-tier creators that need any income they can get from works still earning in some fashion. Also, think about how a 10 year limit would be used against creators by the Disneys of the world. "Well, damn, we don't need to arrange a movie deal with King... we'll just wait 10 years and a day and then make a movie on this book." Hey, indie band that still scrapes by on royalties and touring? The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime. Yes, it's more complicated than that, but... an arbitrary 10 year limit wouldn't fix things or make the world substantially better and might make things worse. Now - I'd be willing to talk about things like drastically shorting terms for works for hire/copyright owned by corporations and not individuals. We might also need to think about not having one term for all things. There's no reason the copyright term for software should be the same as that for a song or a movie or a book. Books, songs, paintings, basically art should probably have a copyright term in the 25-50 year range. Certainly no longer than 50 years.
- bmacho 3y ago
  > Hey, indie band that still scrapes by on royalties and touring? The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime. Yes, indeed. Will it be harder for indie bands? I don't think so. Will it be different? Sure. Will it be better for the society if you could have live concerts or disco parties with great songs? Absolutely. Also bands play each others songs without asking or paying royalty in practice where I live. I've gone and have paid a band to perform someone elses songs. It is definitely a good thing.
  - mbreese 3y ago
    > bands play each others songs without asking Live performances are a different act than recording and selling albums. Live performances are always (?) allowed, but IIRC, the songwriter/composer is due a royalty. How often that happens in real life is a question, but live performances (currently) have a different set of rules.
ptman 3y ago
original 14 (+14?)
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
As I understand United States copyright law, it is impossible for an author to voluntarily enter something into the public domain. They can license it to whomever they like, of course, on any terms that are legal within a contract (including creative commons licensing), but they can't just say "this is public domain". It is especially true when they fail to give license terms. People using it as if it were public domain don't have a license, or any proof of having a license, and if the author dies tomorrow, his or her heirs inherit the copyright (which will still last for another 75 or 95 years, I forget which). They now own it, and can go after those who use it for copyright infringement, with all the penalties that go with that. If the heirs were particularly powerful or have political influence, they might even manage to get the DOJ to pursue the matter as criminal. Thought I've never watched the show, doesn't one of the characters in The Office start talking about how he's "declaring bankruptcy" by saying those words emphatically, where the other characters try to explain how it doesn't work that way? He then goes on to say "I'm not just saying it, but declaring bankruptcy" as if this is somehow a legally important distinction? That's what this guy is doing.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thedailymail 3y ago
  Relevant wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Granting_work_into_the_public_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Granting_work_into_t...
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  This is partly why the CC0 license exists, with Creative Commons lawyers putting some thought into how to actually make a legally recognizable declaration of public domain: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/ https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...
derangedHorse 3y ago
It’s one of the best comic series I’ve ever read. I’d recommend reading through them.

by bmacho 3y ago

ipsin 3y ago

The Telltale Games serial "Wolf Among Us" is based on Fables. I enjoyed it, definitely. The world is based on the public domain (fairytale characters) but with many interesting touches, set in the modern world.

pid-1 3y ago
That was such a good game. Also RIP Telltale Games.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  There's a new company of the same name continuing work on a Wolf Among Us 2, which is one of Bill Willingham's complaints that led to the public domain PR release because Willingham still believes he was severely underpaid for his property for the first game, and that DC licensed it without his permission in the first place.
- keerthiko 3y ago
  Telltale is more or less reincarnated, and [actively working on WAU2](https://telltale.com/the-wolf-among-us-2/ https://telltale.com/the-wolf-among-us-2/)

oaiey 3y ago

10 is a bit hard to bootstrap R&D and regain the invested money (especially when you build something over multiple years). But 20 years .. should work. Was not the original copyright for books something like 30 years.

Pet_Ant 3y ago
My qualm is that it can take a lifetime of pushing around a script or a novel before it gets made. Publishers and studios would have an incentive to accept every script submitted and purposely ignore it for 20 and then look at them now that they are free… ideally it’d be 20 years after it got big but that’s not enforceable and vague.
- kibwen 3y ago
  That only works if every single publisher and studio are participating in an anticompetitive cabal who are all colluding to prevent the work from being bought, in which case you have bigger problems to worry about.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
    lol, lmao, even. What do you think studios are doing right now prompting huge strikes among actors and writers in Hollywood?
    - kibwen 3y ago
      And yet that has nothing to do with the current length of copyright, so I think you're simply proving my point?
      - belenos46 3y ago
        I think he's pointing out that an anticompetitive cabal already exists, so assuming it would continue to follow anticompetitive practices is not a leap of any kind.

sokoloff 3y ago

> someone created a reliable and easy to produce microwave, now anyone should be able to mass produce it, and sell it cheaper. What part of this is not already the case for microwave ovens?

bmacho 3y ago
You are only allowed to produce and sell an existing product, if the original creator allows you to do. In theory you can message LG that you'd love to sell one of their older models for a fee for every sold piece, but I theorize that it would be a much better world if you wouldn't need their permission for this.

ateng 3y ago

Why isn’t there a charity that specialise in “liberating” IPs & patents into public domain?

aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> Why isn’t there a charity that specialise in “liberating” IPs & patents into public domain? Google for Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, ... ;-)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kmeisthax 3y ago
Legally speaking this would involve actually purchasing those outright. Sidestepping any questions about copyright assignment and rights reversion, the main problem here would be cost. Most companies that own works anyone of us care about significantly overvalue their ownership in the work, like to the point where ownership is either not for sale or would only be offered for a ludicrous price. You'd be better off lobbying to weaken copyright protections. There are several charities interested in doing so, but they all have different kinds of baggage: donating to the FSF means Stallman's Way or the Highway, donating to the EFF means supporting Protect The Stack[0]. RPG[1] is run by Louis Rossmann who is fairly chill[2], but they're also the weakest in terms of anticopyright. Nobody wants to purely abolish or reform copyright; they want to do so as a means to achieve some other ends. Putting that aside, there's also the problem that proposals to reform copyright go absolutely nowhere. Copyright maximalism is pretty uniformly supported by almost the entire US political class[3] and even very mild reforms like right-to-repair face fairly extreme bipartisan opposition. Not even the fascist-lite (DeSantis/Trump) wing of the Republican Party is willing to kick Disney in the copyright balls. Illegally speaking, the Internet Archive is perfectly willing to publicly archive works they don't own, and they are saints for doing so. But they are also having their balls sued off. [0] To paraphrase a lot, it means "ISPs should not have abuse desks". [1] Repair Preservation Group [2] He does have a right-libertarian bent and an axe to grind against New York's government, though that can be explained by them trying to kill his business [3] Corporate leadership inclusive. Most corporations should be considered to be a kind of shadow government, not just as private entities.

TRiG_Ireland 3y ago

> All fictional characters and stories, after 10 years. Girl Genius has been publishing a page of their comic three times a week for twenty years, and the story is not yet done. I think they deserve to hold it for a little longer.

bmacho 3y ago
> I think they deserve to hold it for a little longer. I don't see why. I don't see why should they have the exclusive right to sell it anymore, and sue anyone that creates a derivative work based on their work older than 10 years. Also Girl Genius still would have a lot of options to make money of it. I just think derivative work should be able to appear, and more than 10 years old stuff should be free as in freedom and as in free beer. And we, as a society could choose this by modifying our laws.
Pet_Ant 3y ago
They would only lose ownership to their earlier strips by now. Also anything else would be fan fiction. It wouldn’t remove the primacy of author created works. I mean if I create a XXX Fables movie no one will consider it authentic or canon.
- jzb 3y ago
  "Only" handwaves away a lot. It would put the characters into public domain and rob the authors of the ability to sustain themselves selling collections of early strips. "No one will consider it authentic or canon." Citation very much needed. When there's demand for something, people will take what's offered. I would be fine with some sort of easy licensing scheme that would allow others to write stories, etc., in someone else's universe / with their characters... but they should see a taste. Especially when we're talking about mid-tier or lower-tier creators who are probably depending heavily on that large body of work to keep the lights on.
  - bmacho 3y ago
    > "No one will consider it authentic or canon." Citation very much needed. I'm not saying that you should be able to claim yourself to be walt disney, but you should be able to sell a hand made mickey mouse plushie, or a mickey mouse comic (under your name). That's different.

jzb 3y ago

10 years is nothing. I'm against copyright maximalism and would love to see copyright terms whittled down, but 10 years is a non-starter. For every Stephen King that has a massive following and would easily earn enough in those 10 years, there's 100 mid-tier and lower-tier creators that need any income they can get from works still earning in some fashion. Also, think about how a 10 year limit would be used against creators by the Disneys of the world. "Well, damn, we don't need to arrange a movie deal with King... we'll just wait 10 years and a day and then make a movie on this book." Hey, indie band that still scrapes by on royalties and touring? The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime. Yes, it's more complicated than that, but... an arbitrary 10 year limit wouldn't fix things or make the world substantially better and might make things worse. Now - I'd be willing to talk about things like drastically shorting terms for works for hire/copyright owned by corporations and not individuals. We might also need to think about not having one term for all things. There's no reason the copyright term for software should be the same as that for a song or a movie or a book. Books, songs, paintings, basically art should probably have a copyright term in the 25-50 year range. Certainly no longer than 50 years.

bmacho 3y ago
> Hey, indie band that still scrapes by on royalties and touring? The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime. Yes, indeed. Will it be harder for indie bands? I don't think so. Will it be different? Sure. Will it be better for the society if you could have live concerts or disco parties with great songs? Absolutely. Also bands play each others songs without asking or paying royalty in practice where I live. I've gone and have paid a band to perform someone elses songs. It is definitely a good thing.
- mbreese 3y ago
  > bands play each others songs without asking Live performances are a different act than recording and selling albums. Live performances are always (?) allowed, but IIRC, the songwriter/composer is due a royalty. How often that happens in real life is a question, but live performances (currently) have a different set of rules.

ptman 3y ago

original 14 (+14?)

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

As I understand United States copyright law, it is impossible for an author to voluntarily enter something into the public domain. They can license it to whomever they like, of course, on any terms that are legal within a contract (including creative commons licensing), but they can't just say "this is public domain". It is especially true when they fail to give license terms. People using it as if it were public domain don't have a license, or any proof of having a license, and if the author dies tomorrow, his or her heirs inherit the copyright (which will still last for another 75 or 95 years, I forget which). They now own it, and can go after those who use it for copyright infringement, with all the penalties that go with that. If the heirs were particularly powerful or have political influence, they might even manage to get the DOJ to pursue the matter as criminal. Thought I've never watched the show, doesn't one of the characters in The Office start talking about how he's "declaring bankruptcy" by saying those words emphatically, where the other characters try to explain how it doesn't work that way? He then goes on to say "I'm not just saying it, but declaring bankruptcy" as if this is somehow a legally important distinction? That's what this guy is doing.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thedailymail 3y ago
Relevant wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Granting_work_into_the_public_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Granting_work_into_t...
WorldMaker 3y ago
This is partly why the CC0 license exists, with Creative Commons lawyers putting some thought into how to actually make a legally recognizable declaration of public domain: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/ https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...

derangedHorse 3y ago

It’s one of the best comic series I’ve ever read. I’d recommend reading through them.