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Happy Public Domain Day
- wk_end 3y agoLast night someone was streaming Steamboat Willie on Twitch, with captions in the sidebar winkingly gloating “This is completely legal! I am profiting off of Steamboat Willie without Disney’s permission!” I was amused. And then as I watched, it started to feel kind of beautiful. We’re now free to do what we want with Steamboat Willie, yes. But in another sense, it's free too now. No longer a product, this little cartoon that changed the world is now just a part of our history and our culture, the water we swim in, as it has been and as it should’ve been for so long.
- k__ 3y agoThis is your reminder that online piracy isn't about "stealing" from small artists, bout about "preventing" big corps to gatekeep human culture.
- xela79 3y agoso according to his, Asian & African LOTR incoming? J. R. R. Tolkien United Kingdom 3 January 1892 2 September 1973 Writer The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings
- koolba 3y ago[flagged]
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y agoCopyright is broken and needs drastic changes. It is not fulfilling its purpose for a long time now and is holding back humanity as a whole.
- rstupek 3y agoI'm curious how copyright is holding back humanity?
- inglor_cz 3y agoI would argue that, like every economic compromise, copyright introduces certain friction. For example, authors cannot easily build on works of other authors; even if you had a brilliant idea about a new Mickey Mouse movie, you would have to obtain licence from Disney for that. That sort of goes against the entire cultural tradition of humanity before copyright; Disney themselves made enormous money on adaptations of folk tales in public domain. Art does not exist in a vacuum and most works are at least inspired by previous works. Ofc authors and publishers benefit from this friction, that is why copyright exists at all. But it is a legitimate question where precisely that tradeoff should lie. Already in the 18th century in England, the Law Lords rejected "eternal" copyright as undesirable. 95 years isn't exactly eternity, but it is a lot longer than the original 14+14 format.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoIt prevents archival, reproduction, and examination of interesting legacy works before they and their contemporary supporting materials disappear.
- c0pium 3y ago…for people who are unwilling to pay. There are explicit carve outs in the DMCA for anyone who is legitimately doing any of those things to break DRM to make copies. You just need to actually pay for the material.
- hn_acker 3y agoIt's not just about payment. It's about licensing. Preserving/archiving legally-obtained copyrighted works without a license is in a grey area even if you never share the archive with anyone until the term is over. Grey area means "do at your own risk". Preservation without distribution is not fair use, since fair use can only be decided on a case-by-case basis in court. What if the copyright holder charges an unaffordable amount for a license for archival? (Don't forget, the preservationist is the one doing the preservation work.) What if the copyright holder doesn't offer a license to archive their works for any price? What if the copyright holder wants their work to go away forever, even though that completely flies against the stated purpose of the Copyright Clause [1]? (You can't have progress of knowledge if the knowledge disappears.) What if the US Copyright Office didn't grant an exception for archival in the current three-year round of DMCA 1201 rule-making? (Why do these crucial exceptions to DMCA 1201 have to expire every three years?) What if you can't find the copyright holder, especially in the case of orphan works? Copyright is a real, not hypothetical, obstacle to preservation [2]: > Films have disintegrated because preservationists can’t digitize them. The works of historians and journalists are incomplete. Artists find their cultural heritage off limits. (See studies like the Hargreaves Review commissioned by the UK ns of the availability of copyrighted works and public domain works, and economic studies of the effects of copyright.) I'm not arguing about whether copyright "holds back humanity". I'm just pointing out that "you just need to pay for the material" is a fundamental misunderstanding in the context of preserving copyrighted works. And personally, I think the US Congress should add a bright-line exception to copyright for preservation/archival without distribution by anyone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause#Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause#Effect [2] https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/ https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/
- 1letterunixname 3y ago100, author+50, or author+70 years is absolutely absurd rent-seeking corporate greed that subsumed the protections of individual creators because of damn corporate personhood. Copyright should exist for a period of 2x "life sentence" used by Scandinavian criminal courts: 42 years. No extensions, no exceptions.
- dahart 3y agoMy fear is that shortening copyright now won’t do anything to stem corporate greed at all, but it would let the corporations pillage all the modern works of the massive sea of independent artists and individual creators while they’re still alive and trying to make a living.
- xracy 3y agoI feel like... 10 years... might be the right amount here. But honestly, I'd be inclined to see how bad it is if the answer is like 3 years. not about to jump right back into it with "42 years" That's still half a lifetime. Seems unnecessarily long.
- grishka 3y agoNothing but greed will break if it becomes 3 years. On the contrary, IMO this will actually considerably reduce piracy, because things entering public domain would be something one can wait for. You either go to a cinema to see the hot new movie right now, or you see it legally for free in 3 years.
- CaptainFever 3y agoAs a copyright abolitionist I think 10 years is an alright compromise if alternative funding models really don't work out. Long enough to be painful enough to spend money, short enough that you can build upon the previous decade's work. If you have a childhood show, once you become a young adult, you can build on it legally. Simple to calculate too!
- shmerl 3y agoFor sure. The term should be rolled back to sane levels. Breaking DRM should not be banned and so on.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dang 3y agoRelated: 2024's public domain is a banger - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38833881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38833881 - Jan 2024 (27 comments) Disney's earliest Mickey Mouse enters public domain as US copyright expires - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38830264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38830264 - Jan 2024 (162 comments) January 1, 2024 is Public Domain Day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38823973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38823973 - Dec 2023 (15 comments) Copyright for original Mickey Mouse persona to run out 1 January 2024 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38799484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38799484 - Dec 2023 (10 comments) Mickey Mouse to Enter Public Domain: "It's Finally Happening'" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38737164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38737164 - Dec 2023 (7 comments) Mickey, Disney, and the public domain: A 95-year love triangle - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38678021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38678021 - Dec 2023 (208 comments) Public Domain Day 2024 Is Coming: Here's What to Know - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38586978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38586978 - Dec 2023 (6 comments) The Mickey Mouse Copyright Runs Out in 2024 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36559037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36559037 - July 2023 (64 comments)
- fuzztester 3y agoThere is also System Administrator Appreciation Day. There was a good post on some site, some years ago, about the many ways in which they quietly go about their work, which is so essential to much of modern life, not just to software organisations, but still remain under-appreciated or even not understood.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- blacksqr 3y agoRegrettably, thanks to the international nature of the internet, it may still be legally hazardous to make works in the public domain in one's own country available on the internet. The legal question of whether putting something on an internet server constitutes publication in all countries simultaneously or just in the country where the server exists is still unsettled. So for example a UK citizen may wish to put Tolkien's works on the internet now that they are in the public domain there, but Tolkien's estate might decide to sue from the United States, or from many countries in Europe. Individuals and small entities are likely unwilling to bear the legal risk. So the effective public domain date, from the viewpoint of the internet, is set by the countries with the longest protection terms, which appear to be Spain (80 years) and the US (95 years for works made for hire).
- bombcar 3y agoGutenberg has been doing this for years. There are works accessible on certain mirrors that are unavailable elsewhere.
- TylerE 3y agoLikewise IMSLP with sheet music. They have gotten very, very good at navigating the various public domain regimes. The stuff that's worldwide public domain gets hosted on their main infrastructure, but they then have (legally separate) operations in several countries with various regimes (-CA, -US, -RU, at least, maybe a few more) that hosts files that aren't cleared worldwide.
- mod50ack 3y agoThere's no Russian server. The broader IMSLP network has: - Main server: for files thar are PD in the US and Canada - IMSLP-EU: PD-EU and PD-CA, but not PD-US - PML-CA: PD-CA, but not PD-EU or PD-US - PML-US: PD-US, but not PD-CA Anyway, there's stuff we're working on in any case... some infrastructure improvements.
- TylerE 3y ago