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Popeye and Tintin enter the public domain in 2025 along with Faulkner, Hemingway
- profsummergig 2y agoCurious about something: - let's say original Tintin works were created from 1929 to 1969. - does this mean only the works released in 1929 are now "remixable"? - or does it mean that the "concept of Tintin" is now going to be in the public domain? - (I'm pretty sure the works from 1969 will not be in the public domain).
- gbear605 2y agoMy understanding, which is limited, is that anything that is from the 1929 Tintin will be public domain, but the later additions are still under copyright. So you can use the character, but not reference later stories or characters introduced later. It’s much the same as how you can freely make fiction about Thor, but you can’t freely make fiction about Thor, the Marvel character.
- tomkarho 2y agoIf only it was that simple. IANAL and other disclaimers but let's take Mickey Mouse as a comparison point. Steamboat willie is in public domain so that particular cartoon and aesthetic it introduces is fair game but modern day Mickey is not. To simplify: the one with white pants is good but the one with red ones is not. So let's pretend Tintin had his hair style in 1929 but got his blue sweater at 1969. I would imagine that would mean that you could make anything with a Tintin character (and call it Tintin) that has the hair style but put him in a blue sweater and you'll get in trouble. It's not just the character name that matters but various other pieces that make up the character and not all of them were introduced or became iconic in the same time period.
- HPsquared 2y agoThat must make it dangerous. If anything in your "old style reproduction" happens to resemble the newer version, even by chance, say he happens to wear a blue sweater one day. Or whatever they could claim in court was from the newer work. Absolute minefield!
- mopenstein 2y agoAnd don't forget trademarks never expire.
- d3VwsX 2y agoI searched boardgamegeek for games published in 1929. The only thing that grabbed my attention was Shambattle, the first published American miniatures wargame. It is an early, possibly the first, modern miniature wargame that used dice to resolve combat (no spring-loaded toy cannons like in Well's Little Wars for instance). https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31562/shambattle-a-game-for-old-fashioned-toy-soldiers https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31562/shambattle-a-game-...
- DoingIsLearning 2y agoCrazy how much Walt Disney's lobbying so many years ago had such an impact and irreparable damage to digital content access, as well as, all the TPM nonsense that came after. We simply normalized users not owning content because of him. A 25 year window should be more than appropriate for copyright protection.
- portaouflop 2y agoI said it a billion times, Copyright as it exists now is broken, does not serve its purpose and needs urgent reform
- Cumpiler69 2y ago[flagged]
- eesmith 2y agoYou must realize that makes no sense, right? Set aside that none of the school shootings has changed national gun policy ... Set aside that it's unlikely the US health insurance system is unlikely to change, especially given the majority party's calls to tear down "Obamacare" and privatize more ... There is no head, not even a symbolic one, for the current IP/copyright system. DRM is in every fucking thing these days because many businesses profit by protecting their business model via government-granted IP monopoly. General Jackson may have slayed the Many Headed Monster, but at least you could count the heads. When 10,000+ organizations benefit from the IP/copyright system, the hydra heads are too many for one to make a difference.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago>DRM is in every fucking thing these days because many businesses profit by protecting their business model via government-granted IP monopoly. I never argued for tearing down the IP/DRM system. I'm advocating for better restricting it to shorter periods so that the initial IP holders can profit from it for a while but not virtually indefinitely.
- gregw2 2y agoOK, I have to ask... so practically speaking, could someone use AI to create a dozen new TinTin books based on the old ones and/or background historical tidbits knowledge?
- klabb3 2y agoAI is a distraction here. You can use whatever tool you want. Copyright does not care how you made it. It cares about likeness and in imagery, music and text, especially names. I’d assume you can freely use content from the earliest works, so if you eg use a character introduced in a later book it would still be covered by copyright. But I’m not sure.
- failrate 2y agoFinally, we can get the team up between Pappy and Haddock.
- rtkwe 2y agoIt's a real shame that copyright lasts as long as it does so that people can only really get access to things in their parent's past rather than being able to do something with the things they grew up with. I'm still a little shocked Disney didn't try to get another extension this last time. Maybe they did quietly and were rebuffed or foiled by the utter gridlock of the US Congress.
- nadermx 2y agoGridlock? They passed tiktok law in haste
- DiscourseFan 2y agoThat’s because they spammed every member of congress and they got really freaked out
- brookst 2y agoWell yeah, but that’s xenophobia and neophobia. Try getting something done with positive motives.
- grishka 2y agoIMO copyright should be short enough that things going into the public domain should be in the foreseeable future territory. So that it'd always be the choice of "do I watch this movie now and pay for it, or do I watch it in 5 years for free". This would disincentivize the current practice of hoarding copyrighted works for easy passive income and incentivize being actually useful for the society.
- scoofy 2y agoEhh... I feel like this is heavily blockbuster-bias. If everything goes into the public domain in five years, authors will never make a dime (they already don't), and movie studios will literally just adapt the best books from the previous decade for free. I think you need to have enough time to incentivize the creative arts to flourish. I'd say 30 to 50 years is probably fine. Enough where people are able to adapt their favorite things from their youth.
- joseda-hg 2y agoHuh, I guess in my mind Popeye was in the public domain already, but this is always good to know
- throw4847285 2y agoPSA: The 2011 Tintin movie by Spielberg is actually phenomenal. Some people were put off by the animation, but I didn't find it to fall into the uncanny valley at all. It's silly and cartoony in the right ways, and some of the action sequences are up there with the best of Indiana Jones. Would highly recommend, though with the caveat that you'll wish they made a sequel. Unfortunately, Peter Jackson was supposed to take over for the second one, and he's not so reliable theses days.
- vasac 2y agoI don't particularly like Tintin, but I was watching it with a kid and was pleasantly surprised. In the end, it was a better adventure movie than the last Indiana Jones film. The chase scene in Moroccan streets was somehow much better than the similar Tuk Tuk scene in "The Dial of Destiny" - I guess seeing CGI in a cartoon doesn't look out of place, while it didn't look close to natural in DoD.
- throw4847285 2y agoThere's this one part of the chase where Spielberg does this absurd minutes long one shot take including a 360 pan that would be impossible with live action. It's proof that we aren't awe-inspired by verisimilitude, but by audacity. Here's a video of some of Spielberg's best one shot takes from the Every Frame a Painting channel: https://vimeo.com/94684923 https://vimeo.com/94684923
- xrd 2y agoI took your word for it. Wow, that's an amazing sequence!
- mattpallissard 2y agoAgreed. I describe that movie to people as "Spielberg, but not constrained by reality"
- arresin 2y agoWholeheartedly agree. It bothers me how overlooked it is. Completely insane how well they captured the unique spirit and voice of the comics (read all repeatedly when young).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- vrighter 2y agoSo now that a lot of books used for studying literature will become freely available, I wonder how long it's going to be before the syllabus "needs revising"
- bena 2y agoHigh schools still teach Shakespeare and that's always been in the public domain. As is a lot of Mark Twain's works.
- jjulius 2y agoNot only that, but what GP is suggesting would require schools to have a reasonable, sizeable budget. Schools provide most of that reading material, so they'd have to be the party responsible for buying all of the new, copyrighted books. A fairly laughable idea if you follow the general trend of school budgets...
- mistercheph 2y agoSchools love nothing more than wasting money on unnecessary trash they get sold by their distributors, choose your own reasons for why that is in spite of ever-loudening complaints of budget constraint. How else could not just one but multiple full length textbooks on Algebra 1 get written, published and distributed every year?
- technothrasher 2y agoSomewhat tangential, but it makes me nuts that my son's small high school, that is always struggling for money, pays stupid amounts for Disney scripts for the school plays instead of doing Shakespeare or any of the other public domain plays out there.
- robertlagrant 2y agoHow much do they spend?
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- optimalsolver 2y agoAll episodes of the 90s Tintin animated series are on DailyMotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x749uno https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x749uno
- johtso 2y agoInternet archive has it too https://archive.org/details/The.adventures.of.Tintin.animated.series https://archive.org/details/The.adventures.of.Tintin.animate...
- Funes- 2y agoThere's also the original 1957-1964 TV show, Herge's Adventures of Tintin. Here's a fragment of its original airing on Catalan public television (TV3) during the 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMH76zya8MQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMH76zya8MQ. That's seemingly the only available piece of that particular translated version on the Internet, and its audio is damaged, at that. Makes me think of how much content has been completely lost through the years.
- anthk 2y agoOTOH I miss the "Tricycle-Dinamita" absurd comedy series both in Spanish and Basque. For HNers, they are almost like the Catalan Monty Python with a background from theatres.
- nmstoker 2y agoI vaguely recall seeing this in the UK in the 80s and then being impressed with the much more authentic animation styles of the later cartoons.
- agumonkey 2y agoAs a kid I found it embodied quite fittingly the naive mystery of the comics, the direction, pacing, music .. everything was on point. (Something that was lost on spielberg 3d movie variant imo, too much indiana jones in spirit)
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- ustad 2y agoI just can’t get my head around that this (Tintin) is for the US. For the rest, including the EU, the copyright is until around 2050.
- alephnerd 2y agoI think this will be the original black and white Tintin. The modern colored Tintin we see was made after WW2 and drastically rehabilitated Tintin's reputation. For example - https://sauvikbiswas.com/2014/11/18/tintin-in-america-the-black-and-white-facsimile-edition/ https://sauvikbiswas.com/2014/11/18/tintin-in-america-the-bl... I love reading Tintin, but being honest about it's origins and baggage is important as well. Highly recommend reading "Tintin: The Complete Companion" as well.
- leoc 2y agoIIRC there were also plenty of changes in later editions that didn't relate to controversies (or to colourisation): for example radio sets were made more up-to-date.
- alephnerd 2y agoYep! BW Tintin was already very dated by the 1950s. Really shows how much progress (positive and negative) happened in just 20-30 years.
- eesmith 2y agoLooks like it will be "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets", which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Land_of_the_Soviets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Land_of_the_Sovi... says "is the first volume of The Adventures of Tintin" and "it was the only completed Tintin story that Hergé did not reproduce in colour" due to Hegré's "embarrassment at the crudeness of the work."
- grotorea 2y agoAs much as I love Tintin, gotta agree with Hergé here. Although Congo and America aren't that much better.
- alephnerd 2y agoEvery Tintin upto "Land of Black Gold" had a black-and-white version written before the war. They did not age well, and if you read them you can understand why Hergé had a hard time in the 1945-1950 period.
- johnea 2y agoAll that WWII war propaganda becoming public domain at the perfect time for inciting the next mass murder!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cableshaft 2y agoSo in about a month we can expect to see a trailer for horror film renditions of Popeye and Tintin, (also board game Kickstarters that use them as a theme) like we did with Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh? Cool. Cool cool cool.
- strictnein 2y agoAlmost a month ago the trailer for Popeye the Slayer Man was released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1hsxK0UMlQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1hsxK0UMlQ Surprisingly violent trailer, fyi.
- Funes- 2y ago[flagged]
- falcor84 2y agoMy (IANAL) understanding is that rule 34 renditions generally fall under the parody clause of fair-use in any case
- kadoban 2y agoIANAL either, but that is _way_ oversold by the general public. It's only parody if the point of the new work is saying something about the original. Popeye having explicit sex with Olive Oyl isn't parody, it's just for people to get their rocks off. There's no commentary on the original work being made. Nothing wrong with that, but if people think they're in the clear because they shout "parody", they're mistaken.
- throwaway_1224 2y ago[flagged]
- indrora 2y agoYou act like that has stopped any artist. Ned time you hear about a new Pokemon game releasing or any expansion to a franchise. New characters will have content drawn of them before the announcement is over.
- Funes- 2y ago>You act like that has stopped any artist. Well, not from producing the "art", but from distributing it? Of course.
- danjl 2y agoSee, every day we get new data to train LLMs. Just think, all of the current LLMs were trained without Popeye, Tintin, Faulkner and Hemmingway. Just imagine how much better they will be with all this new public domain data to use for training! /s
- srik 2y agoI love TinTin! I feel like we're going to see a ton of AI drawn TinTin fan works pop up, will be interesting to see.
- dewey 2y agoIs there a model that cares about copyrights and has incapable of doing that right now? Or is this sarcasm? Hard to tell!
- serf 2y agonot a model per se but there are plenty of safeguards on, for example, oAI products. Go ask an oAI product 'draw a portrait in the style of Patrick Nagel'. Here's the reply I got : "I am unable to generate images in the style of Patrick Nagel due to content policy restrictions regarding artists' styles. " I don't know of any specific copyright-centric error messages, but in my ignorant naivety I would assume that if oAI products are having problems mimicking an artists' style, it'll probably avoid copyright as much as possible.
- vintermann 2y agoI remember I tried to get an early version of Midjourney to draw something in ligne claire-style, no matter how I expressed it, it failed miserably at that. It was an early "Yeah, these models are actually pretty overfit" moment for me. I haven't tried lately, though. I would assume it's better now.
- dragonwriter 2y agoFlux-1-Schnell does pretty decently just by prefixing a prompt describing the subject without style information with “An illustration in ligne claire style.”
- littlestymaar 2y agoFine-tuning stable diffusion tend to work pretty well for this kind of things.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- randylubin 2y agoWe run a public domain jam every January - come join us and make games with the new public domain material! https://itch.io/jam/gaming-like-its-1929 https://itch.io/jam/gaming-like-its-1929
- strictnein 2y agoLike was saw with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19623240/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19623240/), there's now also a slightly higher budget movie taking advantage of Popeye entering the public domain: Popeye the Slayer Man (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30956852/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30956852/). Great line from the trailer: "You know why the factory closed down 20 years ago? There was a spinach contamination." Not be confused with Pops the Slayer Man (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33362807/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33362807/), also coming out next year.
- jhbadger 2y agoThey need to be careful with the spinach mention! As noted in the article, the public domain version of Popeye is the version before he ate spinach. It's like how people got in legal trouble for showing Mickey with white gloves as the public domain "Steamboat" version of Mickey didn't wear them yet.
- judge2020 2y agoBoth of the mentioned movies probably wouldn't have had any problem releasing while the copyright to the characters remained in-tact under fair use. If someone is trying to make a movie with existing well-known characters, people aren't too interested in non-transformative work, and distributors probably wouldn't distribute something due to the general lack of audience interest. The main benefit that public domain brings to a work is that you can make small edits or changes to a work without violating its copyright. Imagine if you wanted to go through all the episodes of Spongebob, change the colors to make it clearer to watch for colorblind viewers[a], and then sell those edits as a box set or otherwise sell access to them via some accessibility-focused streaming service. Under copyright this would probably not be seen as transformative, and something non-transformative then has an incredibly high bar to clear for fair use to apply to it. I also think that making new episodes that aren't super transformative would probably not have met the burden for Fair use: for example, making a new episode of Popeye that otherwise follows the same script beats as existing episodes would probably be seen as copyright infringement by the courts. However, once you get into the territory of making a sequel/prequel movie where you really flesh out his character, it starts getting into the realm of qualifying for transformative under fair use (depending on how the judge sees it). But the mentioned movies really seem like they're so different from the source material. For Pooh Blood and Honey, it doesn't affecting the market for the original, given the works are so different in what they do (and there is likely 0.1% or less overlap between the audience of the slasher genre and the children's programming genre cohort), it did not use almost any of the original copyrighted works to tell its story, just its characters, and the content is transformative enough to where it's not like it's just another episode of Winnie The Pooh. This popeye film seems to use the same approach as Blood and Honey: it's just Popeye killing people with stuff like "look, it's the Spinach from the original episodes!". a: not sure if this would actually be beneficial, but it's the best example I can think of for a barely-transformative work other than putting sunglasses on the characters' faces or putting Subway Surfers next to it.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoEarlier discussion: What will enter the public domain in 2025? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42290448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42290448
- kristopolous 2y agoThe current popeye artist is a fairly interesting public domain ally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._K._Milholland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._K._Milholland ... he did a mickey mouse thing at the beginning of the year. I assume he's fine with it but I can't find any statements by him.
- mistrial9 2y agorelated https://www.superherohype.com/comics/561991-popeye-artist-releases-new-mickey-mouse-web-comic-based-on-steamboat-willie https://www.superherohype.com/comics/561991-popeye-artist-re...
- the_arun 2y agoIs there a place where we could see all public characters good to use without payment?
- thevillagechief 2y agoI love Tintin! People in the US grew up with Marvel comic books. We grew up with Tintin, as did our parents before us. Can't wait to see what people do with it.
- lordgrenville 2y agoGreat news. The copyright owners of Tintin are very litigious [0]. I have some "Tintin in Vietnam" prints at home that are commonly sold in SE Asia [1]. Those street vendors will be happy to know that they're in the clear now. [0] See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39625647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39625647 [1] eg https://old.reddit.com/r/TheAdventuresofTintin/comments/c0pvgn/tintin_in_vietnam/ https://old.reddit.com/r/TheAdventuresofTintin/comments/c0pv...
- magicalhippo 2y agoAs well as Tintin, I also got Spirou[1], and my personal favorite, Gaston[2]. Gaston was more short format, but the slapstick humor and absurd scenarios really resonated with me as a kid. They were translated to Norwegian and came in bound books. Still have them. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirou_%26_Fantasio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirou_%26_Fantasio [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_(comics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_(comics)
- tekkk 2y agoWow, haven't seen those images in a long time. I can't recall where I read this Gaston comic—translated of course—but I have never laughed so much at comic strips in my life. I still remember that cigarette machine he built as well as alcoholmeter. Should have been made into cartoon series, but seeing how old it is I wonder if it was before its time. It really had an originality unlike anything I've read before or since.
- arp242 2y agoIt's The Office of the 50s-80s. Amazingly it wasn't translated into English until 2017, which is probably why it's lesser known outside of Europe. I assume this is because the translation rights/contracts with Mr. De Mesmaeker took a long time to get signed.
- wsintra2022 2y agoTeesside Tintin was one of the early treasures of the internet, I had so much joy seeing that for the first time however crude it was.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kussenverboten 2y agoTintin et Milou!
- anonu 2y agoTintin was Belgian. So does it go into the public domain everywhere? Could copyright owners in other countries go after you in the US?
- sumtechguy 2y agoThis explains the US landscape. https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain Belgians would have to look up their local version of that. But to answer your question is it depends on the country. Les say one country has 100 years. Another has 50. It is now year 75. In the 50 year country and you make a derivative you are fine. But take that same thing to the 100 year country then you might be in trouble. But only if you bring the stuff into that country. Now others may import it but that is on them not you. But you might have to prove that out in court. Also in the US sound recordings can bet more tricky as there are also state laws that come into play.
- dhosek 2y agoThe state law stuff only applies to unpublished sound recordings. Anything published has copyright terms fixed by federal law (although the terms differ from other copyrightable works which I did not know before googling this matter), but for the next couple decades-ish, sound recordings enter the public domain 100 years after publication.
- aetherson 2y agoIt goes into public domain in the US in this case. In other countries it may remain copyrighted or already have been in public domain, depending on local laws. In general, countries can't/don't enforce their laws outside of their territories, with lots of nuance and boundry cases. There is zero chance that someone would "go after you" for, say, buying a copy of a Tintin book that was made without permission, in America. If you, say, wanted to publish a Tintin book and then export it to Europe, they might disallow it.
- anthk 2y ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoThis is some of my favorite Tintin fan art: https://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3270528/random-cool-tintin-done-h-p-lovecraft-style/ https://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3270528/random-cool-tinti... I grew up with Tintin and Asterix.