4 ms·

No, you can't give up your copyright in the US, no matter how hard you try. All works are automatically copyrighted when they are set down so you can't somehow

by jxdxbx 14y ago

No, you can't give up your copyright in the US, no matter how hard you try. All works are automatically copyrighted when they are set down so you can't somehow avoid it or opt out. There's just no mechanism. So view a "dedication to the public domain" as what it is, an "irrevocable" license (which means "permission" not "contract") to the entire universe to use the covered works in any way without permission. While this license exists, if the author tries to sue anyone the defendant merely needs to wave around the license. This is as good as the public domain, right? Nope. An author can always revoke a license that purports to be irrevocable after a set time. This is known as copyright "termination" or reversion. The law is very, very clear on this. There is nothing that an author can do, no agreement that he can make, that waives this right. You can pay an author a billion dollars to take ownership of a work and set it all down in an ironclad 50-page contract she can just go ahead and take it back anyway. The purpose of this is to protect authors against signing their lives away when they are young and lack leverage. One effect however is to make all transfers and licenses contingent which in turn makes it impossible to actually dedicate things to the public domain in as real a sense as one would like.

coldtea 14y ago
>* There is nothing that an author can do, no agreement that he can make, that waives this right. You can pay an author a billion dollars to take ownership of a work and set it all down in an ironclad 50-page contract she can just go ahead and take it back anyway. The purpose of this is to protect authors against signing their lives away when they are young and lack leverage* Does that only hold for authors? Because tons of musicians and music bands have "signed their lives away" when they were young and they haven't got anything back. Plus, how would this would work: "You can pay an author a billion dollars to take ownership of a work and set it all down in an ironclad 50-page contract she can just go ahead and take it back anyway." Is the author then supposed to return the money? And what about all the damages to your business by getting the ownership of his work back?
- jxdxbx 14y ago
  I used "author" in the technical sense, which means all creators of copyrighted works. The termination is far enough in the future that only now are some prominent musicians taking advantage of it, but there have been some stories recently. You have to actively take advantage of the law, also, it's not automatic. And there are often lawsuits. None of this applies to "works made for hire," for which the "author" is for example a company. If I hire you to write a song you never were the copyright owner to begin with. This is a complex area and there's a lot of litigation about the distinction between works for hire and works that are written and then transferred or licensed. I don't know the details of how it works with canceling my hypothetical "no termination only" billion dollar contract. I know copyright law but I haven't studied this area specifically. For the most part contracts pay the author a modest sum that covers a license or a transfer for a modest number of years. In fact a 20 year license should cost about as much as a perpetual license given that most works make all the money they're ever going to make long before that. So a termination under those circumstances doesn't involve any unjust enrichment to the author. And there can be no legally relevant "damages" that result from an author taking advantage of a law that has been in place for decades--it's your responsibility as a media company to know about these things, not the job of an author to decline to take advantage of his legal rights for your sake.
  - cpressey 14y ago
    It's interesting that you can give away your copyright to another entity (if it's a "work made for hire") but you can't give up your copyright completely to place a work irrevocably into the public domain. What if I create a legal entity, have it hire me to make a work, and then dissolve the entity? (That's mostly rhetorical; I expect the answer, if it exists, is messy.) EDIT: answering my own question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works
    - jxdxbx 14y ago
      There's a difference. You never owned the work to begin with in a work made for hire. Example: a New York Times reporter never owns the copyright to his articles--they are owned by the NY Times from the beginning. There is no transfer. The article is in a sense written "by" the Times. But if I write an article and then sell all the rights to the Times later, I can claw it back in a few decades. The arguments are over what happens when it's not so clear. Like what if the Times contracts with an independent freelancer specifically to write an article?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
gamblor956 14y ago
* author can always revoke a license that purports to be irrevocable after a set time. This is known as copyright "termination" or reversion. The law is very, very clear on this. There is nothing that an author can do, no agreement that he can make, that waives this right.* In the US, authors absolutely can give up their rights to a work irrevocably. For example, Michael Jackson did not own all of the copyrights to his songs on his death even though he wrote or co-wrote all of them. Movieland is filled with examples of screenwriters who gave up their rights to their (non-commissioned, i.e., non-work-for-hire scripts, aka "spec" scripts) screenplay in exchange for a one-time payment only to see the studio get rich. You've mixed up US copyright law, which allows for complete inalienability during the author's lifetime and European copyright law's concept of "moral rights" which are not alienable but the other or others.
- jxdxbx 14y ago
  Sorry, you're wrong. An author's heirs can reclaim any rights that are transferred. See, for instance this: http://www.authorsguild.org/services/legal-services/terminating-transfers/ http://www.authorsguild.org/services/legal-services/terminat... "What if the author is dead? When an author dies, his or her termination right, known as the “termination interest” is inherited as follows: if the author has no children, the surviving spouse inherits the author’s entire termination interest; if the author has children, they split the termination interest with the surviving spouse — the children take half, divided equally among them, and the surviving spouse takes half; if the author has children but no surviving spouse, then the children inherit the author’s entire termination interest (divided equally among them); if any of the author’s children is dead, that child’s interest is inherited by his or her own children (divided equally among them); majority action by the children of the author’s deceased child is required to exercise that child’s termination interest; if the author’s surviving spouse, children, and grandchildren are all dead, the author’s executor, administrator, personal representative, or trustee owns the author’s entire termination interest. The author’s heirs (as listed above), or their executors, who own and are entitled to exercise more than one half of the termination interest, either individually or together, may terminate." And in other comments, I addressed the works-for-hire issue, where the creator never owns the copyright to begin with. You can't terminate works-for-hire because legally the person who hired you is always already the author.

by jxdxbx 14y ago

coldtea 14y ago

>* There is nothing that an author can do, no agreement that he can make, that waives this right. You can pay an author a billion dollars to take ownership of a work and set it all down in an ironclad 50-page contract she can just go ahead and take it back anyway. The purpose of this is to protect authors against signing their lives away when they are young and lack leverage* Does that only hold for authors? Because tons of musicians and music bands have "signed their lives away" when they were young and they haven't got anything back. Plus, how would this would work: "You can pay an author a billion dollars to take ownership of a work and set it all down in an ironclad 50-page contract she can just go ahead and take it back anyway." Is the author then supposed to return the money? And what about all the damages to your business by getting the ownership of his work back?

jxdxbx 14y ago
I used "author" in the technical sense, which means all creators of copyrighted works. The termination is far enough in the future that only now are some prominent musicians taking advantage of it, but there have been some stories recently. You have to actively take advantage of the law, also, it's not automatic. And there are often lawsuits. None of this applies to "works made for hire," for which the "author" is for example a company. If I hire you to write a song you never were the copyright owner to begin with. This is a complex area and there's a lot of litigation about the distinction between works for hire and works that are written and then transferred or licensed. I don't know the details of how it works with canceling my hypothetical "no termination only" billion dollar contract. I know copyright law but I haven't studied this area specifically. For the most part contracts pay the author a modest sum that covers a license or a transfer for a modest number of years. In fact a 20 year license should cost about as much as a perpetual license given that most works make all the money they're ever going to make long before that. So a termination under those circumstances doesn't involve any unjust enrichment to the author. And there can be no legally relevant "damages" that result from an author taking advantage of a law that has been in place for decades--it's your responsibility as a media company to know about these things, not the job of an author to decline to take advantage of his legal rights for your sake.
- cpressey 14y ago
  It's interesting that you can give away your copyright to another entity (if it's a "work made for hire") but you can't give up your copyright completely to place a work irrevocably into the public domain. What if I create a legal entity, have it hire me to make a work, and then dissolve the entity? (That's mostly rhetorical; I expect the answer, if it exists, is messy.) EDIT: answering my own question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works
  - jxdxbx 14y ago
    There's a difference. You never owned the work to begin with in a work made for hire. Example: a New York Times reporter never owns the copyright to his articles--they are owned by the NY Times from the beginning. There is no transfer. The article is in a sense written "by" the Times. But if I write an article and then sell all the rights to the Times later, I can claw it back in a few decades. The arguments are over what happens when it's not so clear. Like what if the Times contracts with an independent freelancer specifically to write an article?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

gamblor956 14y ago

* author can always revoke a license that purports to be irrevocable after a set time. This is known as copyright "termination" or reversion. The law is very, very clear on this. There is nothing that an author can do, no agreement that he can make, that waives this right.* In the US, authors absolutely can give up their rights to a work irrevocably. For example, Michael Jackson did not own all of the copyrights to his songs on his death even though he wrote or co-wrote all of them. Movieland is filled with examples of screenwriters who gave up their rights to their (non-commissioned, i.e., non-work-for-hire scripts, aka "spec" scripts) screenplay in exchange for a one-time payment only to see the studio get rich. You've mixed up US copyright law, which allows for complete inalienability during the author's lifetime and European copyright law's concept of "moral rights" which are not alienable but the other or others.

jxdxbx 14y ago
Sorry, you're wrong. An author's heirs can reclaim any rights that are transferred. See, for instance this: http://www.authorsguild.org/services/legal-services/terminating-transfers/ http://www.authorsguild.org/services/legal-services/terminat... "What if the author is dead? When an author dies, his or her termination right, known as the “termination interest” is inherited as follows: if the author has no children, the surviving spouse inherits the author’s entire termination interest; if the author has children, they split the termination interest with the surviving spouse — the children take half, divided equally among them, and the surviving spouse takes half; if the author has children but no surviving spouse, then the children inherit the author’s entire termination interest (divided equally among them); if any of the author’s children is dead, that child’s interest is inherited by his or her own children (divided equally among them); majority action by the children of the author’s deceased child is required to exercise that child’s termination interest; if the author’s surviving spouse, children, and grandchildren are all dead, the author’s executor, administrator, personal representative, or trustee owns the author’s entire termination interest. The author’s heirs (as listed above), or their executors, who own and are entitled to exercise more than one half of the termination interest, either individually or together, may terminate." And in other comments, I addressed the works-for-hire issue, where the creator never owns the copyright to begin with. You can't terminate works-for-hire because legally the person who hired you is always already the author.