Once/if Dr. Seuss enters public domain you're going to see that everywhere. The entire world will turn into a Seuss wonderland. Or at least I can dream it will.
I live in Italy.
Can I get (legally) the works of Willa Cather and G. H. Hardy (the mathematician)?
According to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_in_public_domain
they enter the public domain in 2018 as well.
Good for poor people but too bad for the families of these artists/writers, as they won’t be able to benefit from it anymore. This is why government regulation is terrible.
What? Copyright itself is a regulated affair. Not only that, but our idea of "intellectual property" rights is a modern notion.
Familiarize yourself with the Copyright Act of 1976 [0] before you start making the claim that copyright expiration is somehow "government regulation". It's the only good part about the the act. The copyright and IP law in general have been abused to do some very greedy shit.
Not just poor people. Walt Disney wasn't poor, but he made massive use of public domain works. Now his family cries into $1000 bills about how allowing his works to go into public domain will cut their income by 1%. Give me a break.
Uh... The copyright system is government regulation. The government says that in exchange for producing a creative work, you have exclusive rights to publish that work for a "limited" time.
> bad for the families of these artists/writers, as they won’t be able to benefit from it anymore
That benefit was purely due to government regulation.
> Good for poor people
Good for society in general IMO, because even very old works often inspire new ones. Imagine that the greek and roman pantheons were under copyright, and anyone writing about Zeus would be sued for infringement.
Maybe the families of these artists and writers should do something productive for society themselves instead....
Copyright should be no longer than 28 years. 14 years for corporations and estates, plus one 14 year extension to individuals if they are still alive and file for a single 14 year extension
I think that copyright should not expire during the creators life. I can profit from my business activities for the entirety of my life, so should an artist.
After death? Absolutely expire that copyright. In fact I think that perhaps a limit of 14 years after death so that a widow can make use of it but no more.
The key word to your "business activities" is ACTIVITIES.
Further You seem to be under the false impression that the purpose of copyright is so creators can make money. No that is not the purpose.
Copyright has the sole constitutional purpose in the US to promote useful sciences, no other purpose. Not so creators can make money, not so widows can make money.
The ability for those people to make some money off of their work is entice them to create in the first place. Placing a limit on the time they are earn from the work entices additional activity including
1. Them to create additional works every 14-28 years
2. Allows other people to make use of that work to create additional work after 14-28 years
As was eluded to in other comments most of the IP locked away today is based on work that was created by others, a majority of Disney for example was inspired or directly copied from Public domain Works
The idea behind a 14 year copyright is to inject the Public Domain with a rich set of IP creators can use to create more works. Which is the purpose of Copyright not profit
I see the appeal of the principle, but I think life of the author should not be a consideration in calculating copyright term, as it brings several problems:
1) In order to determine whether a work is under copyright, one needs to know not only about the publication history of the work itself (which is typically printed on copies of the work or accompanying material), but also whether and when the author died. For works by obscure authors, this can involve significant cost.
2) Works published late in an author's life or by an author who dies young receive a shorter term, even though there's no reason to think that they're less valuable.
3) It theoretically creates an incentive to kill the author to shorten the term. Although I suppose that this is quite unlikely to actually happen, why build such a perverse (in both the economic and moral senses of the word) incentive into the system if we don't need to?
Furthermore, it's not at all clear that term lengths on the order of a lifetime create any productive incentive compared to shorter term lengths. For the vast majority of works, revenue rapidly decays to a trickle within a few years of publication (for fast-paced markets like video games, this can happen in a few months). So starting from a term that's already decades long, an extra decade or two on a new work has a vanishingly small net present value [1].
(I often drop this into PD threads so sorry if you’ve seen this before, but) the Standard Ebooks project[1] that I contribute to takes PD texts, updates them with better markup and a high quality house style, adds PD cover artwork, then releases them again back into the public domain. Although I’m outside the US the project is US-based, so I’d love to see a yearly update interval again there for both texts to produce and sources of cover art.
No thanks needed: it’s fun, reuses my front-end skills, teaches me Python (I’ve been helping out with the build system as well), and gets me reading a bunch of books I’ve not touched before. The best sort of hobby :)
I first stumbled on your project when I was stuck in a hospital, and I want to say that it was a great diversion, and the releases I read were all very high quality (on Moon+ Reader for Android). So really, thank you.
Well, if no thanks then, I am glad you have this hobby and I am glad you posted this, at a very timely moment of the year, which coincides with me needing to burn some extra vacation days (because nothing is created, nothing is lost, except accrued vacation days). Cheers!
Thanks for your project, I've downloaded some ebooks and it was great to read them. I would just like to let you that, at least on my ereader (sony prs t1), the book covers do not show at all. I looked at the epub source and I think I saw some svg in the cover, it was probably that.. It's an old ereader..
Maybe you could file a bug at https://github.com/standardebooks/tools ? Alternatively, I had a similar problem with my Kobo and Calibre, which was messing with the file in some way even though I had all conversion options disabled. I just use Finder to copy them over now.
Thanks for this project! If not for this, I probably wouldn't have read The Communist Manifesto.
I wonder, if the translation of a book is in the US public domain, does that imply that the original is also in the US public domain? I'm curious because as a native French speaker, I would love to see the original French books there too.
tl;dr: it was felt that for the quality of available scans it wasn’t worth including them. That’s not to say they couldn’t be added in a later edition though were better quality scans to become available.
I’m currently working on Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, for which the images are essential. Planning to try and trace and hand-amend the images into high quality SVG as part of the production process.
I wonder if SVG would kill the naive look of "Flatland's" art. Or perhaps, maybe more likely, the author would have preferred mathematically precise art. Good luck.
The US government right now is waging a war against the commons. As such, it's pretty easy to predict that they will, with no fanfare or controversy, pass a law that enriches large corporations at the expense of everyone else.
Trump signing the Mickey Mouse Act of 2019 would be the least surprising thing about his presidency. Him not signing it is certainly possible (Even a broken clock is right twice a day), but it would be surprising and unexpected.
I wouldn't be surprised. I am kind of surprised that we haven't heard rumbling already but with all the moves Disney has made maybe they are afraid of drawing too much attention to themselves and will wait.
I still don't understand why Disney has historically been so paranoid of Steamboat Willie entering the public domain anyway - Isn't Mickey protected well enough by trademark (which is perpetual so long as it's defended) that copyright on a 1928 cartoon is no longer instrumental in maintaining the proprietary protection of the character?
Copyright is as much (if not more) about power and control as is is about anything else. It's one more hammer in their toolset to whack others on the head with.
Don't forget that Disney really knows the power of public domain. Could you imagine if "Snow White" was allowed to enter the public domain? Anyone would be able to retell that story to their children without worrying about performing a copyrighted work in public without a licence!
Well they can do that anyway. Snow white is a fairy tale that's existed for hundreds of years. What's copyrighted specifically is the disney version of it.
Well thanks to the generosity of the OTO basically all of Crowley's public works have been available for 20 years now. They basically allow people to share his works because sharing has encouraged more sales of his physical books which they earn income from producing.
Mere sharing is quite different from the ability to produce derivative works. Crowley works entering the public domain should be a boon for his accessibility as fanfic anthologies become publishable.
Honestly, I wish they'd just issue a special exception for Disney instead of screwing up the entire system because they don't want to appear nakedly corrupt.
My idea for Disney-appeasement without special exemptions:
Let copyrights be extended for 14 years at a time, indefinitely, with the requirement of registration and a token filing fee. Anyone who cares can keep their copyright for as long as they want, if they just care enough to fill out a 1 page form. Anyone who doesn't care that much (or no heirs, or whatever), the copyright expires. Bonus side effect: for everything still in copyright, there is a database you can look up current contact info for licensing.
Copyright schemes are almost always for the distributors, not the creators.
Let creators enjoy the full benefits of copyright by returning the ownership back to creator after 10 years.
After a decade, it is expected that creators will be able to command bigger cut as compensation for popular works and thus, inspire more creators to publicly deliver works due to the expectation of more appropriate and fair level of compensation from interested distributors. Otherwise, creators are discouraged from independent creation of works if it's believed that they will suffer perpetual loss of copyright ownership in exchange for a minuscule payment.
As it stands, distributors can say "well, sell us the copyright for a dollar and we might give you a cut. No, not a licence, the copyright! At least you'll get a lot of exposure? Hehehe"
The current scheme has a lot of economic encouragement for indy creators to aim for live music, book signings, etc. Where creators need can be present and needed.
The real question is: What role should publishers/distributors have, and be allowed to have?
From a writer's standpoint, I think it was common not to grant the publisher a perpetual license. The publisher would offer the author an advance and get exclusivity. If the book made enough money to cover that advance, the copyright would revert to the author (publisher may still have license to keep publishing, but not exclusivity).
In today's world, people can and do make big money self publishing on Amazon, so the hold publishers had has reduced. The argument makes less sense now than 20 years ago.
If you want to argue that self publishing is still a crap shoot compared to traditional publishers, then we have to recognize the great value publishers can bring to the author, and discuss why government intervention (i.e. law) is necessary in this case.
58 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadHere's the one for 2017:
https://law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2017/pre-1976/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170201214420/https://law.duke....
Familiarize yourself with the Copyright Act of 1976 [0] before you start making the claim that copyright expiration is somehow "government regulation". It's the only good part about the the act. The copyright and IP law in general have been abused to do some very greedy shit.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976 https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92appa.pdf
Uh... The copyright system is government regulation. The government says that in exchange for producing a creative work, you have exclusive rights to publish that work for a "limited" time.
> bad for the families of these artists/writers, as they won’t be able to benefit from it anymore
That benefit was purely due to government regulation.
> Good for poor people
Good for society in general IMO, because even very old works often inspire new ones. Imagine that the greek and roman pantheons were under copyright, and anyone writing about Zeus would be sued for infringement.
Maybe the families of these artists and writers should do something productive for society themselves instead....
Copyright should be no longer than 28 years. 14 years for corporations and estates, plus one 14 year extension to individuals if they are still alive and file for a single 14 year extension
I think that copyright should not expire during the creators life. I can profit from my business activities for the entirety of my life, so should an artist.
After death? Absolutely expire that copyright. In fact I think that perhaps a limit of 14 years after death so that a widow can make use of it but no more.
They can, by continuing to create new work
The key word to your "business activities" is ACTIVITIES.
Further You seem to be under the false impression that the purpose of copyright is so creators can make money. No that is not the purpose.
Copyright has the sole constitutional purpose in the US to promote useful sciences, no other purpose. Not so creators can make money, not so widows can make money.
The ability for those people to make some money off of their work is entice them to create in the first place. Placing a limit on the time they are earn from the work entices additional activity including
1. Them to create additional works every 14-28 years
2. Allows other people to make use of that work to create additional work after 14-28 years
As was eluded to in other comments most of the IP locked away today is based on work that was created by others, a majority of Disney for example was inspired or directly copied from Public domain Works
The idea behind a 14 year copyright is to inject the Public Domain with a rich set of IP creators can use to create more works. Which is the purpose of Copyright not profit
1) In order to determine whether a work is under copyright, one needs to know not only about the publication history of the work itself (which is typically printed on copies of the work or accompanying material), but also whether and when the author died. For works by obscure authors, this can involve significant cost.
2) Works published late in an author's life or by an author who dies young receive a shorter term, even though there's no reason to think that they're less valuable.
3) It theoretically creates an incentive to kill the author to shorten the term. Although I suppose that this is quite unlikely to actually happen, why build such a perverse (in both the economic and moral senses of the word) incentive into the system if we don't need to?
Furthermore, it's not at all clear that term lengths on the order of a lifetime create any productive incentive compared to shorter term lengths. For the vast majority of works, revenue rapidly decays to a trickle within a few years of publication (for fast-paced markets like video games, this can happen in a few months). So starting from a term that's already decades long, an extra decade or two on a new work has a vanishingly small net present value [1].
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/01-618.ZD1.html ; See Part II—C
[1] https://standardebooks.org/
https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/issues/63
I wonder, if the translation of a book is in the US public domain, does that imply that the original is also in the US public domain? I'm curious because as a native French speaker, I would love to see the original French books there too.
tl;dr: it was felt that for the quality of available scans it wasn’t worth including them. That’s not to say they couldn’t be added in a later edition though were better quality scans to become available.
I’m currently working on Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, for which the images are essential. Planning to try and trace and hand-amend the images into high quality SVG as part of the production process.
(sigh)
Trump signing the Mickey Mouse Act of 2019 would be the least surprising thing about his presidency. Him not signing it is certainly possible (Even a broken clock is right twice a day), but it would be surprising and unexpected.
If we keep pushing the year back in perpetuity, we should be honest about the fact that we're violating the Constitution.
Let creators enjoy the full benefits of copyright by returning the ownership back to creator after 10 years.
After a decade, it is expected that creators will be able to command bigger cut as compensation for popular works and thus, inspire more creators to publicly deliver works due to the expectation of more appropriate and fair level of compensation from interested distributors. Otherwise, creators are discouraged from independent creation of works if it's believed that they will suffer perpetual loss of copyright ownership in exchange for a minuscule payment.
Similar scheme exists in Europe: http://evolver.fm/2012/02/29/why-mastered-for-itunes-wont-de...
As it stands, distributors can say "well, sell us the copyright for a dollar and we might give you a cut. No, not a licence, the copyright! At least you'll get a lot of exposure? Hehehe"
The current scheme has a lot of economic encouragement for indy creators to aim for live music, book signings, etc. Where creators need can be present and needed.
The real question is: What role should publishers/distributors have, and be allowed to have?
From a writer's standpoint, I think it was common not to grant the publisher a perpetual license. The publisher would offer the author an advance and get exclusivity. If the book made enough money to cover that advance, the copyright would revert to the author (publisher may still have license to keep publishing, but not exclusivity).
In today's world, people can and do make big money self publishing on Amazon, so the hold publishers had has reduced. The argument makes less sense now than 20 years ago.
If you want to argue that self publishing is still a crap shoot compared to traditional publishers, then we have to recognize the great value publishers can bring to the author, and discuss why government intervention (i.e. law) is necessary in this case.