Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What will enter the public domain in 2022

publicdomainreview.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 235 posts

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#201

Post by ggm »

I dislike the Sunny Bono and Disney laws and I dislike modern IPR life extension. But, I do sometimes think this is an overstated problem. Taking the long view, what's coming into the public domain now is good, and more will follow in due course. If not in my lifetime, the white album will ultimately be legally freely available. Of course we have to fight to maintain that inevitability, it's not like corporates won't fight back.

I also think this is a junk website for something so interesting. Bad design for a simple list.

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#202

Post by bruce511 »

d110af5ccf wrote: post #178
bruce511 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to avoid your absurd fee idea, but failed. So here goes... A) which govt gets your fee? B) does paying 1 govt cover you in all countries? Or just 1? What if different countries set different fee levels? C) % of revenue? Not profit. Who's revenue? Creator? Manufacturer? Distributor? Portol? All 4? (think author, publisher, bookshop, amazon) D) $100 per what? Per blog posting? Tweet? Novel? Song? If I write a s…

Regarding "which government" don't we already solve that issue today? The holder of a copyright (or patent) today will often economically benefit the country they reside in. Recognition is mutual because otherwise the system wouldn't work. Sometimes there are disagreements, for example India and certain pharmaceuticals. I guess the real issue is how such a system would cope with different countries setting different…

Patents are very different to copyrights. At the most fundamental level patents are registered and paid for. Copyrights are immediate and automatic.

So the suggestion is to make copyrights like patents, because, that system has proved to work so well?

Another difference is scale. Every photo you take is copyrighted to you. Immediately. For free. You're suggesting that every photo you take should incur a registration fee? Or that every photo everyone takes should be in the public domain?

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#203

Post by defanor »

aosaigh wrote: post #176

I find it hilarious that users are complaining about the UX. It's an advent calendar! It says so in the subtitle "A Festive Countdown". Did these same users complain to their parents if/when they got an advent calendar for Christmas? "Mother, this advent calendar has awful usability. Why can't I access all of the chocolate immediately?"

Perhaps it's a matter of expectations: following the link, I expected to see a list, not some sort of an art project (which seems to be a bit broken, though maybe I didn't allow enough of scripts for it to work better). So I wasn't able to see the list there, while being curious about it, which is quite annoying. "Advent calendar" in the title would fix it.

Though I've actually had a similar story with a chocolate advent calendar: thought it's a book at first, but then discovered that it isn't. I don't think I've expected a book, so probably wasn't disappointed, but likely would have been if I did expect to receive a book instead.

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#204

Post by khafra »

chrismorgan wrote: post #123
jedberg wrote: post #82

This comes up every year so I ask a question: If you could fix copyright, how would you do it? Here is what I would do: 1. All works must be registered in a government registry. If it's not in there it's not copyrighted. If you want to register a work from before the law passes, you have to prove you own it under the current system. This would solve the orphan works problem -- if no one can prove they own it, it beco…

I say go simple on the copyright extension formula. If you treat it as a tax (scaling by revenue or similar), it gets messy, encourages dishonesty, and pretty much forces a new subindustry to spring up. But if you keep it simple, you can achieve much the same result without needing more staff in the tax or copyright offices, or inspiring the existence of copyright lawyers or accountants. Ten years of free protection,…

> If you treat it as a tax (scaling by revenue or similar), it gets messy, encourages dishonesty, and pretty much forces a new subindustry to spring up.

Not if you treat it as a Harberger* tax. If you do that, the small-time writer gets to keep his characters for a pittance, but Disney pays royally for all their princesses.

* https://academic.oup.com/jla/article/9/1/51/3572441

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#205

Post by bruce511 »

necovek wrote: post #188
bruce511 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to avoid your absurd fee idea, but failed. So here goes... A) which govt gets your fee? B) does paying 1 govt cover you in all countries? Or just 1? What if different countries set different fee levels? C) % of revenue? Not profit. Who's revenue? Creator? Manufacturer? Distributor? Portol? All 4? (think author, publisher, bookshop, amazon) D) $100 per what? Per blog posting? Tweet? Novel? Song? If I write a s…

Fees are mostly to disincentivise keeping works from public domain (which copyright creators agreed was for the public good) which are not really benefiting the creator in any substantial way. Regarding governments, just like we establish residency for income tax purposes, you could establish residency for copyrighted-work creation. If it's multiple countries you've been in while "creating", the one you spent most ti…

>> Fees are mostly to disincentivise keeping works from public domain

Your cure is worse than the disease. If I understand this right, works need to register and pay a fee to be copyrighted. So if I take a picture of my smiling family, post it on FaceBook without registering it (and paying a fee) it's automatically public domain?

So it can be used in a brochure by any political party, company, gun advert, whatever, without my consent and without any renumeration? And this is ok so someone can make crappy remixes of Milli Vanilli songs?

>> Regarding governments, just like we establish residency for income tax purposes, you could establish residency for copyrighted-work creation.

Excellent. So you're saying big companies and rich people pay pennies for copyrights in copyright-havens, while poor people get screwed.

>> If you register an off-shore tax-haven company today to receive your income while you reside (and work) in another country, when found out, you'll be charged with tax evasion.

um, that's not how tax havens work - and very much don't work for companies. Tax havens are completely legal for companies, they maximize tax avoidance (which is legal) not tax evasion.

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#206

Post by avar »

jedberg wrote: post #82

This comes up every year so I ask a question: If you could fix copyright, how would you do it? Here is what I would do: 1. All works must be registered in a government registry. If it's not in there it's not copyrighted. If you want to register a work from before the law passes, you have to prove you own it under the current system. This would solve the orphan works problem -- if no one can prove they own it, it beco…

> How would you fix copyright?

By abolishing it. Which I don't think is that radical of an idea.

Would we come up with copyright today if we didn't have it already? I don't think so.

The system as a whole makes no sense as something that the government need to be involved in when it comes to enforcement and the "promotion of the arts"

If we're talking about wholesale reform the burden of proof is one those arguing for that continued trade-off being worthwhile.

Today everything from graffiti and the SMS messages you're sending to your mom, to a major Hollywood movie is protected under the same system.

You could always right point out exceptions like Banksy for graffiti, but does that mean it's worthwhile for society as a whole to apply these blanket protections just in case someone comes up with a a worthwhile work they'd like to commercialize?

The small bits of copyright that are worthwhile in practice could be salved under some system that worked much more like Trademarks or patents.

I.e. you can't set up your own news site that copied articles from the NYT on a daily basis and charged for them, or the same with movies, but it would be on the narrow basis of directly interfering in someone else's (business) operations in a way that shows real demonstrated day-to-day harm. Or, you could pay an exorbitant fee (like a patent) to buy protection for a specific work when used in a specific way, which throw a bone to "big copyright", such as Disney.

But to quote even an entire article in a book you're writing on the subject, or include a 20 minute clip from a Disney movie in a review you're preparing? The "copyright holder" shouldn't be able to do anything about that.

Copyright was implemented at a time when the government and the people had an interest in things like the newspaper being as pervasive as indoor plumbing, or the water supply.

It should probably be phased out in the say way many publicly run postal systems have (which you can argue is a bad thing, but it's absurd to claim that they're as relatively important to society as they were 100 years ago).

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#207

Post by chrismorgan »

khafra wrote: post #204
chrismorgan wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say go simple on the copyright extension formula. If you treat it as a tax (scaling by revenue or similar), it gets messy, encourages dishonesty, and pretty much forces a new subindustry to spring up. But if you keep it simple, you can achieve much the same result without needing more staff in the tax or copyright offices, or inspiring the existence of copyright lawyers or accountants. Ten years of free protection,…

> If you treat it as a tax (scaling by revenue or similar), it gets messy, encourages dishonesty, and pretty much forces a new subindustry to spring up. Not if you treat it as a Harberger* tax. If you do that, the small-time writer gets to keep his characters for a pittance, but Disney pays royally for all their princesses. * https://academic.oup.com/jla/article/9/1/51/3572441

> We propose a remedy in the form of a tax on property, based on the value self-assessed by its owner at intervals, along with a requirement that the owner sell the property to any third party willing to pay a price equal to the self-assessed value.

I’m not convinced this would be a good fit for copyright in general, but it sounds very problematic for application to private persons in any field; in this case, your small-time writer would surely either overpay, or undervalue and have their work legally stolen from them by a Disney. Sounds like it’d favour the big entities that can play to the laws of averages.

But more generally, Harberger taxation seems a pretty cool concept, a genuine alternative to the current model of capitalism. I’m glad you mentioned it!

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#208

Post by dangerface »

jedberg wrote: post #82

This comes up every year so I ask a question: If you could fix copyright, how would you do it? Here is what I would do: 1. All works must be registered in a government registry. If it's not in there it's not copyrighted. If you want to register a work from before the law passes, you have to prove you own it under the current system. This would solve the orphan works problem -- if no one can prove they own it, it beco…

I like the idea behind IP of protecting small companies from larger companies that just copy them and then have the budget to just out market the smaller company into bankruptcy. Large companies don't need this protection as they have the marketing budget to compete with smaller or other large companies.

The issue I see is that intellectual property is too complicated and expensive for small companies to use that only large companies actually use it and they use it to abuse smaller companies.

I think the best REAL solution for small companies is to just get rid of intellectual property all together. IP didn't stop facebook from just copying snapchat or countless others, Microsoft, Google and Apple are all the same doing it too.

Remove IP laws an smaller companies will be able to look at cool stuff Larger companies do and innovate on it. China isn't ham strung by IP like this if we in the west want to keep up with China, we need to be able to continuously improve on our innovations and IP prevents this.

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#209

Post by bruce511 »

toast0 wrote: post #162
bruce511 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prepare to be impressed! All the following are still actively using code that I'd more than 20 years old; Gnu user tools, as used in Gnu Linux. Linux kernel. Pretty much all databases. (sqlite for example is 21 years old). Much of Windows, and Ms office. Not to mention mountains of my own code, still in production. 20 years is nothing in coding terms. Most developrs I know are small or single, and have one or two pro…

Linux 2.4 was pretty good, but even most of my IoT junk runs 2.6 which isn't quite 20 years old. MySQL 4.0 was a lot better than 3.23 IIRC, and isn't quite 20 years old either. IMHO, it's not so bad for the old version to become unrestricted; more recent changes can still be restricted. And 20 years of updates are often compelling enough to submit to restrictions. What number seems right to you though? 95 years for w…

the parent posted,

>> I would be very impressed with any code

And I would argue that _lots_ of the code in today's shipping products (which I listed, and others) use lots of code laid down more than 20 years ago.

Sure there's lots more in Linux now, but lots of the code is also basically unchanged from 20 years ago. It's not like GREP gets a complete rewrite every 5 years...

I'm not saying that I'd be up for using a Linux install from 20 years ago, but hey "any code" is a lot more than "complete install".

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#210

Post by willis936 »

lapetitejort wrote: post #4

Might be faster to link to the Wikipedia page [0]. As an American some names that stick out to me are Sinclair Lewis and Ludwig Wittgenstein. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_in_public_domain

And Jim Morrison, though moot because The Band Formerly Known As The Doors still sells their music and I'm certain has kept the copyright hot.
Post reply on HN