Non of fiction is important enough to have laws about.
All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022
201–210 of 233 posts
Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a constant problem, publishers go out of business all the time. I have a lot of photocopied sheet music that cannot be purchased anywhere, at any price, but it will be decades before any of it can be legally shared. Just ridiculous artificial scarcity - I wonder how the composers would feel about it.
I realize it creates a legal quagmire to have abandoned works and I think registration should be required to solve that. That being said, what in reality would happen if you release that sheet music? If it's abandoned, there wouldn't be anyone to come after you for it. You could just put it up online for free and then honor DMCA takedowns from people who can prove they are the rights holder.
> I realize it creates a legal quagmire to have abandoned works and I think registration should be required to solve that.
I really like the model of every work automatically receiving protection. I think creations should automatically receive a relatively short-term automatic copy-right protection (say 14 years). After that, I think extensions should require manual renewals by the current rights holder (including contact information for the rights holder)
Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
How were artists living before copyrights? We’ve had quite a few of them delivering masterpieces. So we can reward efforts the same ways as before, art will not die just be less profitable maybe. If reproduction is easy what do we as a society earn by making it harder artificially? I don’t believe any other worker is having these benefits. You do your job, paid for your effort by someone willing to do so, and then go…
> That includes other creative occupations and most of the employees of e.g. movie studios. Are we fairly compensating _them_ for their work? what i find really interesting is, why is it that a company owns what i make there automatically? afaik i didn't sign any copyright assignment in my work contract... i wonder what the legal basis is for that?
You most probably did. At least I know I did. And the point is exactly that, instead of protecting creative output copyright is locking it down by capitalising it. Rather than creativity being a flow of meaningful communication and exchange at the level of ideas and aesthetics, it’s becoming a stock with ongoing financial and not creative dividends. You will have trouble using your creative outputs when moving between companies. Unless you start all over again and from that perspective it is a weird motivator for creativity, albeit one oriented to getting you where you started from rather than one step further.
Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the big problem here is that 2-3 years is almost no time at all . With 2-3 years, basically everyone will wait for the next book in the Game of Thrones series to come out of costing money. Covid has been nearly 2 years, and for many of us it feels both like yesterday and also like forever ago, for example. And then you'll have people that want to watch the movie of something, so they're willing to pay the vid…
> RR Martin would make zero dollars from Game of Thrones, for example. idk... how many people are still watching game of thrones? whats the long tail look like for popular books? my impression was, most books that make any money are hugely popular for a short time, then basically fall off a "sales cliff"... i wonder if anyones done any comprehensive stories about this subject.
My point was that RR Martin wrote books, and then *movies* were made off the books. If the copyright period is 2-3 years, then a movie company would just need to wait a couple years and RR Martin would get zero dollars for his work (except the small number of people that buy his book) but more people watch movies and shows, so they would be willing to pay the premium for the movies based off his content just a couple years later.
Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
2-3 years is no time at all. Someone could hand a movie studio a script in hopes of it being made a movie, the movie studio could wait 4 years, and then make the movie, with no harm to them whatsoever.
Huh. A movie studio. Yes, my proposal also has a nice side effect of filtering out those who are in it for the money, not self-expression. The world would become a better place if there were no "entertainment industry".
Is there something wrong with creating solely for money and not self-expression?
Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. And why not? That I can do that so easily today even with copyright just goes to show how post-scarcity information is. The problem, of course, is that the creators of the work still need to participate in a scarcity economy to live. There are examples of efforts being made to fund creators outside the traditional scarcity-based mechanism, such as patreon funding, github sponsorship, and the like, although I adm…
How do you ensure the copy you buy isn't adulterated and modified? One benefit of copyright is that the author can ensure the "real" one is shared... which you may care about when viewing content. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-...
Trivially solved with hashing or signing. Copyright as a legal mechanism is unnecessary to ensure 'legitimacy'.
Copyright is useful for preventing others from using characters you created, but frankly I don't see the value in that. Moreover, it isn't even effective as fan fiction is incredibly common anyway. We can see how this would work with the proliferation of open source and the commonness of forks. It really isn't a big deal.
Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly I think we should just work at doing away with the concept. The idea of it was to encourage the creation of works by providing a limited term of artificial scarcity so said works could participate in the market. But in the information age, where copying information is as close to free as makes no odds, I think that makes a lot less sense than it used to. That's without even considering that giant corporation…
Then we would be well advised to listen to the creators of such work, who largely tend to describe the type of system you want to do away with.
I don't think that follows. If we listen to car manufacturers we should replace our cars every year. Creators who make a lot of money with the current system are incentivized to perpetuate it, and some of those who don't make much imagine that they someday might.
Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022
#208One hundred years. Yeah, our establishment is so committed to all the kumbaya shit it spouts when limiting individual expression.
Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should eliminate copyright. Zero years. Copyright was a reasonable bargain when printing a book involved a large up-front investment of typesetting it and then printing all the copies that would ever be printed from that setup. It didn't affect most people, just printers. And it enabled authors to make a living from writing. This held a fortiori for phonograph records. It became fairly dubious in the age of photoc…
I think this could have lots of side affects (even though i agree that copyrights have some negative aspects to them). One big issue is that when things aren't bound by copyright, the originals can be adulterated and you won't know: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-... > The New York Times reports that in some countries where "1984" is in the public domain opportunists are printing cheap ve…
How is this a net negative for any one other than the Orwell estate??
Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022
#210Does this offer a sort of land-grab opportunity where anyone who has an original recording can remaster it, convert to mp3, then claim copyright over that "transformation" of the original?
A simple copy of remaster won’t cut it in the US, but if you did some restoration work then that might be enough. This would only work as a land grab if you owned the only extant copies of the original, otherwise people could just make copies of those. There were a bunch of court cases about this, music radio, and rights payments.
As far as I know, restoration is insufficient to claim a derivative copyright in a public domain work because it lacks sufficient originality. To the extent you do a good job, your additions to the underlying public domain work are not your creative authorship. They are a restoration of the original author's authorship.
I believe that is why Peter Kuran (Trinity and Beyond) patented a photochemical restoration process for revitalizing the color in films. Because his other restoration work is not protectable.