181–190 of 201 posts
The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings enters the public domain in New Zealand, Egypt, and a couple other countries. Would have entered into the public domain in Canada had the government not signed a last-minute 20 year copyright extension act last year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why though ? They spend $160M a year [1] and grew their cash reserves by 50% year on year in 2023, so not particularly running in an operating deficit environment. Transcoding is expensive but not that much, if my company doesn’t make 1/20 of Wikipedia and we can afford to do 1000s of hours a day of transcoding surely they can too. [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/W...
It's not about the cost of transcoding; it's an ideological stance about open / royalty-free formats. e.g. there was a pretty strong consensus about not supporting MP4 back when the WMF asked whether it should be allowed, mostly on "it's not free" grounds: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comm...
Also note that VP8/VP9 is still patented, but just licensed freely. IMHO that's less free than patent-expired (public domain).
There's apparently a poster of Mickcy wearing gloves in full color from the same year Steamboat Willie came out (1928). Does this mean that full color gloved Mickcy is also in the public domain? https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mickey-mouse-poster_n_2149610
Disney has modern Mickey wrapped up in trademarks. It will be very interesting watching what Disney does when inevitably derivative works stray from steamboat Willie and approach the appearance of modern mickey. Disney has been preparing for this day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The USA often ignores the international community in many things, if the right domestic interest groups are behind it. It's just that currently the USA has powerful domestic companies/interests that are against copyright term extensions, which are more powerful than the (also quite powerful) companies in favour of term extensions. In the past decade, the USA also has tried to spread the new extended period over the w…
What are the powerful domestic companies/interests who are against the copyright terms? I always viewed copyright extensions as being good for the masses but bad for corporations (the copyright holders)
Here is them arguing against retroactively applying a 70 year old copyright term in Canada to works published before 1978:
https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/strategic-policy-sector/sit...
> For instance, if an author created a work at 30 -- the average age for a first childbirth in Canada -- and died at the average age of 82, with a copyright term of life of the author plus 50 years, and if the average of 25 years for a generation, we are into the fifth generation after creation of the work. Adding on another 20 years only compounds the capacity of heirs of authors to leverage extended copyright to prevent Canadians from accessing valuable cultural (and by that time historical) works. We have seen numerous examples of distantly removed heirs leveraging old copyright to prevent commentators from quoting extensively from well established works, or preventing historical pictures, news-clipping and other primary sources from being used without payment.
And indeed, it was implemented that way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_Canada#Extens...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, to be clear, I am mainly a public domain and copyright theory guy. I do keep up to date with everything here. But I also don't write laws; if I did, they would look different. Companies are allowed to train on copyrighted works - or, to be more precise, there is no prohibition in copyright law on them doing so. On the other hand, there are no particular protections. The real question is to what extent an AI gen…
> Companies are allowed to train on copyrighted works I’m curious what you mean by this. If I’m not allowed under copyright law to make a personal copy of the latest Pixar movie or watch it without permission or payment, even if I’m not sharing it with anyone else, what under the law allows a company to make a copy and train on it? I thought I understood copyright law to not only prohibit redistribution of copyrighte…
You aren't, but in many cases it doesn't matter because, even for USians, you're protected by the fair use exception. And even in some other cases like for educators and archivists where it extends further.
When we get new laws for the training of neural networks, I would expect their spirit to be based on the state of this exception.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about the cost of transcoding; it's an ideological stance about open / royalty-free formats. e.g. there was a pretty strong consensus about not supporting MP4 back when the WMF asked whether it should be allowed, mostly on "it's not free" grounds: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comm...
The decision to not supply H.264 is ideological for sure, and I can understand that from the patent perspective, but then they have MP3 (patent-expired in 2017) but not MPEG-2/H.262 (patent-expired in 2018). Also note that VP8/VP9 is still patented, but just licensed freely. IMHO that's less free than patent-expired (public domain).
Firefox can support mp4 over h264 despite their clear FOSS aligned goals , I am surprised that Wikipedia whose goals more align to open information rather than open source directly has challenges .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, to be clear, I am mainly a public domain and copyright theory guy. I do keep up to date with everything here. But I also don't write laws; if I did, they would look different. Companies are allowed to train on copyrighted works - or, to be more precise, there is no prohibition in copyright law on them doing so. On the other hand, there are no particular protections. The real question is to what extent an AI gen…
What would your ideal copyright regime look like? Mine would be different than what we have now, it'd be 20 years or artists lifetime, whichever is shorter - then 10 year long renewals are possible after that, but the cost of the renewal would ratchet up with each renewal. I've also considered using a percentage of revenue for the work - basically a tax on the revenue from that work, as a condition for the right of m…
I would have to actually write something blog-length about this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because in the end every organization is vulnerable to being eaten from the inside and worn as a skinsuit by parasites. Especially charities. Why would they spend money on improvements to the site when they could spend money on other things instead?
it is the easiest line item to spend on . Wikipedia has one of the best SRE teams, they were pretty transparent too, a lot of the communication was on IRC channels you could see, at least that was the case few years back. Running the top 5 website in the world is no joke especially as a non-profit and they do it well. They haven’t had any down time or major incident in the last decade which is pretty impressive. I wo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Essentially, other countries threatened trade deals if the US made terms dependent on formalities for non-US works. So the law was changed and copyrights were restored. Congress should have grown a spine and called their bluff rather than sell out the American public like that.
You’re talking about the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act aka the Mickey Mouse Protection Act? Claiming that was due to foreign pressure was just scapegoating / misdirection from its supporters. The US forced all sorts of copyright extensions on the international community back then (including DMCA-style DRM protections). The support section of the Wikipedia page lists the main lobbyists for the bill. They are…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Before people cheer too much, surprisingly works can retroactively be snatched back from the public domain and go back into copyrighted state. The United States is decidedly not going to extend copyright terms. The US only very reluctantly pulled works out of the public domain after it joined the Berne Convention in 1989. The reason ''Metropolis'' was in the public domain was because it failed to comply with renewa…
Uruguay Round Agreements Act?