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"Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)

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Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)

#11

Post by cobbzilla »

wodenokoto wrote: post #5

Did the distributor really have sufficient ownership of the movie to release a minor altered version into the public domain? I remember a long time ago a language study startup called smart.fm released their material on RSS under a copy left license. Problem was that they didn’t mean to give it away, but worse, they didn’t have the license to relicense the material like that. I kinda wonder where that puts redistribu…

It wasn’t a relicense, the copyright was never validly filed (date was missing), so the copyright was never registered. Only registered copyrights can be enforced in the US. No registration, no enforcement rights. Or at least that’s my layman’s understanding, happy to be corrected.

Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)

#12

Post by sumtechguy »

wodenokoto wrote: post #5

Did the distributor really have sufficient ownership of the movie to release a minor altered version into the public domain? I remember a long time ago a language study startup called smart.fm released their material on RSS under a copy left license. Problem was that they didn’t mean to give it away, but worse, they didn’t have the license to relicense the material like that. I kinda wonder where that puts redistribu…

> Did the distributor really have sufficient ownership of the movie to release a minor altered version into the public domain?

Probably yes. The way movies are financed is quite the byzantine joy ride if you want to look into it. With random tax incentives depending on where you make it. To finance groups that get control of entire regions. There are quite a large number of videos from independent filmmakers on what is going on. You hear things like 'Disney lost XYZ on a movie'. More than likely they lost someone else's money making sure they recoup first. Like for example the OG star wars has yet to recoup. Probably for some segments of the corporate structure that was created to make that movie that is probably true. Hollywood accounting is a huge mess. So yeah he probably signed off particular distribution rights to get the money to make/distribute the thing.

Many TV show pilots probably fall into the same issue too. I have not dug into it too much but the original pilot of star trek did not have one until a re-release decades later with an obvious digital watermark.

Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)

#13

Post by idle_zealot »

conception wrote: post #10
rwmj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyrighted and then falls into the public domain after 14 years. Plenty of time to monetize, then benefits the public after a relatively short people of time.

Or you get 10-14 years for free and after that you pay for it and it gets more and more expensive the older it is. Disney can keep their mouse but after 90 years its 100M. 91? 105M. Etc. If it’s not worth the price, let it go.

This makes sense from a purely economic perspective (if you scale the fee exponentially). It does not make sense from a "promote the arts" standpoint. Derivative works are a huge portion of human expression, and allowing the most valuable/influential ideas to be kept from the public would continue (albeit to a lesser degree) the creative harm of the current copyright regime.

Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)

#14

Post by ralferoo »

wodenokoto wrote: post #5

Did the distributor really have sufficient ownership of the movie to release a minor altered version into the public domain? I remember a long time ago a language study startup called smart.fm released their material on RSS under a copy left license. Problem was that they didn’t mean to give it away, but worse, they didn’t have the license to relicense the material like that. I kinda wonder where that puts redistribu…

I guess stuff like this would have already been thrashed out at the time, but it strikes me that if a mistake by a third party could invalidate copyright, it'd have been trivial to end the copyright on anything by releasing an unauthorised version without a copyright notice.

I guess it's complicated because the first release with this title was absent the copyright notice, but the article also says that prints existed with the previous title and a copyright notice, so if they were distributed at all, it'd seem to be a slam dunk that it'd be covered by copyright on the original title and the retitled copy without copyright notices was infringing.

Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)

#15

Post by ndriscoll »

conception wrote: post #10
rwmj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyrighted and then falls into the public domain after 14 years. Plenty of time to monetize, then benefits the public after a relatively short people of time.

Or you get 10-14 years for free and after that you pay for it and it gets more and more expensive the older it is. Disney can keep their mouse but after 90 years its 100M. 91? 105M. Etc. If it’s not worth the price, let it go.

It shouldn't be completely free for the initial period. Require a nominal fee (and registration) to pay for escrow/archive storage so it can be properly released into the public domain when copyright expires.

Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)

#17

Post by Andrex »

conception wrote: post #10
rwmj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyrighted and then falls into the public domain after 14 years. Plenty of time to monetize, then benefits the public after a relatively short people of time.

Or you get 10-14 years for free and after that you pay for it and it gets more and more expensive the older it is. Disney can keep their mouse but after 90 years its 100M. 91? 105M. Etc. If it’s not worth the price, let it go.

Giving large companies, but not the average Joe, the ability to retain copyright defeats the purpose of copyright being for artists.

Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)

#18

Post by ghaff »

teddyh wrote: post #3

> Night of the Living Dead's copyright snafu ended up costing him untold amounts of money in both the short and long term. This has strong vibes of “If only Linus Torvalds had charged for Linux, he would have been a rich man today.”. It does not work that way. > Somewhat ironically though, it's Night of the Living Dead's freely available nature that helped it become the revered classic it is today, as easy access and…

We had (many) version of Unix that were superior to Linux for a very long time. We can reasonable debate what Sun (in particular) should have done differently with SunOS/Solaris and Java in particular, but a for-pay-only version of Linux would just have been a fairly mediocre Unix variant.

Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)

#19

Post by ghaff »

ndriscoll wrote: post #15
conception wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you get 10-14 years for free and after that you pay for it and it gets more and more expensive the older it is. Disney can keep their mouse but after 90 years its 100M. 91? 105M. Etc. If it’s not worth the price, let it go.

It shouldn't be completely free for the initial period. Require a nominal fee (and registration) to pay for escrow/archive storage so it can be properly released into the public domain when copyright expires.

Registration basically benefits large corporations. There are good reasons why a lot of individual authors oppose orphan works legislation. Disney isn't going to forget or screw up copyright registration. You or your kids might.

Totally in favor of shorter copyright terms though even where there are edge cases where longer terms seemingly have made sense. (In terms of promoting progress of the arts, etc. or whatever the language is, I'm not sure that usually fairly small inheritances qualify.)

Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)

#20

Post by DrillShopper »

Andrex wrote: post #17
conception wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you get 10-14 years for free and after that you pay for it and it gets more and more expensive the older it is. Disney can keep their mouse but after 90 years its 100M. 91? 105M. Etc. If it’s not worth the price, let it go.

Giving large companies, but not the average Joe, the ability to retain copyright defeats the purpose of copyright being for artists.

Copyright has been about corporations, not artists, for a long time.
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