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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)

#31

Post by Retric »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #28
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.

What if copyright expired in 18 months? Same thing. 14 years made sense when there were wooden printing presses and the fastest communication was a rider and a horse carrying a handwritten letter sealed in wax. They arguably need less time to monetize today than they did back then. Years-long (or, as it is now decades-long and centuries-long) periods are about giving someone the right to tax culture for many generati…

18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17… I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again and I suspect a large fraction of people would react similarly.

5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value on most works and yet not hampering cultural remixes.

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

#32

Post by toast0 »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #25
cobbzilla wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not the case. If registration were required in the US, 99.999999% of software ever written would be effectively public domain.

The copyright rules have changed. Registration and a proper notice was required when this film was published.

Now, fixing a creative work in a tangible medium is all that's required. When does the copyright expire? Nobody will know, because there's no year of publication listed, and no author listed to find out when they die. (Even if there is an author listed by name, maybe it was me; maybe it was the Pulitzer Prize winning author)

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

#33

Post by JadeNB »

DrillShopper wrote: post #20
Andrex wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

That doesn't mean that we should lean into it.

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

#34

Post by rakoo »

glimshe wrote: post #6
dublinben wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the same way that It’s A Wonderful Life became a much-revered Christmas classic. If the copyright hadn’t expired allowing monthlong TV marathons, it would have faded into obscurity. How many people remember The Best Years of Our Lives, which beat it out for multiple Oscars in 1947?

What is the middle ground? Everybody knows that "free" has a huge appeal. But so does low cost, which arguably vastly reduced piracy for older movies and music. It seems that content providers found ways to unlock content by paying creators fractions of a cent. It would be cool if there was a standard way to acquire license for older content for very little without dealing with the copyright headaches.

Piracy is only bad if you want to earn money for each eye watching a minute of a movie. What we're doing right now is piracy, no one pays anyone anything for content

The question shouldn't be about how much it costs but why do things cost anything in the beginning, and if they have to what is the amount a specific piece should be retributed for its contribution to society minus how the non-zero cost impacts society.

AIs are being let off the hook with their massive copyright infringement but when a movie being open directly benefits everyone suddenly that's a problem.

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

#35

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

Retric wrote: post #31
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if copyright expired in 18 months? Same thing. 14 years made sense when there were wooden printing presses and the fastest communication was a rider and a horse carrying a handwritten letter sealed in wax. They arguably need less time to monetize today than they did back then. Years-long (or, as it is now decades-long and centuries-long) periods are about giving someone the right to tax culture for many generati…

18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17… I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again and I suspect a large fraction of people would react similarly. 5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value on most works and yet not hampering cultural remixes.

>18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17

Well, that's one way to look at it. The other way is that it merely limits how much it can be sold for on month 17. When I was in high school, one of the big malls had a dollar-a-ticket movie theater. People would pay for things that are more easily/cheaply available soon, they just won't pay the premiums demanded now.

But there's a third way to look at it... the idea that they never owned the intellectual property anyway. It always belonged to the public domain, they had a temporary lease. And in that view, the idea that they'd have trouble extracting maximum dollars from it on the day before the lease ends is absurd. No one cares, nor should they care.

>I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again a

Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience. I can do all the streaming I need, to any of my devices (or my friends' devices) anywhere in the world. Everything on demand, from every premium channel and streaming service, in the highest resolution. Every minute or every day. I read comments here and elsewhere about people complaining how they have to cancel Netflix, the show's over, but they have to resubscribe to Disney because the new show's on, etc. It's all bizarre. The stuff you guys are willing to put up with is mind-boggling.

>5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value

You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit. Not "value". The magnitude of the grift in the industry that gave us the term "Hollywood accounting" is beyond human imagination or capacity to comprehend. Stop enabling that.

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

#36

Post by rakoo »

rwmj wrote: post #9
glimshe wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the middle ground? Everybody knows that "free" has a huge appeal. But so does low cost, which arguably vastly reduced piracy for older movies and music. It seems that content providers found ways to unlock content by paying creators fractions of a cent. It would be cool if there was a standard way to acquire license for older content for very little without dealing with the copyright headaches.

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.

elevates*

Language has meaning, and the puplic domain is a better situation for society. It is more interesting to say it ascended

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

#37

Post by Retric »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #35
Retric wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17… I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again and I suspect a large fraction of people would react similarly. 5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value on most works and yet not hampering cultural remixes.

>18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17 Well, that's one way to look at it. The other way is that it merely limits how much it can be sold for on month 17. When I was in high school, one of the big malls had a dollar-a-ticket movie theater. People would pay for things that are more easily/cheaply available soon, they just won't pay the premiums demanded now. But there's a…

> Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience.

Ethics

> You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit.

The creative industry isn’t wildly profitable. Slash the amount of money movies/books/etc make on average and you dramatically reduce the amount of movies/books/etc published.

After all we could totally remove copyright, but then you don’t get leech off the fruits of other people’s labor if they never preform that labor.

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

#38

Post by Finnucane »

dublinben wrote: post #4
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…

This is exactly the same way that It’s A Wonderful Life became a much-revered Christmas classic. If the copyright hadn’t expired allowing monthlong TV marathons, it would have faded into obscurity. How many people remember The Best Years of Our Lives, which beat it out for multiple Oscars in 1947?

I've seen The Best Years of Our Lives several times; it plays regularly on TCM.

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

#39

Post by bluGill »

dahart wrote: post #23
gus_massa wrote: post #2

Note that it was released in 1968. The law changed since then. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice > For works first published on or after March 1, 1989, use of the copyright notice is optional. Before March 1, 1989, the use of the notice was mandatory on all published works. Omitting the notice on any work first published from January 1, 1978, to February 28, 1989, could have resulted in the loss of…

This March 1 1989 date is when the adoption of the Berne Convention took effect in the US, the Berne Convention being what brings the notion that registration should not be required in order to have legal copyright protections. European artists had that protection for ~100 years at that point. Most countries in the world have adopted the Berne Convention, though I learned fairly recently here on HN that the US is sti…

You can sue for damages if you don't have the copyright registered in the US. If you have the copyright registered you can sue for triple damages. (according to my mandatory company copyright training, a real lawyer is welcome to correct me)

Edit: I just remembered that you cannot sue if your copyright is not registered - but you don't have to register until just before you sue. Triple damages applies to anything that happens after the copyright is registered, but that is the only difference it makes.

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

#40

Post by bluGill »

kmoser wrote: post #30
cobbzilla wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This error occurred after the film's title was changed from its original moniker Night of the Flesh Eaters. Prints with that title contained the copyright notice, but when new prints were created using the title Night of the Living Dead, the copyright notice was forgotten. This begs the question: if the original movie was copyrighted, how does releasing the same movie with a different title make the new re-release…

Remember we need to talk about law as it existed back when this happened not the law today. Back then you didn't get copyright protection unless you registered with the copyright office (and a few other things that I'm not quite sure of - none relevant to the law today). So the copyright was never registered, likely because the distributor was expected to register it and they failed to do their job. There might be a lawsuit against the distributor for breach of contract, but it wouldn't be a copyright lawsuit.

Today things are much easier, if you create something it is copyright. If you want to sue you need to register, but you can register at anytime. If you register you can sue for triple damages for anything that happens after you register, but you can still get damages for things that happened before your register. (The above is my understanding of the law, but I'm not a lawyer)

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