It’s wild that copyright lasts this long (life of author + 70 years after death)
"Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)
41–50 of 70 posts
Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)
#42Earlier 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…
It takes more than 18 months for many good works to get through all the editing processes. You can tell when publishers skip on that time as the quality is worse.
Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)
#43Earlier 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.
The middle ground could be a lot of different things. One might be a reformed copyright system.
The economist I know of who calculated a socially optimal copyright duration, Rufus Pollock, came up with an estimate of 20 something years.
This makes sense from the point of view of finance because the NPV of extra years beyond this is very low. To put it in qualitative terms, no one is thinking about their grandchildren's pensions when they decide to create a work.
Personally I would also have different durations and rules for different types of work: a book, a video, and a piece of software are very different works and need diffferent incentives
Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)
#44> 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?
The Best Years of Our Lives is a genuine classic. Complex narrative, brilliant cinematography and performances. It is a much more difficult film than It's A Wonderful Life, and absolutely worth watching.
Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
I think your training may have confused copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
Patent law allows triple damages in the case of willful infringement, and trademark allows triple damages in the case of a counterfeit mark that the infringer knew was counterfeit.
Copyright does have some things that can increase a damage award but there is no real triple damages mechanism.
The plaintiff in copyright gets a choice. They can ask for either:
• The actual damages plus the profits that the infringer made from the infringement. The latter is only to the extent that the infringer's profits exceeded the actual damages.
E.g., if you lost $100k due to infringement and the infringer made $70k your damages would be $100k. But if the infringer made $120k your damages would be $120k (the $100k you lost plus the $20k the infringer made over $100k).
• Statutory damages. It is often very hard to figure out actual damages so the law allows an alternative. If you elect statutory damages the damages range from $750 to $30000 per work infringed. The amount is determined by the judge or jury.
They can be decreased to as low as $200 if the infringer "was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright".
They can be increase up to $150000 if the infringement is found to be willful. This is the closest thing copyright as to triple damages.
The way registration affects all of this is:
• You have to register before filing a copyright lawsuit. There are some exceptions such as when a foreign copyright owner wants to sue over a work not published in the US but infringed in the US, due to Berne Convention requirements but we can ignore those here.
• You can only collect statutory damages for infringement that commences after registration (unless the registration is within 3 months of first publication).
• You can collect actual damages and infringer profits from infringement before registration.
Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not the case. If registration were required in the US, 99.999999% of software ever written would be effectively public domain.
99.9999999% of software written is not published, it’s covered by trade secret law. Copyright only applies to published works. Look into what happens legally when source code is leaked and published.
its covered by trade secret and copyright.
Software can simultaneously be covered by copyright, trade secret and patents. The patents have to disclose some info, of course.
Even when distributed you can distribute just the binary, and keep the source a trade secret.
Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)
#47Earlier 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.
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.…
>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
This is utterly nonsensical. You've invented a new definition of piracy to try to claim that streaming services are piracy.
Specifically at this point:
>no one pays anyone anything for content
This is literally factually incorrect. Netflix pays billions per year to copyright holders. Just because it's indirect payment in the form of a subscription doesn't mean you're not paying for the right to view content.
Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)
#48> 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 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. Not at all similar. Linus explicitly made his software free. Romero didn't _intentionally_ exclude the copyright notice, and had no explicit intention of making it free. > It’s not “ironic”, it’s completely expected. If it was only an old black-and-white movie, still subject to c…
>I'm sure there are countless other public domain black-and-white movies that no one has ever heard of.
See: MST3K and RiffTrax
Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)
#49> 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…
> If it was only an old black-and-white movie, still subject to copyright, today the movie would be a historical footnote at best. That's a very ungenerous take. The film is very good and was revolutionary for it's time. Check out other horror films from the same era and the tone is completely different. Night of the Living Dead changed what horror films could be. And there's plenty of old black and white movies stil…
> Night of the Living Dead changed what horror films could be.
And this would indeed merit the film a historical footnote. But it would be virtually unavailable, and nobody in a position to make it available would take the chance on an ancient black-and-white film. And it would therefore in all likelihood languish in obscurity.
Re: "Night of the Living Dead" accidentally became public domain (2019)
#50> an unfortunate error accidentally made it public domain
Never have I been so torn on my opinion of whether or not this was truly “unfortunate”.