101–110 of 221 posts
I plan on uploading a BD rip of Steamboat Willie to YouTube at midnight January 1st, 2024. I'm curious if a copyright strike will happen and if I can defeat it.
Might be careful about discerning which midnight applies.
So is using mickey full of land mines? If you use it incorrectly and accidentally use variations of it that still have copyright, you risk getting sued
It's important to remember that none of these laws give you permission to do anything. The only thing the law does is give a judge, or a panel of judges, or a jury, a set of guidelines to evaluate whether or not you violated that law and can be fined or punished. If you use it in a way that violates copyright, or in a way that a lawyer responsible for the IP thinks violates copyright then you can hire a lawyer to try…
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That doesn't go far enough. Copyright terms should be on the order of 20 years or so, and should have nothing to do with whether or not the creator is still alive.
It's probably too short. It would live authors with very little bargaining power particularly if they become bigger in their writing carriers. Corporations would just have to wait 20 years and save themselves the exclusive rights and royalties. It should be looked form the frame of how long is appropriate to promote the creation of the arts etc. Realistically no author is thinking I won't create this art unless I get…
Corporations can't wait even 20 years because tastes change. There's not much mainstream demand for Sum 41 anymore. Also corporations can't have much margin on public domain material; there's too much competition if anyone can publish it, and for digital creations they'd be competing with legal p2p sharing. So they need that exclusivity.
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I think it went the other way around. Corrupt US industries first pushed those conventions and then pressured US legislature to "synchronize" with them. It's all a big pile of corrupt BS that tries to bypass normal lawmaking, so pushing back against it should be only natural.
I'm not familiar with the background here, so I just checked on Wikipedia. It says "After the United States' accession to the Berne convention, a number of copyright owners successfully lobbied the U.S. Congress for another extension of the term of copyright, to provide for the same term of protection that exists in Europe." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#:... ) This would seem to indica…
Example: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-...
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It might not be the only reason, but I think it's a good insight. It's also a reminder that when something "has bipartisan support" should be a red flag: it usually means it's another way the government is robbing from you (the public).
How was the government robbing us with the First Step Act? That's smack dab in the middle of the Trump Administration, complete with Democratic support and Koch Foundation support. Also, the recent bipartisan bill to keep the government open literally did the opposite of robbing the public. Here's a good one to check your insight: the so-called "Bipartisan Safer Communities Act." You've got Republicans helping to pas…
It's a good example, but (to me) for the opposite reason of what you implied.
Let's see if gun violence and mass shootings stats will actually decrease in 5 or 10 years from now then.
Disney has put so much effort into building Mickey Mouse as a brand that I don't mind all the protections they get. Plus, he's more of an icon than a character, so he's more likely to be an already-allowed stand-in for commentary on Disney (a la South Park) than people telling new stories with him.
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Were increases considered constitutional amendments? If they could happen, then what's the problem to revert it?
Previous copyright extensions were not constitutional amendments. Decreasing the length of new copyright terms could be done the same way, without any need for an amendment. Reducing the length of existing copyright terms might be considered an ex post facto law. Those are explicitly prohibited by the Constitution. The Constitution states that copyrights must be limited in length. Retroactively extending the duration…
No, that is definitely not an ex post facto law. That's not even close to what the ex post facto law clause covers (dealing with punishments for actions that were kosher at the time they took place).
There is an argument that shortening copyrights is prohibited by the takings clause. But I think there is a very good argument that shortening them isn't prohibited by the takings clause (for the same public-private interest balance reason that led to the first amendment arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft and Golan v. Holder failing).
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I doubt it played a very big role. Consider: the last general copyright extension in the US was the CTEA in 1998. Back then, the movie and music industries were among the biggest players in the copyright space. Since 1998, though, Silicon Valley companies (most obviously Google) have become powerhouses with lots of money and lots of incentive to fight future copyright extensions.
Do silicon valley companies still have a big incentive to fight copyright extension? The public domain and copyright expiry is one more set of requirements for SV code to have to implement and support. It's way easier if the owner stays for ever, and that there is a single owner
And that's not even counting the relevance of organizations like the Internet Archive, which was not nearly as meaningful in 1998.
> The public domain and copyright expiry is one more set of requirements for SV code to have to implement and support. It's way easier if the owner stays for ever, and that there is a single owner
And this makes no sense. Applications are not required to recognize public domain content and make it unrestricted when copyright expires. Having it remain under ownership forever doesn't make anything easier. And, in fact, copyrights having a single, simple owner is just... not the case. So to whatever extent there is a need to keep track of owners, copyright expiration only makes things easier (because if a work is in the public domain, you can no longer screw it up).