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All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

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Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#181

Post by splitstud »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #95
mattl wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is reasonable? 14? 24? 50?

Honestly I think we should just work at doing away with the concept. The idea of it was to encourage the creation of works by providing a limited term of artificial scarcity so said works could participate in the market. But in the information age, where copying information is as close to free as makes no odds, I think that makes a lot less sense than it used to. That's without even considering that giant corporation…

Then we would be well advised to listen to the creators of such work, who largely tend to describe the type of system you want to do away with.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#182

Post by cgio »

bena wrote: post #170
grishka wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. A movie studio. Yes, my proposal also has a nice side effect of filtering out those who are in it for the money, not self-expression. The world would become a better place if there were no "entertainment industry".

If you are in it for self-expression, you're entirely free to self-express to your heart's content. Copyright doesn't matter, publishers don't matter, studios don't matter. The minute you want to express yourself to others, you're no longer in it for self-expression. And regardless of your opinion on what should and should not exist, people should be fairly compensated for their endeavors, even if those endeavors are…

How were artists living before copyrights? We’ve had quite a few of them delivering masterpieces. So we can reward efforts the same ways as before, art will not die just be less profitable maybe. If reproduction is easy what do we as a society earn by making it harder artificially? I don’t believe any other worker is having these benefits. You do your job, paid for your effort by someone willing to do so, and then go on with your life. That includes other creative occupations and most of the employees of e.g. movie studios. Are we fairly compensating _them_ for their work?

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#183

Post by yesenadam »

Tagbert wrote: post #159
VictorPath wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disney was actually founded on Alice in Wonderland, Mickey Mouse was created years later. At the time, Alice in Wonderland would have still been copyrighted if it were under the copyright regime Disney etc. instituted since. The corporation pulled the ladder up after it. Incidentally, Mickey Mouse was in many ways a ripoff of Universal's Oswald the Rabbit.

"Mickey Mouse was in many ways a ripoff of Universal's Oswald the Rabbit" Considering that Walt Disney created Oswald the Rabbit for Universal, it is no surprise that some elements carried over to Mickey. When Universal took Oswald away from Disney's control, he responded by creating the mouse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_the_Lucky_Rabbit#Univer...

Apparently Mickey and Oswald were both created by Ub Iwerks. I don't know why it's still repeated that Disney created them personally.

"Disney asked Iwerks to design a character that became Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The first cartoon Oswald starred in was animated entirely by Iwerks." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub_Iwerks

Sounds a bit like a Jobs + Wozniak situation!

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#185

Post by kragen »

rhines wrote: post #146
grishka wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> large publishers would probably just wait out artists and steal their work But it's public domain. You can't exactly "steal" something that already belongs to everyone, including you .

Sure, but a big company can absolutely find some little-known creator's work, spin off their own products with it, and use their size to absolutely dominate search results, marketing, and distribution. While it may no longer be legally considered theft, it does seem to be a shame that a creator has a window of only a couple years to find success with their work before they're at risk of it becoming worthless to them.…

Wouldn't have been a problem for Charles M. Schultz. One month of copyright would have been enough to keep him well fed. Same for Nassim Taleb.

In the age of the web, the big company's shitty bundled product may have a hard time competing with the creator's website. How many laptop vendors ship a custom fork of Ubuntu? But of course Ubuntu's kernel isn't exactly Linus's mainline, but I don't see him complaining.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#186

Post by jedberg »

toast0 wrote: post #148
ipaddr wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most movies make most of their money week one. Most songs make the bulk of income within a 3 month period. 3 years is longer than necessary. Perhaps this would affect less known artists. I would be willing to keep the copyright until the first 100,000 or 1,000,0000 worth of product is sold.

> Most movies make most of their money week one. Most movies are fixed in a tangeble medium months before week one. Sometimes years. Component parts (principle filming, scripts, original music, if any) are routinely finished at least a year before release. A rush to get everything out to enjoy the full 3 years of income potential would further push out the couple of films a year made where people actually cared to do…

Copyright on a movie doesn't start until it's registered. The component parts are copyrighted upon creation but the entire work is a separate copyright. For example the Star Wars re-release is copyright 1997, even thought the bulk of it was created in 1975-76.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#187

Post by jedberg »

natechols wrote: post #48
ncallaway wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, one of the major issues for old and abandoned work is that it can be impossible to figure out who the rights holders are for a particular work. A step of active renewal by the rights holder would at least create a public registry of the current owner for a particular right.

This is a constant problem, publishers go out of business all the time. I have a lot of photocopied sheet music that cannot be purchased anywhere, at any price, but it will be decades before any of it can be legally shared. Just ridiculous artificial scarcity - I wonder how the composers would feel about it.

I realize it creates a legal quagmire to have abandoned works and I think registration should be required to solve that.

That being said, what in reality would happen if you release that sheet music? If it's abandoned, there wouldn't be anyone to come after you for it. You could just put it up online for free and then honor DMCA takedowns from people who can prove they are the rights holder.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#188

Post by mattl »

criddell wrote: post #44
mnsc wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But does having a work enter public domain automatically mean that eg New Order will stop getting paid for streams via legitimate services like Spotify?

Why would Spotify pay anybody for playing a public domain song?

Presumably if they want to have access to the non-PD stuff they’d have to figure out something.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#189

Post by kube-system »

kragen wrote: post #185
rhines wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but a big company can absolutely find some little-known creator's work, spin off their own products with it, and use their size to absolutely dominate search results, marketing, and distribution. While it may no longer be legally considered theft, it does seem to be a shame that a creator has a window of only a couple years to find success with their work before they're at risk of it becoming worthless to them.…

Wouldn't have been a problem for Charles M. Schultz. One month of copyright would have been enough to keep him well fed. Same for Nassim Taleb. In the age of the web, the big company's shitty bundled product may have a hard time competing with the creator's website. How many laptop vendors ship a custom fork of Ubuntu? But of course Ubuntu's kernel isn't exactly Linus's mainline, but I don't see him complaining.

Copyright affects a lot more people that the vanishingly few who are lucky enough to experience instant success.

Torvalds is in a whole different situation. Public domain is very different than GPL. Linux probably wouldn't be what it is today if not for the GPL requirements to publish source, which don't exist under public domain.

In fact, that's a scary consequence I didn't initially think of -- in a world where copyrights on Linux have expired, we'll may very well see contributions drop dramatically as the largest contributions start to closed-source their branches of Linux.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#190

Post by vineyardmike »

kragen wrote: post #135
marcodiego wrote: post #2

99 years to enter public domain... I don't think this is fair.

We should eliminate copyright. Zero years. Copyright was a reasonable bargain when printing a book involved a large up-front investment of typesetting it and then printing all the copies that would ever be printed from that setup. It didn't affect most people, just printers. And it enabled authors to make a living from writing. This held a fortiori for phonograph records. It became fairly dubious in the age of photoc…

I think this could have lots of side affects (even though i agree that copyrights have some negative aspects to them).

One big issue is that when things aren't bound by copyright, the originals can be adulterated and you won't know:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-...

> The New York Times reports that in some countries where "1984" is in the public domain opportunists are printing cheap versions of the novel and listing them on Amazon, avoiding paying royalties owed to Orwell's estate in the US.

> The New York Times found 11 of the 12 fake Orwell books it ordered were dispatched from an Amazon warehouse and were labelled "new." The books cost as little as $3.

This seems like an obvious net-negative for society.

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