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

publicdomainreview.org

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

#221
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

Seems like a net positive: more people can read 1984. If your concern is that someone might publish a modified version of the text, why, public-domain status makes that easy to detect and analyze, because anyone can share the original version, which copyright makes illegal.

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

#222
post #146

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.…

What is stopping that from happening now? Most small creators don't have the money to defend their copyright

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

#223
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. Sure, under the current system. The question is how many people that would have bought the media would just wait out the copyright. Once you're into these short lengths of time, it's a lot.

Most people don't wait until a movie comes on free tv before watching live, renting, buying or streaming.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have said it was originally to help out the market, and you have said copying information is now nearly free, but you forgot to say how or why the first part is incongruous with the second. Why does it make less sense than it used to? Which of our new capabilities could be leveraged by a new system?

You used to have to recoup the costs of publishing as well as fund the author. Binding books was and is not free, but copying bits effectively is.

You still didn't answer the question. Copyright was introduced because it was amazingly cheap to copy as opposed to create. If it's gotten even cheaper, that means it's more relevant, not less. So, again, how does the first part connect to the second? Explain fully why the current system isn't relevant, because there's clearly something obvious to you that isn't obvious to me.

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

#225
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.

Only if: 1. You're only considering works published by huge multinational publishers with the gigantic marketing budgets required to get immediate traction 2. You assume that works are published on a large scale for their initial publishing Small time artists can spend years trying to get a work picked up by large publisher. Those who don't choose to use large publishers may be finding new audiences over longer perio…

The million dollar gross earnings should be a good match for those selling very few and should cover all but the most successful indie artist

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

#226
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting to think about. The Disney retellings in some ways are evolutionary winners that are also dead ends. Outside of Disney they can’t evolve unlike pre-Disney. The Disney retellings are so popular that other retellings are almost extinct. When Disney goes away, does the story lineages disappear? Do copies of older retellings resurge? Do totally different story lineages take the place of the Disney sto…

Those stories are dead. Most people think Disney came up with all of their ideas and have no idea that most of them stem from ancient stories--some existed before writing as we know it. They will probably dig up these stories from Sumeria (tablets in UK) or other yet un-studied texts some day and rehash them completely anew...starting the cycle again. Heck, the bible has a lot of good stuff if you can shed the religi…

> They will probably dig up these stories from Sumeria

Yes, a Snow Crash reference! Chapter 28:

"'Rife Bible College, which he founded , has the richest archaeology department in the world. They have been conducting a dig in Eridu, which was the cult center of a Sumerian god named Enki.'"

[...]

"'Sumer was a civilization of clay. They made their buildings of it and wrote on it, too. . . . So all the data of the Sumerians have survived. Egypt left a legacy of art and architecture; Sumer's legacy is its megabytes.'"

[...]

"'If there was some phenomenon that moved through the population, altering their minds in such a way that they couldn't process the Sumerian language anymore. Kind of in the same way that a virus moves from one computer to another, damaging each computer in the same way. Coiling around the brainstem.'"

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You used to have to recoup the costs of publishing as well as fund the author. Binding books was and is not free, but copying bits effectively is.

You still didn't answer the question. Copyright was introduced because it was amazingly cheap to copy as opposed to create. If it's gotten even cheaper, that means it's more relevant, not less. So, again, how does the first part connect to the second? Explain fully why the current system isn't relevant, because there's clearly something obvious to you that isn't obvious to me.

What I'm saying is, the motivation to print pirated copies of books was to sell them to people for profit because as cheap as it was to copy books compared to writing them, it was still quite a bit above 0.

However, copying cost today is effectively 0. No one would pay money for a pirated copy of an ebook. One could (somewhat pedantically) say that this means the creator's 'exclusive right to profit' from their work is not violated because no one profits in this way from piracy[0], but that's not the point. the point is that the concept barely even made sense the first time around, but allowed a creator who didn't own a giant expensive distribution mechanism the leverage to negotiate compensation. Now the distribution is about as free as it is ever likely to get.

[0] or at least they wouldn't if it weren't for laws creating barriers that allow people to profit by providing mechanisms around said barriers.

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

#228
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cop…

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

Right, that's why we're trying to find ways to limit the damage it does to everybody else.

The GPL-vs.-BSD flamewar you're trying to start is only mildly relevant. The various BSD and Apache contributors aren't campaigning against the use of their code by Apple and Microsoft, either. The point is that there's nothing wrong with going out and making derivative works of other people's creative work; it's how all creative work is done.

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

#229
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

Orwell is dead and the society, which did far more for immemorializing his thought than his estate, should own the rights.

Are they adulterated or just reprinted?

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

#230
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most movies make most of their money week one. Sure, under the current system. The question is how many people that would have bought the media would just wait out the copyright. Once you're into these short lengths of time, it's a lot.

Most people don't wait until a movie comes on free tv before watching live, renting, buying or streaming.

That's usually a long time.

When you're talking about timelines as short as weeks, you're going to get a ton of people waiting. They might still go to a theater, even, but one with much cheaper tickets.

How many at 3 years specifically? I'm not sure, but it's a risk to be considered.

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