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

I don't know where you got the notion I look down on populist authors or its writing. I'm talking about the market of writing itself, and the incentives actually in effect for writers.

Book sales at the time of Shakespeare would have been hampered by a number of factors, including the slow rate of printing presses (about 60--120 impressions/hour), the cost of books (cheap pulp-based paper had yet to be invented), and low literacy rates (25% or less of the population).

It wasn't until all of those were developed, largely during the 19th century, in which printing rates increased roughly a millionfold (wood grape-crush presses to electrically-powered, steel-framed, Linotype-set, continuous-paper-roll web presses), cheap paper, and 90%+ literacy rates), that owning more than a handful of books became common. Development of the paperback further accelerated this, often through the re-issue of out-of-copyright "classics" in low-cost libraries for the everyman.

Even the notion of a bookcase or bookshelf as a notable item of furniture is a surprisingly late development, largely since 1860, and growing markedly in prevalence after 1900, judging by Google's Ngram viewer:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bookshelf%2C%2...>

(A methodology with issues, but a methodology all the same.)

Sales of modern books are largely all but nonexistent. It might not be only a dozen copies (the famous quote fails to account for multiple ISBNs existing per title), but even a few thousand sales isn't going to support much of a livelihood, and there are ~300k English-language titles published traditionally per year (and have been since the 1950s), expanding to a million or several including "nontraditional" publsihing, going off numbers directly from the US Library of Congress's Copyright office, annual letters, and ISBN issuer Bowker.

https://writingcooperative.com/half-of-all-traditionally-pub...>

Bowker: https://web.archive.org/web/20150415233658/https://www.bowke...> (2013)

Office of Copyright: http://www.copyright.gov/reports/annual/2015/ar2015.pdf> (2015)

Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/static/portals/about/reports-and-budgets...> (2023)

My point wasn't that populist works cannot be created. It's that there are other rationales to writing, that most of the Great Works were written without copyright, that chasing dollars leads, as Schopenhauer expresses far more elegantly and cogently than I can, to sludge (now AI-generated sludge, such as these services https://www.childbook.ai/> https://www.createbookai.com/collection/mothers-day-books>.

I'm not opposed to great literature. I'm not opposed to authors being paid. I'm not even opposed to reasonable copyright terms. But I'm pretty well convinced that the existing system actually serves all those goals poorly.

Sure, the occasional author goes stratospheric.

But for most people, the reasons for writing a book differ:

- They can't not.

- It's a calling card. (See the parallel HN submission on business books. Most are extensive advertisements for consulting services. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43940747> Other books essentially sell businesses or systems.

- The writing fills other aims. Book -> Film (asses in seats, or subscription revenues). Advertising bait (mainstay of the publishing industry from ~1860 to, variously, 1950--2000, see my fave Hamilton Holt writing in 1906: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>.

- Part of some other job. Academics write for tenure, to meet public communications targets, for recognition, or other goals.

- Propaganda. There are organisations which write and sell publications effectively to spread faith and doctrine. Some in the original religious sense, others with political, social, or cultural goals.

- Vanity. Though that may be less successful than other options.

- It's cheap. If the story or idea is in you and can't keep from coming out, why not commit it to the page, or electrons in the cloud? Writing and publishing are cheaper than they've ever been, and if you can break through there's that ever-so-small chance of winning the lottery, sometimes big, often small.

- The materials already exist. A surprising number of books are assembled from lecture notes, speaking points, or essays on numerous topics. (Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is based on his course lecture notes, taught for several decades at the University of Edinburgh. Feynmans Lectures in Physics similarly. These may not be trivial to edit into shape, but working from an existing structure is often quite useful.

At the same time, chasing a buck gives AI sludge, formulaic genre fiction, tired professional and technical books, straight-up bullshit (Depak Chopra, John Gray (the Venus hack, not the philosopher), Erich von Däniken, etc., etc. One thing about pseudoscience is that its authors and publishers are often grifters taking advantage of gullible audiences and markets. Their bullshit books are actually a sorting and marketing mechanism to other goods and services (e.g., fortune-telling, pyramid schemes, cults, and the like.) All of that is driven by profit, without any regard to quality.

All older films do not sit dormant for decades, and then are suddenly rediscovered. That's not remotely so. Some are a cult classic when produced, thus no one is ever "taking a chance on it", because it's always been a profitable endevour to pump out on late night TV, or on a VHS, DVD, Bluray, or digital version.

It feels like so much history and reality is missing in this idea of an 'ancient film'.

There were so many films like this, yet under copyright, available on late night TV back in the day. Before most had cable, before most even had VHS machines, you'd turn on TV at night on a Saturday, or at 2am on a Tuesday, and see endless old movies.

Once VHS came out, you could get virtually anything older because the film -> VHS transfer process was cheap, and people wanted content. You'd pay a buck to rent old junk at the store, and the campier the better.

Put another way, it became a cult classic when it was released, and then was always available. Endless copyrighted works were in the same category.

There is no 'chance' taken, for it was always seen as chance-worthy.

But beyond this:

* This film is the first part of a trilogy, Night, Dawn, Day of the Living Dead. Anyone watching any of these films, wanted to see the whole set

* Even if under copyright, as others have stressed, this one is on the list. What list? A list you do clearly not share, which is fine, but horror fan films do.

EDIT:

I'm going to give a little more context here.

In this timescope, there was a show called "I Dream of Jeannie"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Dream_of_Jeannie

In this show, Barbra Eden wears a 60's envisioned harem costume. There is one important aspect of this costume, and that is that her belly button is covered.

Why?

Because it was illegal.

There is a whole deep dive here, but the point is that Night of the Living Dead was an extremely gory and violent film in its day, immensely groundbreaking, and people desperately wanted to see it.

It didn't become a cult classic because it was easier to distribute. It became one because of what it was.

That's the point I think.

NOTE: This does not invalidate the concept that some films can follow your path, it's just that this one didn't.

There may have been something called "newspapers" during Shakespeare's time, if only just barely (Wikipedia's list begins in 1605, four years prior to his death, and in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_newspapers>). The first British paper didn't emerge until several decades later (1641, in Scotland).

But most who take even a generous view of that topic put the emergence of the first true mass-market, to use your favourite description, popular newspaper, disseminated widely, published daily, sold cheaply, reliant on mass advertising, and featuring lurid (and often entirely fabulous) reportage, was the New York Sun, published by Benjamin Day.

My earlier reference to Hamilton Holt's Journalism and Media (1909) describes the massive rise of advertising-supported media, and its pernicious impacts on the trade, beginning in about 1860. Mass-circulation required mass literacy, mass-advertising, mass marketing, large-scale print runs, and good which could be sold across a wide area through advertising and mechanised transport. Much as Viagra dominated early online advertising (particularly email), it was patent medicines (usually themselves ineffective, fraudulent, and/or dangerous) which served as the mainstay of early advertising. The book is short (115 large-print pages), information dense, written by an expert practition of the trade of which he writes, and engagingly written. I'd strongly urge you to take it in.

You seem strongly wedded to your views and unwilling to consider alternatives. But that's my whole point: as Schopenhauer notes, and he's hardly alone, the financial motive perverts the art:

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

Commercial journalism is imploding as advertising and attention flee elsewhere. The resulting landscape has a small number of winner-take-all commercial enterprises (the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, in the United States), with most other even major-city papers suffering (Washington Post, LA Times, Boston Globe) if not utterly eviscerated (Chicago Tribune), or vanished entirely in news deserts. The Tribune's local competitor, was acquired by that city's NPR affiliate which was paid millions of dollars to take over the paper. And it's non-profit initiatives which are increasingly serving as the bulwark of journalism, such that it survives, in much of the U.S.

(That those non-profits, notably NPR and PBS are now under direct attack from the present US administration is hardly surprising.)

Again, whether or not you accept that the commercial motive is a negative, what other models for supporting authors might you find attractive. A couple of years ago on discussion of pirated books on Amazon, the question was asked "Would you continue writing novels if you got UBI of equivalent size and weren't allowed to charge for your books?". Writing here, author Charlie Stross (cstross) answered, "That's what I'd call living the dream!"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35765198>

But the original was registered at the time. My question is why the re-release under a different title didn't retain copyright since the only thing that changed was the title.

If copyright applies only to my published works, this would mean as long as you steal my laptop you now own the works on it. I'm certainly not publishing my diaries on the internet.

This has not been true for a very long time.