dagblog - Comments for "Your New Year's Public Domain Report, 2014"

I took a copyright course in

Richard Day — Sat, 04 Jan 2014 07:44:30 +0000

In reply to Your New Year's Public Domain Report, 2014

I took a copyright course in law school.

I think it used to be 17 years following a copyright and you could renew it once.

Patents were similar in value.

I may have the length of time off a bit, but the idea at our 'founding' was that the writer should be compensated.

Aptly as they say.

I recall when Congress just gave Disney the prize.

I was flabbergasted just as I was when Congress decades later amended the Constitutional Right to bankruptcy.

Without an Amendment to our Constitution, I still think that both instances of Congressional action were wrong.

But Netflix figured 'it' out. And so have other 'publishers'.

I suppose that other bills relating to tax credits and deductions have furthered the capitalist's dreams of total corporate authority; but damn!

The word. The word that the author originally stole from some other author removed from us for thousands of years becomes proprietary?

Actually, he's been public

Doctor Cleveland — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 02:24:03 +0000

In reply to I heard something about

Actually, he's been public domain in the UK for some time.

In the US, his estate was holding onto complete rights to the character because SOME of the Holmes stories were published after 1923. Really the opposite of how the law should work: those last few years of stories don't meaningfully change the character, who was well formed by the end of the 1890s. But using the rights meant having to defend yourself against the Holmes estate in a lawsuit and until now it has been easier to pay them off. And that's a lot of how our IP regime works in practice; media holders get even MORE than the already-generous letter of the law.

Holmes did just enter the US public domain, but should have been in it by the 1970s.

I heard something about

Donal — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 01:47:03 +0000

In reply to Your New Year's Public Domain Report, 2014

I heard something about Sherlock Holmes entering public domain, but maybe that was in the UK.