Center for the Study of the Public Domain:
Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years.
Under those laws, works published in 1959 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2016, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2055. No published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different—thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1.
What books and plays would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978 copyright laws? You might recognize some of the titles.
Copyright’s original intent has been completely bastardized to the detriment of the public and in favor of corporate interests.
They might have been public domain, but really it would just be a different entity like Google distributing and making money from them.
Agreed. It’s sad to think about corporations like Disney that might not have achieved as much early success without available public domain material to adapt.
But with public domain material, anyone can create new work without having to budget for excessive royalty fees on material that should have passed into public usage. Public domain allows smaller players to enter a market. Extending copyright is a game that incumbents play to kill competition.
It would be nice if the author had a say on whether his or her work should become public domain or whether it should be passed on to the heirs.
Authors do have a say. As I understand the law, if you write a novel or play, you get to renew the copyright as long as you live.
Authors’ estates also have a say, but have been traditionally held to limits on how long they could maintain copyright.
How many decades do you believe a dead author’s estate — or whoever has acquired it — should be able to renew such a restriction on popular culture?
The thing to keep in mind, though, is that most public domain works simply cease to exist because nobody is taking care of them. Publishing has a lot in common with gardening. The works need care. Movies need to be transferred from chemical prints to 8K video, and books need to be transferred from paper to expensive-to-produce interactive books. Do you even have a VHS player you can put your hand on? And VHS was only replaced by DVD less than 20 years ago. Imagine it is 2053 and somebody handed you a just-out-of-copyright VHS tape. And that is under the 56 year rule.
The idea with public domain works that still have cultural value is that they would be taken care of by public institutions like libraries and universities, however (at least in the U.S.) you see libraries closing and universities turning into for-profit businesses.
That’s like saying “it would be nice if the carmaker could sell a car built from 1942 designs for the same price as a car built from 2016 designs.” It would be nice for the car maker, but it is not going to happen. There is no market for that. Same as there is no market for almost all public domain works. Nobody cares about them.
The tiny, tiny few works that are timeless enough to still have an audience after their copyright expires are given to that audience, not to the disinterested grandchildren of the author, who have probably already profited financially from the work during its copyright term, and may not even know they are related to the author.
So I don’t see what it is you are lamenting. You want to charge the people who are reading Moby Dick today a few extra bucks and give it to some random person who probably doesn’t even know they are Herman Melville’s great-great-great-grandkid?
It is different in different countries. Some countries have no concept of copyright at all.
In the U.S. the copyright outlives you, and there are BS laws to enable corporations to go even further than that and steal your bones out of your grave and do a puppet show with them. For example, if you look at Disney, they will make a 2015 movie based on an 1850 book that is long out of copyright, and then they will sue anyone who also bases a movie or other work on that 1850 book, saying that they are ripping off the copyrighted 2015 movie, essentially re-copyrighting the original book. They have a lot of money that they made from doing this, and they pay it to lawyers so they can keep doing it.
An author’s estate inherits their property, but not their identity. If an author dies, that doesn’t mean their kid wrote their books.
Disney is a bad example, though, because they were a major force in changing the laws so that another Disney can’t get going.
Thanks. And Disney was indeed the example I was thinking of. Hooray for “Snow White.”
That makes Disney an excellent example of how messed up copyright law has become.