<
https://doctorow.medium.com/2023s-public-domain-is-a-banger-7db8919cbaed>
"40 years ago, giant entertainment companies embarked on a slow-moving act of
arson. The fuel for this arson was copyright term extension (making copyrights
last longer), including
retrospective copyright term extensions that took
works out of the public domain and put them back into copyright for decades.
Vast swathes of culture became off-limits, pseudo-property with absentee
landlords, with much of it crumbling into dust.
After 55–75 years, only 2% of works have any commercial value. After 75 years,
it declines further. No wonder that so much of our cultural heritage is now
orphan works, with no known proprietor. Extending copyright on all works — not
just those whose proprietors sought out extensions — incinerated whole
libraries full of works, permanently.
But on January 1, 2019, the bonfire was extinguished. That was the day that
items created in 1923 entered the US public domain: DeMille’s
Ten
Commandments, Chaplain’s
Pilgrim, Burroughs’
Tarzan and the Golden Lion,
Woolf’s
Jacob’s Room, Coward’s “London Calling” and 1,000+ more works:
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2019/
Many of those newly liberated works were forgotten, partly due to their great
age, but also because no one knew who they belonged to (Congress abolished the
requirement to register copyrights in 1976), so no one could revive or reissue
them while they were still in the popular imagination, depriving them of new
leases on life."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
