Lessig - Public Domain Dead in 35 Years 469
tcd004 writes "Lawrence Lessig, in an article on the Foreign Policy site, predicts that the public domain will die a slow death at the hands of anti-piracy efforts. From the article: 'The danger remains invisible to most, hidden by the zeal of a war on piracy. And that is how the public domain may die a quiet death, extinguished by self-righteous extremism, long before many even recognize it is gone.'"
Re:Say what?? (Score:2, Informative)
No, public domain means not covered by copyright. If there's "a small EULA" which depends on copyright for its force, then it's not public domain. You're thinking of "freeware".
Re:Public Domain in the balance (Score:3, Informative)
Not much in the way of content, you are right. As for 35 years, it's because it was part of a larger "Here Today, Gone Tommorow" piece that is talking about what institutions that we take for granted might not be here in...you guessed it...35 years.
35 years (Score:5, Informative)
Re:People forget (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Say what?? (Score:3, Informative)
If you were to release an application in to the public domain and offer it as a free download from your web site, you could not stop me from simply changing the strings so that it looks like my work and then reselling it as a commercial application.
Going to? (Score:2, Informative)
Public Domain is dead.
Nothing has entered public domain in the latter half of last centure, and even a lot of stuff that did enter the public domain had been "returned" to the original copywrite holders.
Copywrite should be 20 years from first publication. Trademark should last indefinately. Micky Mouse (TM) would remain Da Rat, while Elvis would be PD now. But that won't happen untill 2075 or something.
Re:Going to die? (Score:2, Informative)
And 'use the work'.
FOSS always lets anyone use the work. The only licenses that pretend you can't use the work are closed source EULAs, in direct disagreement with copyright law.
BSD and public domain lets anyone copy the work, including, and this is in fact the difference between them and other FOSS licences, people not producing FOSS.
Re:Going to die? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Will it be dead? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Going to die? (Score:3, Informative)
I see an 'instant' death (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, you can still run your C64 at home, but dont expect to get online. And if you try, expect to be visited by the bit police.
No recordings go into public domain until 2067! (Score:5, Informative)
I quote:
Records, cassettes, CD's, and other music recordings come under a general category called Sound Recordings or Phonorecords. Before 1972, sound recordings were not protected by copyright law, but by a hodge-podge tangle of state laws. This problem was fixed with the 1972 copyright act and extended by the 1998 twenty year copyright extension. Different copyright experts have offered very different complicated explanations, but all agree that all sound recordings essentially are under copyright protection until the year 2067. So here is the one sentence you need to remember:
Sound Recording Rule of Thumb:
There are NO sound recordings in the Public Domain.
There are, of course, exceptions to everything, and there really are some PD sound recordings. However, the federal and state laws are so tangled and complicated, it is extremely difficult to do confident sound recording PD research. There are several U.S. web sites claiming that sound recordings made in the United States prior to February 15, 1972, are in the public domain, and there are links to U.S. Copyright Office publications stating: "Sound recordings fixed before February 15, 1972, are not eligible for Federal copyright protection." We have had this reviewed independently by several attorneys across the U.S. Each has confidently and independently told us that between federal and state copyright protection, virtually all sound recordings are protected until the year 2067.
Re:Communism must die. (Score:5, Informative)
Marx original comunism idea specifically called for industry workers that overthrow their governing regime on their own, not purely agricutural societies forced to change by some so-called intellectuals. Real communism never called for a one-party system, nor a quasi-dictatoric board of directors in it. Instead it relies solely on self-organizational principles and true equality (In the libertarian + social security sense, everyone paid according to his needs).
Every "communist" system so far has utterly failed to even attempt employing these principles, which lead to oppression (via the "we know better" and "not with us is against us" approaches) and inequality ("Some are more equal than others", because they bear the burden of ruling...). Followed directly by restrictions, that were only necessary, because people didn't decide to become communist in the first place and didn't want to stay communist, because their infrastructure wasn't up to it (the reason Marx wanted industry workers under all circumstances!)
In short: Communism has not failed, because it has never been tried. Systems hiding under that name have failed though. Wrong names for systems is pretty common though, consider democracy, which means "ruling by the people". Nowhere does this call for parliaments!
Re:I foresee a crisis at Disney (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Going to die? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Going to die? (Score:3, Informative)
No. The companies who produce DVDs are free to sell it at whatever price they like, and I am free to choose whether or not I am willing to pay that price. However, if they are selling the DVDs for $2 in Brazil, and I go to Brazil and legally purchase it there, then I should be able to play it. If they weren't willing to sell the DVD for $2, they shouldn't offer it for sale for $2, anywhere. Furthermore if I buy 10000 DVDs in Brazil for $2 each and bring them to the US to sell them for $8 each, why shouldn't I be able to? The DVD manufacturers would have no problem with getting people in Brazil to answer their support lines for lower wages, what's the difference between these two? If you believe in globalisation for labour, you should also believe in globalisation for products.
The PD preserves itself, even if it doesn't grow. (Score:3, Informative)
Your post would have been more productive had you avoided calling the GNU General Public License "viral". What you think of the GPL is not on topic here, as this discussion primarily concerns how the public domain works, not your views on how distributed GPL derivatives are licensed. Similarly, a previous poster used the word "fell" to describe entry into the public domain. I'd argue that the popularity of the term in this context is irrelevant and that we are better served by examining the connotation that being in the public domain is somehow lower or lesser than being in copyright.
Getting back to your point raised by calling the GPL "viral", there is a bit of this for the public domain as well. Works in the public domain remain in the public domain even if fragments of them are built upon in other copyrighted works. There are parts of the movie Amelie which come from the Prelinger archives. These fragments are in the public domain and one can extract them from Amelie [archive.org] and end up with a series of public domain fragments. So, the public domain is self-preserving but this effect doesn't extend as far as the power copyright holders have in licensing derivative works. Of course, it's possible to transform the work so completely that such extraction is impossible.
Re:Going to die? (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/jackson.htm [snopes.com]
Snopes gave me some better info, appearantly Lennon-McCartney still recieves 50% of the royalties and Sony recieves 50% of the rest, so 25% goes to Michael.
Re:"someone smarter than me" (Score:2, Informative)
The original idea of copyright and/or patent law (as envisioned by the founders of the USA at least) was that inventors and artists would have some incentive to publish their work rather than keeping it to themselves. For about 14 years they'd have deliberately limited control over who could copy the work so they could make some money from their own good ideas, and then it would fall into the public domain where it belongs!!
It's all written down in some obscure old document that nobody ever reads..