[roxburylib]

The last update to copyright law extended copyrights and froze anything new entering into public domain for two decades. That stops at the beginning of the New Year when properties from 1924 lose their copyright.

In another fourteen years, 1938 products lose their copyright and Action Comics #1 enters public domain. Does that mean that DC and Timely comics will begin to enter this site? Superman and other characters will still be covered by trademarks. Obviously, Superman is still protected from somebody releasing new content with the character due to the trademarks. I'd guess that the loss of copyright will allow the comics to be reprinted here and elsewhere.

I'm more interested in classic sound movies becoming available in a half dozen years.

[narfstar]

It is likely Disney will get copyrights extended they have big bucks

[roxburylib]

That's certainly possible, but there's no legislation on the horizon. If I understand what I've read of copyright law, the last extension brought the US in concert with international copyright laws. The problem with Disney trying to further extend the copyright is that they would have to also change international copyright law or only have restrictions placed on US content. Since the internet has no national borders, it would be hard for them to limit access to their public domain content hosted in other countries being accessed from the US.

The first interesting legal dispute that will probably come up in a couple years will be for Winnie the Pooh when the books enter public domain. Disney has a trademark on the character. The character did not originate with Disney. The specific Winnie the Pooh graphic representation, with the red shirt, will remain Disney's trademarked vision of the character. It should be possible for somebody to release a cartoon of Pooh using the drawings of its original creator as inspiration. We'll have to wait and see if anybody tries to do this and whether or not Disney sues them. The appearance of the original Winnie and Disney's are very similar in shape, but they're not identical.

The link provides some background on copyright versus trademark.  There's still a bit of a gray area because a trademark can effectively extend copyrights in perpetuity when applied to fictional characters. The courts have placed an emphasis on secondary associations with trademarks. Mickey Mouse is heavily associated with Disney, so the trademark will prevent anybody putting out a Mickey Mouse movie. James Bond may have less trademark protection when the books pass into public domain in a few decades because the character doesn't have a strong brand association with any particular company.

The trademark will protect Mickey from being exploited by another company, but should not stop the works that will soon enter into public domain from being copied and distributed without Disney's consent.

http://copyright.nova.edu/mickey-public-domain/

[roxburylib]

Hold the presses! The original book, Bambi, enters public domain in January and that could be Disney's first legal challenge should somebody want to release a Bambi movie or book. The original Bambi was more realistically depicted as the real animal versus the more cartoonized Disney version.

Here's a list of the more prominent things that will be public domain in the new year.

https://lifehacker.com/these-1923-copyrighted-works-enter-the-public-domain-in-1825241296

[silversabrewolf]

I believe you are incorrect...EVERY yr without a extension new things enter public domain..next yr all works from 1924 enter and so on and so forth...Action comics #1 will be P.D.in 2033

[silversabrewolf]

Roxbury BAMBI like Winnie the Pooh is NOT a exclusive Disney property..When it hits public domain the only way u would be in trouble if you used the Disney IMAGERY to create a new work..putting a picture of a baby deer up wont get you in any trouble.

[silversabrewolf]

Here is a easy to use copyright chart..I publish some P.D. domain material even then I have made mistakes..Sometimes books can have more then one copyright date. I am unsure about comic books...I would Imagine lets say a comic from 1923 was incorporated into a new comic by the owner in 1930 that would make the 1930 comic the greater of the two. so the story originally from 1923 would NOT be P.D. it would be extended outward from the 1930 date which is a clever way to get extensions without new registrations. [url]//copyright.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/2018-01/copyright_term_and_the_public_domain2018.pdf

[silversabrewolf]

Sry I keep posting short thoughts. And I was incorrect you are right Action on will be P.D. in 2033 so your 14 yrs is correct. I do not believe Disney and other Companies will put up much of a fight anymore.They are making billions off their new materials they produce. Nobody will get rich off of steamboat willie and nobody will get rich off of any ATLAS comics or anything early from D.C. or Marvel.Comics are their secondary income now.Furthermore, now there is a well oiled well funded Public Domain Organization ready to battle it out I believe that the P.D. will grow nicely over the next decade.Many comics won't be P.D. the ones ppl really want to reproduce for awhile yet though.

[silversabrewolf]

One more thought. The period from 1923-1963 was very good actually,The copyright office did a study of class A registrations for books and periodicals and found only 15% of the works were renewed. Ziff-Davis for instance which is hosted here in Fantastic Adventures hardly renewed ANY of their copyrights yet, they produced THOUSANDS of stories and hundreds of issues,it takes digging through the records but you can find many hings free to repurpose. or host or do whatever you wish with it.

[The Australian Panther]

silversabrewolf, [Love the Avatar] " I do not believe Disney and other Companies will put up much of a fight anymore.They are making billions off their new materials they produce. Nobody will get rich off of steamboat willie and nobody will get rich off of any ATLAS comics or anything early from D.C. or Marvel.Comics are their secondary income now." If I remember correctly, the spectacular Micky Mouse cartoon that accompanied the release of 'Frozen' referenced 'Steamboat Willie'. The problem is, you think the lawyers acting for big corporations think reasonably about these things. Expect them to fight hard for the status quo. They always have and they always will. Here's what motivates Lawyers, 'If we let some things go out of copyright, we will set a precedent. Setting a precedent creates legal loopholes. We will not set a precedent.'  If you think reasonably, Disney in particular and Hollywood in general have always benefited from the availability of material that is out of copyright.
Cinderella, Snow White, Uncle Remus to name a few, were available for the taking and Disney took em'. Why are there so many Sherlock Holmes properties? Out of copyright. Jules Verne? HG Wells? RL Stevenson? out of copyright. But the works built on these free ideas must be locked up at all cost. Also, where there were once international standards, the rules are now different for different areas of the world. US has its rules, Europe has different rules, China and Russia have never particularly respected rules on copyright.
The internet is a dog's breakfast.
I hope, tho, that 2019 does see some material on CB+ that has not been available before.
Gotta Live in hope!           

[silversabrewolf]

I doubt they will..The last time there were no Organizations to fight them..Letting copyrights expire doesn't set precedent in my view,It means the copyrights expire thats all..And yes Who do you think will make any kind of money from steamboat willie?..From what I have been reading,the extension of 1998 was to bring laws in more harmony world-wide..Laws I with vigor disagree with..Per the U.S. Constitution in America copyright cannot last for a indefinate period..They have their 95 yrs, I believe it will stand at that..and yes I know disney has benefited from public domain,nevertheless what you cite legally when those things expire they will be able to keep rights to the imagery  not the stories themselves..It is sad that corporations are pigs,there is a solution Don't partake in their material,I watch nothing anymore disney related,I don't even watch T.V.We shall see in lets say 2023 what happens.Lawyers are creeps

[roxburylib]

It's important to keep in mind that big corporations, like Disney, have massive staffs of lawyers to make it prohibitively expensive to challenge them. Trademarks can hold where when copyrights expire and have no time limits. Trademarks depend on how connected the property is to the company that held the copyright.

From a trademark perspective, Mickey Mouse is clearly identified with Disney. There is no other association.

Disney will argue that Bambi, likewise, is associated with them. It's not as strong an association as Mickey. It is strong. Way more people have seen Bambi and the many children's books based on the movie than have read the original book--particularly over the last few generations. Most people would associate Bambi with Disney than the original book. Whether that is sufficient to prohibit anybody from producing a new Bambi cartoon will be a matter for courts to decide. The court may decide for the public interest that Bambi is in public domain. It could also side with a big corporation and allow Disney's trademark on Bambi to prevent other companies from using the original character due to a perception that it is a Disney release. Tarzan has been in public domain for decades, but the Burroughs estate vigorously enforces its trademark.

I don't think trademark stops distribution of content that enters public domain. It could limit how that content is advertised to avoid an association of it being an official Disney release.

There could be some new content on this site now that 1924 works enter into public domain, but it won't be comics. There could be some more pulps, pamphlets, newspapers & magazines, and some British publications. The first comic in the format recognized today was Famous Funnies and that's already public domain due to copyright not being renewed.

[silversabrewolf]

Well it is 2021 and no extensions..Thanks to President Trump..I doubt things will be as rosey under this new president?..We are getting close to the expiration of steamboat willie and others..I think within the next yr or so..things will be locked up again.

[roxburylib]

I doubt there will be any new copyright extension in the US unless there's a move to do it globally. Take a look at all the removed Captain Marvel Adventures issues that got pulled from this site. Those comics are all in public domain. Warner's legal department demanded their removal. Who has pockets deep enough to legally fight a multi-billion dollar corporation?--even when they're legally right.

The missing issues here are still at the Internet Archive.

[Adamanto]

There's no way there's going to be any more copyright extensions. We live in the Internet age where it's incredibly easy to upload and share material, which means there's far more public interest in "old stuff it's impossible to get your hands on anyway" than there was in 1998. It's imposssible for anyone to lobby an extension through anymore, the public simply wouldn't allow it.

[crashryan]

It's imposssible for anyone to lobby an extension through anymore, the public simply wouldn't allow it.

I must disagree. What the public will "allow" doesn't make a scintilla of difference to the creators of copyright law. The concentration of "intellectual property" rights into the hands of fewer and larger mega-media corporations will, in my opinion, only strengthen the push toward near-eternal copyright.

The entertainment industry is still fighting to close the Pandora's Box opened by videotape recorders back in the 70s. Though piracy concerns existed in the audio tape market, it was really VHS/Beta that demonstrated to publishers that they'd lost the ability to control an individual's possession of commercial media.

Copyright is often presented as protection of the rights of an individual creator, and it does serve that purpose. However the system was created generations ago by book/magazine/sheet music publishers wanting to prevent other publishers reprinting their stuff and thus cutting into their revenue stream. The majority of publishing was done under variations on the work-for-hire scheme in which the actual writer/artist/composer signed their rights over to a publisher in return for a paycheck. Despite some changes in copyright law that favor individual creators, the vast majority of media is still owned by corporations.

Fast forward to today. Thanks to digital technology and the Internet, "old stuff it's impossible to get your hands on anyway" is widely available. This includes plenty of material that's under copyright. I think the conglomerates have finally got it through their heads that they can no longer control possession of media. So their efforts have turned to controlling use, beginning with the DMCA. To "exercise their rights" media corporations no longer have to show they own a work, they just have to say they do. YouTube takedown notices are an example. You post a video, Disney/Marvel/ABC/Lucasfilm says you violated their rights, the video is taken down and you have no recourse.

I remember reading some time ago that Sony attempted to claim rights to all performances of a long-dead composer's work because Sony's classical catalogue contained performances of that composer's work. That attempt didn't fly but it'll come back, given the prevalence of algorithmic "policemen" trawling online postings for infringing work. If the rights holder is big enough (i.e. rich enough) the accusation is all that's necessary either to have an item removed or to take over the poster's revenue stream.

I've said before that I think the only thing that would counter this trend would be a massive. orchestrated campaign of targeted copyright violation/piracy aimed at stuff that should have been public domain long ago. If a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand creators simultaneously posted Steamboat Willie Disney could knock them down. What if several million did it, or better yet, what if they created and posted brand new unauthorized Mickey Mouse cartoons and released them simultaneously? It's an interesting fantasy. Mighty is the Mouse, but even the mighty can reach a breaking point.

[roxburylib]

Here's a 2020 Comic-Con panel that talks about the legal intricacies of using famous public domain content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX6H7Q0v-Uk

The reason I don't think we'll see copyright extensions in the foreseeable future is that trademark protections last forever.

Copyright laws preceded trademark laws by over a century and don't work well together when it comes to intellectual property. At their core, copyright protects creative works for a specified period which is currently the life of the creator and a defined period after that while trademarks protect brands forever. Copyrights protect creators while trademarks protect companies. Successful companies build a reputation based on the quality of their products. They don't want that reputation destroyed by a company producing cheap, inferior knockoffs using their name.

Ever buy a no-name Lego compatible brick set that didn't assemble as nicely as a Lego set? Lego doesn't want any consumer thinking that knockoff is as good as what they make. They're so protective of their name that the knockoffs can't even say they're compatible with Lego. All that can be said is that they're compatible with leading brick systems. That's the kind of protection that trademark law works best with. There is no conflict with copyright law for this protection.

Problems arise when trademarks are used to protect companies built on intellectual property where there the protection is on creative ideas rather than physical product. It's a type of industry that I doubt the original crafters of trademark law gave much thought about. Oddly, intellectual sweatshop types of industries are a relatively modern problem where companies own creative works rather than creators. The book industry has thus far mostly resisted that temptation and stuck to its traditional origin as being the distributor of creative work rather than the owner. In the music, movie, and comic book industries, creators often own little, if anything, of what they create.

Part of the issue with books versus other creative industries lies in how many individuals are involved in the creative process. Typically, a novel is a one-person creation. A movie involves hundreds of people. A song writer usually isn't a singer. A singer isn't always a composer. Singers don't play all the instruments on their recordings. The more people that are involved in a creative work, the more difficult it is to determine who deserves most of the credit for the final product. For example, take the Stone Poneys hit song, "Different Drum." Mike Nesmith, of Monkees fame, wrote the song as a countryish ballad originally sung by the Greenbriar Boys. It wasn't a hit. With a different arrangement and lead singer, Linda Ronstadt, it was a hit. Who gets the lion's share of the credit for the song's success?--the songwriter, the arranger, or the singer? It shouldn't be the record label, but it might.

As far as beating Disney by a million people releasing new animated Mickey Mouse, cartoons, that's not going to happen. First of all, there aren't a million people with the talent and time to do that. More importantly, Mickey is the legal trademark of the company that was originally founded by the man who created (with Ub Iwerks) Mickey. Legally, anybody creating new Mickey Mouse works will be successfully sued and put out of business by Disney.

Steamboat Willie will enter public domain in 2024. It will be hard to release it on disk without being sued by Disney. By not using Mickey's name or image, a company might get away with it. Theoretically, somebody could produce a comic, cartoon, or toys of Mickey in the original art style of the public domain version of the mouse. They won't be able to call it Mickey Mouse because that name is too strongly associated with the Disney brand. With those restrictions, why bother? Parents aren't going to buy their kids a Mickey Mouse toy that doesn't look like today's Mickey and isn't called Mickey Mouse.

Let's not forget the lesson of Warner getting websites to remove most of the Captain Marvel Adventures comics. Not everybody wants to mount a legal defense against a giant corporation. If YouTube puts a dollar rental of Steamboat Willie up, Disney's threat of a lawsuit isn't going to legally scare a company as big as they are. A lawsuit against Google risks setting a legal precedent against Disney's trademark protection that would render legal suits against smaller companies toothless.

In another decade, Superman and Batman enter public domain as well as many classic talkie movies. Legal challenges will eventually occur that better define the limits of trademark protection.

File sharing of public domain content, including Steamboat Willie, won't be a big concern for giant holders of intellectual property trademarks. Their bigger headache is stopping current products from being disseminated without their control. The amount of revenue lost from Steamboat Willie is minuscule next to pirating of new releases.

[Andrew999]

As I understand it, Steamboat Willie will be in the public domain from Jan 1st, 2029 but the Micky Mouse character is trademarked so it will still be impossible to create new Micky Mouse material without Disney.

If Disney challenge the above, it will be interesting to see the outcome.

My own view of public dissent closely aligns with Crash. I have no objection to reasonable copyright protection for those involved in bringing us a product but I object to items that are essentially orphaned (that is, of insignificant commercial value - so nobody is likely to want to reissue them) being trapped in limbo and forgotten because they form part of a million items bought en masse by a megacorp - none of whose members probably even know they exist.

There should be a mechanism to release these items.

I also advocate moving away from censorious outlets like YouTube - there are perfectly good alternatives who do not slavishly obey the diktats of other megacorps - Vimeo and Dailymotion for example.

If we don't make a stand against increased censorship now, we won't even be allowed to discuss it in the future.

[Adamanto]

Let's not forget the lesson of Warner getting websites to remove most of the Captain Marvel Adventures comics. Not everybody wants to mount a legal defense against a giant corporation.

Unless I completely misinterpreted, that was a case of their lawyers doing a lot of diving and discovering that these particular thought-to-be-public-domain issues HAD in fact been copyrighted after all. There was no legal defense against it, the people that ran those websites had simply been wrong when they thought the books were PD.

There was a similar incident a short while ago regarding Castle of Frankenstein too, where a reprint project had to be stopped when an actual current copyright holder revealed that they had purchased the copyrights in a private transaction, so the books weren't public domain after all. Things like that sometimes happen, there's no 100% infallible list of everything that's currently under copyright out there.

[roxburylib]

Efforts in the US have been made to create orphan copyright laws, but they have been overly broad. Little in the proposed laws prevented bad actors from pirating the works of others legally. The proposed laws should have imposed timeframes for works that could be used by anybody if a reasonable search was made to find the copyright owner. More recent content should be limited to the creation of historical documentaries and works. Without those limits it's too easy to steal works from photographers, artists, and even peoples' family photos.

I have no objection to reasonable copyright protection for those involved in bringing us a product but I object to items that are essentially orphaned (that is, of insignificant commercial value - so nobody is likely to want to reissue them) being trapped in limbo and forgotten because they form part of a million items bought en masse by a megacorp - none of whose members probably even know they exist.

Name a work that falls into that category. If it's of insignificant value, who would have it and be willing to spend time digitizing it? Items bought by a megacorp aren't orphaned because the copyright is being purchased. In spite of Disney owning Marvel Comics, they're still licensing their characters to Dark Horse and other comic book companies.

Copyright orphan laws are trying to free up works where the copyright owner can't be found. An example given was for a company wanting to release a boxed set of a musician's work and wanting to include period photos and ads produced for the songs, but couldn't find the copyright owners because addresses in the copyright records weren't accurate after 70 years and companies that commissioned the images were long out of business. The odds are that the original copyright owners were dead.

This article says Steamboat will be PD on January 1, 2024. I'll take their word for it, but don't care.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/a-whole-years-worth-of-works-just-fell-into-the-public-domain/

[Andrew999]

I don't have any objection to protecting creators - though I might take issue with the time period (Life + 70 = that's an enormous period of time. Defend Canada's right to keep it at +50 in line with the Bern Convention)

I was too casual in my use of the word 'orphan' and you were right to take issue with that. What I meant was works that are owned by someone under copyright but which will almost certainly never be reissued because they would never sell in the quantities required to make them commercially viable through printing or digitizing.

There are many examples. Rebellion is a great company - I have a lot of respect for them. Recently, they purchased the whole back catalog of an earlier UK company called IPC (which in turn, had purchased Pearson, I think, before that).

Within that bulk purchase were hundreds of copies of girls magazines from the 50s and 60s like Mirabelle. It would be great to see these magazines on CB+. for example, and elsewhere, but of course their copyright is held by Rebellion so that won't happen - for decades maybe.

I doubt very much that Rebellion would ever reissue these comics (at least in their complete form - they might take an odd strip as part of a collection of course) - so much of that early material is in effect lost to us - both as entertainment and as an historical document.

I wonder if there's a halfway house where groups of volunteers (like CB+ but also others) might offer to invest the free labour to upload and make available these old magazines, paying Rebellion a percentage for each copy viewed or downloaded. (CB+ also taking a percentage of the viewing price). That would be a business deal of course - nothing to do with public domain - and would need to be considered more fully.

[Adamanto]

I was too casual in my use of the word 'orphan' and you were right to take issue with that. What I meant was works that are owned by someone under copyright but which will almost certainly never be reissued because they would never sell in the quantities required to make them commercially viable through printing or digitizing.

You see this in computer game fan circles, which operate with the idea of "abandonware" - there's SO many old computer games from the 70s and 80s that were published by tiny publishing houses that haven't existed for over 30 years, and which got absorbed by other companies that they themselves got absorbed by others, meaning that most rights to these things belong to companies that have no idea they own them. So instead of spending lots and lots of money researching who technically owns these games that only a handful of hobbyists really care about, these websites instead just put them up for download with a note that if you own the copyright to anything they offer for download and DON'T want them to offer it, give them a heads-up and they'll remove it.

Several major publishers from this era have declared their entire old back catalog public domain as well, recognizing there's not much money to made from this material so they might as well just make the fans happy.

[Captain Audio]

I don't have any objection to protecting creators - though I might take issue with the time period (Life + 70 = that's an enormous period of time. Defend Canada's right to keep it at +50 in line with the Bern Convention)

Years ago I downloaded a British sporting goods catalog of pre WW 2. I was surprised to see that a great many illustrations were missing from the file.
Turned out the illustrations were the work of an artist who had only allowed a limited use of his work and his family refused to allow any further reproduction of his work  long after his death.

IIRC the wife of Lord Dusany also flatly refused to allow the publication of many of his stories that had not been previously published before his death.

[Andrew999]

That's exactly what I had in mind - thanks Adamanto!

Three cheers for games companies!

[Adamanto]

That's exactly what I had in mind - thanks Adamanto!

Three cheers for games companies!

You can see an example here, this is one of the biggest resource websites for the ZX Spectrum computer:
https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/publishers

The "distribution" field in the list shows what the current status on each publisher's library is, with "Allowed" meaning the copyright holder has declared their library public domain and the website is offering a downloadale copy, while "Denied" means they've specifically said it's NOT public domain and the games can NOT be downloaded from the website. "Unknown" means it's unclear who currently owns the copyright to this stuff, so the games are being offered for download but will be removed if the copyright owner makes themselves known and say they don't want this.

Considering there's 26 publishers on the "denied" list and 1721 publishers on the "allowed" list, you can see how it's a pretty safe assumption these unknown copyright holders would probably declare their libraries public domain if they knew they owned them.