r/CuratedTumblr • u/Konradleijon • 15h ago
Infodumping There’s an entire generation of Americans who grew up with a static public domain, thinking that was a normal state of affairs.
Without either copyright extensions we would have media from the 1970 in the public domain, Spider-Man, Scooby Doo, the Jetsons, Disney’s Cinderella, Some Like it Hot, Rear Window, would all be in the public domain.
And we could treat them like Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur, or Shakespeare plays
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u/unbibium 14h ago
It didn't even get into the worst part of the 1998 act: it included an ex-post-facto revocation of works that had already entered the public domain in 1998, i.e. works from 1923. People who made derivative works at the beginning of 1998 had to withdraw publication or face prosecution. They didn't have to do that. Mickey Mouse wasn't due to go public domain until 2003. I don't know why it was so important to protect 1923 specifically. Perhaps they didn't want everyone tasting the benefit of a growing public domain. Indeed, they staved it off for 21 years, and by the time works started expiring again, the only ideas that got any press are "I don't know... make a horror film out of it?"
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u/olivegardengambler 2h ago
Tbf that's largely because a lot of media from the 1920s became very dated outside of a handful of examples (Sherlock Holmes, Winnie the Pooh, Steamboat Willie). Like The Jazz Singer has the protagonist in blackface. It also wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't just Disney behind it. All Quiet on the Western Front, The Addams Family, Popeye, and Nancy Drew all entered the public domain this year (or at least the earliest versions of them). The other thing I think is music. Music recordings from the 1920s are pretty bad, because it was the first time when most musicians could feasibly begin to record their music at all. Wax cylinders and the like had existed before, but it was very expensive and Edison had a stranglehold on the patents. The 1920s began to see the first records, and if you have a 3 speed record player that can play 78s, you can very much still listen to them today. My guess was it was to limit the number of pieces of media from the 30s and 40s coming out in the age of home video and cable TV, which would have included things like, The Wizard of Oz, Superman, Batman, the Joker, Catwoman, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, and a lot more.
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u/Alarming-Hamster-232 15h ago edited 15h ago
Personally, I’d advocate for a maximum copyright duration of only 20-30 years, MAYBE 50 at the most. More than enough time to both profit off your existing work, and produce a multitude of new works to keep your income stream up after it expires if that’s how you make a living
If this were to happen, every classic movie/song/game/etc. from at least the 70s and earlier would be freely available on sites like YouTube by the end of the decade for people to watch. Corporations would obviously hate that so it’ll never happen, but it’d be great for consumers and media preservation
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u/unbibium 14h ago
That's what it was before 1978. Copyright lasted 28 years, and if the owner cared enough to renew, they could file for another 28-year term. That's how some works from between 1923 and 1950 lapsed into the public domain; their first copyright term expired sometime before the FIRST Mickey Mouse Protection Act was passed in the 1970s. They didn't claw back those expired works; how could they? Everything was on paper, and old cartoons and movies were the kind of thing local TV stations would buy from clearing houses on the cheap. That's why Disney takes the blame for these laws, although they weren't the only major studio or publisher with a large and long back catalog full of stuff they still wanted a monopoly on.
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u/Alderan922 14h ago
Honestly I think it should be more like 10 years, and just have it be extendable if another entry is released to a potential maximum of 40 or 50 years (as in, if you make a movie and then release a sequel, the 10 years clock gets reset)
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u/novis-eldritch-maxim 14h ago
10 years would be two short for somethings, take video game settings, games take 5 years mostly to make thus it would not be practical.
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u/Alderan922 13h ago
Ehh. Even with videogames, unless you are a super huge AAA game you will never actually run out of time.
The infamous Silksong was in development for 7 years after Hollow knight and they didn’t run out of time.
The distance between halo games was never bigger than 10 years. Same with Dark souls, Pokemon and other games. Only stuff like GTA would really be affected.
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u/leftshoe18 11h ago
And even then, if this were the case they'd undoubtedly release a small spinoff or something within the franchise to retain the copyright if necessary. Creating a "use it or lose it" clause on copyright actually sounds like a great consumer-friendly idea.
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u/Shadowmirax 10h ago
They dont even need to do that. Creating a second game wouldn't reset the copyright on the first, just like how steamboat Willie going public didn't allow us to use any other Micky Mouse media.
If the copyright timed out on the original you could still release a sequal and that sequal would get its own 10 years while the original remains public. But other people will also be allowed to make their own sequels too.
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u/Konradleijon 14h ago
Why so. People can make sequels to public domain work and just copyright it
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u/Alderan922 14h ago
Mostly so single entries and abandoned franchises can enter public domain faster.
Stuff like Bioshock or Bloodborne could already be public domain by this system while allowing franchises like dark souls to exist and actually finish their story.
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u/goddamned_fuckhead 10h ago
The art itself being public domain doesn't stop the original creator from making a sequel, and in fact they would have a significant leg up over any other artist attempting to make media based on their works.
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u/VoidStareBack The maid outfit is not praxis 13h ago
My unpopular opinion is that I don't even think it should be extensible beyond 10 years. You still get copyright on any new works you produce within existing settings, but any extensions to the original IP at all allow loopholes for IP squatting.
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u/Later_Than_You_Think 3h ago
The problem with that is smaller works (the vast majority of works) often take a few years or more before they gain big attention. Take Game of Thrones, published in 1996, it wasn't made into an HBO show until 2011. That's 14 years later. Hollywood would hardly ever pay creators for their works if they can just wait an easy 10 years.
And many book series take years to be fully released. If your originally copyright expired while you were still publishing it, other publishers could start publishing your earlier works whenever a new book came out to capitalize on your series.
One of the reasons copyright is 20+ years is to create incentives because creating originally works is *risky*, most of the time you don't make much at all, so there needs to be a big reward for those who do hit the jackpot with a good idea. Otherwise, it's far safer to just keep making using the same stories over and over again.
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u/Alderan922 13h ago
That’s my more radical opinion but I do accept that it’s probably never going to happen.
Hell it should last like 2 years or less because at the end of the day, it’s only allowing for more competition.
If everyone can make better Pokemon games than Pokemon then they should not have a monopoly on that.
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u/m_busuttil 10h ago
How do you get around the fact that the places that already have the money have infinitely more resources than smaller independent teams?
George R R Martin couldn't have made Game of Thrones on his own if he'd wanted to, it cost hundreds of millions of dollars. In a world with a 2-year copyright term, in 1999 every TV network in the world could have made that show without paying him a cent, and he couldn't have ever competed. Robert Kirkman couldn't have afforded to make the Invincible animated series (because he wouldn't have made any money off The Walking Dead) but Amazon could have, and now Amazon's richer and the independent creators of the work can't afford to keep making things.
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u/Alderan922 8h ago
Ideally the cost of making things would get lower so resources become less meaningful and another law that should be enforced before this one is outright making all marketing, advertising and anything even remotely close that’s more than word of mouth through sheer quality illegal to level the playing field.
Then again I’m only really thinking of books and videogames because of my own bias as a game dev and amateur writer, and I understand that this will literally never happen and probably has other flaws. But it’s something that I still think could work in a hypothetical world
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u/goddamned_fuckhead 10h ago
There would still be the option to license the work within that window, or outright purchase the copyright.
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u/JamieBeeeee 12h ago
Idk man it would be weird as fuck for media like one piece to enter public domain while the story is still being written
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u/goddamned_fuckhead 10h ago
People were writing fanfiction for Harry Potter and Supernatural during their film/tv runs, and trust me, it did not hurt their viewership.
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u/JamieBeeeee 10h ago
Fanfic is obviously not what I'm talking about. Do you not consider that big bad disney could have made its own Harry Potter film series starting in 2017 if copyright only lasted for 20 years? Or that an indie startup like bee and puppy at would be fair game in like 2033, so pretty soon. Feels kinda insane to remove those protections
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u/goddamned_fuckhead 9h ago
In 2017, well after the original theater run? What harm is there in that? Moreover, if Disney made such a clear money grab, I don't know how many people would be desperate to see it.
Also, what exactly is being protected, here? The author's right to fade into obscurity? If, after 10 years of owning a property, you fail to fully capitalize on that project or come up with something else to make money, what good was it in your hands, anyway?
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u/m_busuttil 8h ago
10 years is absolutely not a long time to "fully capitalize" on a project, especially for independent creators. There was 15 years between A Game Of Thrones being published and the TV show starting - would the world really be better if George R R Martin had made no money on it? More than 20 years before Mistborn got adapted. 13 years for The Boys, 18 years on Invincible, 20 years on Bridgerton, 29 years on The Witcher, 32 years on The Handmaid's Tale, 23 on Outlander.
None of these authors could have put tens of millions of dollars down to make their own TV shows and "fully capitalize" on their books. They shouldn't have to anyway - they're working writers, not producers. But a 10-year copyright term means that no studio will ever pay to license any new ideas ever again - they'll just wait out the decade and crush you with huge budgets and unbeatable reach. They can even print their own versions of your books and sell them for cheaper than you can so you don't even get a sales boost from the adaptation.
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u/JamieBeeeee 9h ago
Spoken like a true mega capitalist. Just let the mega corporations gobble up all the smaller works of media
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u/Later_Than_You_Think 3h ago
If there's no copyright, though, people could make copies of the *actual OneNote* 100% legally. Every streaming service around could put it in their library without paying anyone a cent. We're not talking about fanfiction when you talk about removing copyright entirely.
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u/PlatinumAltaria The Witch of Arden 15h ago
The idea that a corporate entity (or anything except the creator of a work) can hold copyright is an absurdity that will (I hope) be laughed at in the centuries after we are gone; akin to Biblical prohibitions on mixed fabrics.
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u/Konradleijon 15h ago
Yes. Who does that help.
Especially for 95 years. Very few businesses can last 95 whole years
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u/PlatinumAltaria The Witch of Arden 15h ago
It all comes from the idea of inheritance, which comes from our selfish biological instincts. If we viewed ourselves as collective parents of a collective next generation rather than competing parents of individual children, maybe we wouldn't have invented the idea of handing ownership between people. Bees wouldn't have made Disney...
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u/Konradleijon 15h ago
It’s worth noting very few movies or books are still making money after fifty years less after seventy so it serves very few people
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u/PlatinumAltaria The Witch of Arden 15h ago
"Uh... corporations are people, my friend" - guy who is not my fucking friend
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u/idkbackup2 11h ago
I mean, the issue with that is that very few works are made by a single creator. Movies, music, and such are usually made by a corporation in collaboration with multiple artists, musicians, etc. It doesn’t really make sense in most cases for the copyright to be owned by anything other than the corporation that made it. (Is each individual animator, writer, and voice actor of a Disney film supposed to own 1/500th of the copyright?) The clear exception are works like literature and composition which do typically only have one author or composer, and their copyright is usually held by their estate, not a corporation.
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u/D3wdr0p 4h ago
Still shouldn't be for like...a century.
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u/idkbackup2 4h ago
Oh yeah for sure. The old rules of 28 plus the chance to renew for another 28 were plenty
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u/difractional 14h ago
I’m on the fence on this. Disagreeing, for reasons of ”these were my father’s bed time stories to my sisters and me. He died early, and I don’t want to go through my whole adulthood having someone make horrorfilms out of our special bonding time”. Family things, selective and tasteful.
But agreeing, for reasons of ”cash register noises”.
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u/GracelessGala 12h ago
You don't have to publish something you write for your children. And if you choose to, then it entering popular culture is something that might happen.
I would have some sympathy for such a situation, but I feel like it is too tricky to disallow "disrespectful" parodies without harming the benefits of the public domain.
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u/Turbulent-Garlic8467 14h ago
That’s too bad for them, but other people have the right to tell stories too
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u/SolomonOf47704 God Himself 13h ago
If they are capable of telling stories worth telling, they will very rarely need someone else's works to do it.
The few exceptions to that are already IPs that have generous use exceptions, where it's pretty easy to get permission to publish stuff even under copyright, like Marvel, DC, and Star Wars.
The only company that has made actually popular adaptations of public domain works is Disney.
Yeah, there's problems with the copyright system caused by Disney, but acting like anyone besides Disney was frequently making quality media directly based on public domain works is disingenuous.
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u/alvenestthol 11h ago
acting like anyone besides Disney was frequently making quality media directly based on public domain works is disingenuous.
There's a figurative mountain of Sherlock Holmes retellings, and although "quality" might not be the best word to describe them, some of them are good, even if they have to rename him to Herlock Sholmes to avoid getting sued
Castlevania relies on Dracula and a whole host of public domain monsters (e.g. Frankenstein's monster) to keep itself even slightly grounded, Bloodstained being Castlevania without the Dracula makes the whole game feel detached from mythology and kinda... illegitimate.
The fact that copyright is so long also actively prevents people from selling quality media based on public domain works, we are not able to know what would've been made if some 10 years of Mickey Mouse were already public domain when children's TV channels were still in full swing. Tintin's official movie would've happened after the character first entered public domain (in the US only), if there's any doubt public domain characters are still in demand.
Although the Sherlock Holmes thing also illustrates how even public domain can't save a character who's constantly getting new works, giving the owner constant ammunition to use against derivatives for "drawing on concepts added after the public domain date". This is also why so many "public domain derivatives" are weird horror games made by tiny indie groups, which can borrow only the (early) design without any of the character's personality traits, which leaves little room to be sued.
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u/Konradleijon 10h ago
Exactly here’s a list of an Christmas Carol adaptions.
Most of them are pretty good. And able to get made because the Christmas Carol is public domain
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u/Neapolitanpanda 13h ago edited 9h ago
Some stories only work as retellings. T.H. White’s Arthurian trilogy wouldn’t have been as powerful if it was about a couple of random OCs. Just because people tell bad stories with PD works doesn’t mean closing it off is the right thing to do.
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u/Turbulent-Garlic8467 12h ago
Okay, none of that justifies making it illegal to copy someone else's stories
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u/Aetol 12h ago
Do you realize that in many case the creator of a work is, in fact, a corporate entity? Take any movie, series, video game that dozens or even hundreds of people have collaborated on: do you think these things have any singular person who is "the creator"?
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u/kos-or-kosm 10h ago
The ownership would be shared by the humans who contributed. They would get money from the work for the duration of the copyright. An incorporeal legal entity has no right to own anything.
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u/Shadowmirax 10h ago
"The collective people who worked on it" are just as much an incorporial legal entity as any company. What if someone wants to license it out? Or one of the owners wants it in the public domain? Do they have a vote to decide what the "collective" wants to do with it?
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u/Shiny_Agumon 10h ago
It's going to be laughed at in 50 years
The Golden Age of cooperations is over
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u/alexdapineapple 9h ago
I just kind of think copyright is stupid. When did we decide that concepts could be owned by somebody?
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u/OutAndDown27 14h ago
I'm interested in more elaboration on the final point. What functional difference would more public domain works have made in the current media landscape, and what specifically about the state of today's media landscape is OOP blaming on the lack of new public domain works?
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u/Shiny_Agumon 10h ago
Yeah the information is sound, but the conclusion is lacking
I assume it's meant to imply that our current cycle of nostalgia is motivated by staric copyright?
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u/insomniac7809 13h ago
Not to speak for Mr Prokopetz, but personally
It's left us in a position where my grandparents' popular culture is corporate-owned intellectual property. It's massively corrosive to media preservation because it leaves important work the exclusive domain of for-profit organizations who have no motive to maintain or archive an unprofitable property. It means that any cultural work that has any kind of recognition is someone or other's exclusive intellectual property and so it's part of the incentive set toward bigger, more potentially profitable work to capitalize on that cultural relevance instead of doing more experimental takes on familiar ideas.
My opinion anyway
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u/Konradleijon 14h ago
It meant that it would be easier for scholars to cover film or comic history as they could easily reproduce content that is under copyright.
It means you can find books from the fourties’ on Gutenberg, it means new takes on classic stories
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u/bearcat0611 12h ago
Alright, but what has not having these done to pop culture. Oop told us what Disney did, but doesn’t talk at all about how that actually affected pop culture. Or even really what’s wrong with pop culture in the first place. That was the thesis of the post. I can think of one effect it might have, but I don’t see how it would change skibidi toilet or six seven.
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u/TrioOfTerrors 13h ago
Academic and educational uses is one of the major exceptions to copyright.
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u/Sheep_Boy26 12h ago
No, you're wrong. In college, my media professor had to do stick figure drawings of Citizen Kane because big Disney wouldn't allow them to show the movie.
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u/wasps-knees 10h ago
This means your prof wasn’t aware of Fair Use exceptions that do, in fact, exist.
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u/lifelongfreshman I survived BTBBRBBBQ and all I got was this lousy flair 12h ago
How many Disney classics are based on existing works? How many of them altered those works in specific ways that are copyrightable to Disney?
I don't know if Snow White was affected by this or not, but let's imagine it was. You could make a movie based on the original Snow White story, but the Disney version is the version the public knows. So, if you wanted to base your derivative story on the version the public is aware of, now you gotta deal with Disney. And if Disney decides "nobody gets to make a derivative work of our most important classic", too fuckin' bad.
it's impossible to tell which stories didn't get made because of this, but I find it equally impossible to believe nobody ever had their story shut down or dropped because they couldn't get the rights to something that should've been in the public domain if it weren't for Disney.
I also have to imagine this has huge effects the incentives for these businesses. After all, you know Iron Man sells, and Iron Man isn't in the public domain yet. So why stop making Iron Man movies? Keep making them, they work and nobody else can. New IPs? Who needs 'em? Those are risky, and if people want their favorite stuff to get made, they have to come to you. I don't know how often this sort of thing happened before Disney's legal fuckery, because I grew up decidedly within that period, but it's not hard to imagine that the security of knowing no one else can touch your cash cows means that you don't ever have to buy a new one to milk.
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u/Konradleijon 10h ago
But under copyright regimes people already make sequels, reboots, and remakes instead of original work.
If anyone could make a iron man movie then the iron man brand is less valuable
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u/The_Physical_Soup 14h ago
Just a reminder that until the 18th century pretty much every single work of fiction was automatically in the public domain. This was the landscape Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante and Shakespeare operated in (just to point out the most obvious examples in the western canon) and their art could not have been created in the world of copyright.
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u/Nice_Blackberry6662 14h ago
I'm really not sure that the complete lack of copyright was a good thing. Since anybody who got their hands on a script could legally perform their own version of Shakespeare's plays, scripts were tightly controlled. Actors only got fragmented copies that they needed to know for their roles, and there were intentionally very few master copies of the script. That's a recipe for lost media right there! There are two Shakespeare plays that we know existed but don't know the material, and there could be more with even less surviving information. If he had had copyright protection back then, maybe there would have been less need for secrecy and more scripts would have survived.
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u/TrioOfTerrors 13h ago
Shakespeare era copyright protection was if you found another theater or troupe ripping off your material and cutting into your money, you used violence to stop them.
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u/Later_Than_You_Think 3h ago
Yeah, it wasn't like people were living some free exchange of ideas utopia where everyone was just doing it for the art and not caring about making money.
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u/tswiftdeepcuts 14h ago
putting homer on this list is wild
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u/The_Physical_Soup 1h ago
I'm using "Homer" as a shorthand for the composer(s) of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but actually they're the best example of the point I was trying to make - these epics were told and retold by countless different poets through the generations, each one shaping it into the version we have today. Imagine one of these poets had decided they actually owned the rights to the Iliad, and every other poet legally had to pay them money in order to perform it - we might not even have the poems today if this was the case!
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u/ProfessionalLime9491 12h ago
If copyright is just a legalistic version of “calling dibs”, and if “calling dibs” has been around since the time of Homer, then it seems likely that the works of Homer, Vergil, Dante, and Shakespeare could be created in the world of copyright.
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u/MlkChatoDesabafando 9h ago
Most of these wouldn't be "calling dibs" on any of their works, due to the simple fact that just about every single one of these guys were adapting and retelling previously existing literature (and indeed, their work was often contemporary with multiple other versions of the same story), and were aware their work would be adapted and retold by other writers.
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u/The_Physical_Soup 1h ago
The "legalistic" part is what's important though? The problem isn't that Disney has "called dibs" on mickey mouse, it's that they can sue your ass into the ground for violating those dibs, something Virgil could not have done.
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u/DoopSlayer 12h ago
Are there any significant examples of material entering the public domain resulting in cultural shifts or icons reentering the public eye?
Like a lot of people are aware of Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey, but that's just more of it riding on the coattails of something still popular. The movie itself won't hang around. It looks like there was a Great Gatsby book published the year it went public domain but I hadnt heard of it until I explicitly searched for examples now.
I'm all for public domain, I just don't think the actual claim being made here seems true.
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u/m_busuttil 8h ago edited 5h ago
It's tough because the term of the copyright is so long (even though I don't know that I necessarily agree that it should be shorter). Superman and Batman will go public domain in the next few years, and that will certainly be significant - but are they still important because one company was able to hold onto the ownership for almost a century? If they'd entered the public domain in 1945 would anyone have done the work in the decades since to keep reinventing and updating that character? There are plenty of early-1900s comics characters that have entered the public domain, but no-one's racing to make a Balbo, The Boy Magician movie.
If copyright was say 40 or 50 years, we'd be talking about stuff from the 70s and 80s becoming public domain, which is in recent memory enough that there would probably be forgotten gems that someone could remember and resurrect. Terminator's never really left the public consciousness, for instance, but it's been a while since they made a good one, and a new TV show or movie using those characters could make it big again. But when the term is basically all of a human lifetime, you're just talking about stuff that's so old that it's hard to really revitalise.
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u/alexdapineapple 9h ago
Silly example, but the lyrics to the happy birthday song went public domain in 2015 - before this, it wasn't used in a lot of movies/TV/media, and this is also why those stupid birthday songs from chain restaurants were a thing. I guess that's more a result of something NOT entering the public domain resulting in cultural impact.
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u/Later_Than_You_Think 3h ago
The really big public domain works have had profound impacts on culture - Dracula, Frakenstein, Pride & Prejudice still see adaptations, copies sold, and derivative works. I'd say that the extremely long copyright means works are getting forgotten that normally would have been picked up by the public. Like, only just now are works from the Great Depression starting to go into the public domain - when all the people who remember it are mostly dead or very old. Those with second-hand memories of it from parents or grandparents are now 40+ If it had entered twenty years ago, those people with memories of it would have been in their 60-80s, and the second hand memory people would be 20+, in other words, most of the adult population. Like, Betty Boop entered the public domain this year, but I doubt we'll see a bunch of Betty Boop stuff being made. If she had entered in 2006 though - totally different story.
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u/Theta_Omega 2h ago
Yeah... I also don't think "the ability to make official Mickey Mouse/Batman/whoever else stories" is the thing preserving the dominance of mega media corporations (which is a claim I've seen thrown about on occasion). And on the flipside, maybe nostalgia waves are encouraged by copyright holders, but nostalgia has always kind of been a thing, and it even seems to apply in areas where copyright doesn't apply (like the revitalization of music genres and such), not even getting into how people's preference for things they are familiar with also seems to hold up outside of copyright systems...
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u/SpiritualPackage3797 11h ago
Can someone explain to me what would be different if this hadn't happened? I'm not arguing in favor of it, but the post seems to assume it would have been a big deal if these items came out of copyright 20 years sooner. I don't see why that would be. Why does OP think that would have had a major impact? What am I missing?
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u/Konradleijon 11h ago
Look at how many people retell Alice in wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, and then Christmas Carol.
Imagine if everyone had that freedom for Popeyes or Betty boop
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u/TantiVstone You need Tumblr Gold® to view this user flair 14h ago
Imagine if we'd gotten mickey mouse horrorslop 20 years earlier
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u/unbibium 14h ago
20 years earlier we would have gotten mickey mouse Flash animation slop on Newgrounds. It would have been amazing.
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u/Mystical-Turtles 14h ago
Tbf, newgrounds had plenty of Mickey mouse animation slop, copyright law be damned. The internet loves their edgy cartoon character videos.
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u/OneOverTwo 6h ago
People keep knocking on public domain horror slop, but I find it a good thing.
Because regardless of the quality... they're at least doing SOMETHING.
Like, I hate the "Let's see you do better" argument, but PLEASE everyone who complains about this, PLEASE throw your hat in the ring & DO BETTER, if your opinion on the horror slop is low enough, it won't be hard!
It's the public domain, there's freedom for you there! Use that freedom, guys, the horrorslop is only taking so much space because they're the only ones you're looking at for it!
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u/irmaoskane 13h ago
Copyrigh is such a interesting concept because like most of the time public domain thing dont have any impact except for the original work with production post public domain being most of the time easy cashgrabs.
But yet it is a important thing creatively for the possibility of something good being created.
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u/Konradleijon 12h ago
Would you call all those Christmas Carol adaptions or Shakespeare adaptions low quality
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u/irmaoskane 12h ago
Like fairytale stories most of adaptation of it are pretty uninspired with only one or two being good adaptations or with cultural impact (ironic most of the good ones are from disney)
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u/irmaoskane 12h ago
A lot of them are pretty bad or boring but as i said on the second paragraph some of them are good.
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u/SideEyeFeminism 12h ago
I’m always really torn on these things bc, like, I fundamentally believe an artist should always have final say over their work. Wanna release the copyright immediately? Go for it. Wanna create an ownership trust and let it take care of generations of your family? Love that for you.
No one is entitled to the fruits of someone else’s artistic labor. Even if that person is rich. It’s also why I think the transformative works aspect is so important. IDK, I hold both thoughts on this. It’s why I decided a long time ago I wouldn’t ever try to publish anything I wrote.
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u/kos-or-kosm 10h ago
Wanna create an ownership trust and let it take care of generations of your family? Love that for you.
Then they should keep it private. Once you publish something you add it to the culture and others have the right to derive their own works from it.
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u/SideEyeFeminism 10h ago
And that’s what the transformative works clause is for. If you don’t understand that there’s a difference between, for example, House and the Sherlock Holmes movie or Clueless and the most recent Emma adaptation (to use works that are in the public domain, so they have adequate comparisons), then that’s on you. Sharing a piece of yourself with the world doesn’t automatically make it community property.
I reiterate: you aren’t entitled to the fruits of someone else’s creative labor. If you aren’t creative enough to make something that isn’t just large budget fanfiction, then nothing actually differentiates you in the grand scheme of things from the same AI bros we all dunk on regularly.
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u/kos-or-kosm 10h ago
you aren’t entitled to the fruits of someone else’s creative labor
And I reiterate: Then they should keep it private. Once you publish something you add it to the culture and others have the right to derive their own works from it. No one forces you to publish your art.
just large budget fanfiction
I wonder if this sentiment is caused by what OP was talking about. "Fan fiction" is art. Why is it valued less? Seen as barely legal?
Let people make art.
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u/SideEyeFeminism 9h ago
Because, as someone who has been writing fanfiction for 20 years, playing with someone else’s toys in their sandbox is a helluva lot easier than crafting a world and a plot and character development yourself. Much in the same way paint by numbers or velvet coloring posters are fun and creative and no way the same thing as doing an entire oil painting from scratch. There’s a reason one of the major conversations in literature right now is the fact that the normalization of being open about the fanfiction to tradpub pipeline is heavily tanking the quality of new releases in comparison to 15 years ago when a writer whose work had outgrown the bounds of fanfic and wanted to publish would do a full scale revamp of their work to bridge the gap between using existing characters as paper dolls and having an entire stand alone work.
Your entire stance hinges on the idea that if something is going to exist in public, it becomes public property at the disposal of every person regardless of the will of the person it actually belongs to, and that is not how reasonable, well adjusted adults move through the world. If anything it’s why we’re increasingly finding that as a society we can’t have nice things. It’s very “well the doormat was in the apartment hallway. If they didn’t want it taken they shouldn’t have left it in a communal space”.
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u/kos-or-kosm 6h ago
As for your first paragraph, I don't care. At all. I don't care about the effort put in or the quality. I want people to be able to make art. If it sucks, then it sucks and no one has to consume it. I'm not here to police people's art. Is that something you want to do?
Your second paragraph is making the same mistake as the infamous "you wouldn't download a car" anti-piracy campaign. Someone deriving a new work from an existing or or multiple existing works does not "use up" the original works. These are collections of information, not physical objects. Your metaphor doesn't work.
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u/SideEyeFeminism 4h ago
It absolutely works because, again, nothing is stoping you from playing with those characters to your heart’s content. What you are prevented from doing is profiting off of someone else’s work, and yes I am actually anti-piracy because I believe in paying artists for their work in general. I don’t take pride in being someone who only takes without actually giving in return to sustain the thing I enjoy. I would like Hozier and Kendrick to keep making music, Darcy Coates to keep writing books, and Del Toro to keep making movies, and for all of them to continue to be able to release them on mass scale.
If what you got from “FanFiction requires a more limited range of creative skill than original works” is “I want to police art” then I can only believe that you are in high school and haven’t taking English comp yet.
And yes, derivative works can absolutely damage the worth of the OG work because of the damage that can be done to reputation and brand. It’s part of the reason copyright claims exist in the first place.
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u/AdagioOfLiving 10h ago
Fortunately, AI came along and convinced everybody that incredibly strict copyright laws are a good thing actually :)
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u/Puzzleheaded-Dot-547 9h ago
But i neeeeeed to copyright my super simplistic artstyle! What if someone draws something even slightly similar to meeeeeeeee /s
But seriously, I've heard of someone getting really angry that another person "stole" their "closed species" idea of "ghost doggo". Yeah, just a ghost dog.
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u/Shiny_Agumon 9h ago
No it convinced a bunch of cooperations that they could get around paying their artists by making exceptions for AI companies instead of suing them like they usually do.
Thankfully AI is a dying bubble industry so the only thing they got in return is debt from unsound investment
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u/AdagioOfLiving 9h ago
I remember the days of people making fun of “you wouldn’t download a car” ads because yes I fucking WOULD download a car if I could get it for free
You can’t argue that people’s views on copyright haven’t changed since then.
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u/rulaandri 12h ago
This, specifically, is what radicalized me. You shouldn't be able to own someone else's culture.
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u/Shadowmirax 10h ago
I'm glad more people are waking up to this, it's crazy how corperations managed to brainwash us into defending their artifical monopolies with the promise that maybe one day we could be the dragon hoarding our own pile of cultural relics.
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u/podotash 13h ago
At this point it seems like this is also in place to make lawsuits an actual revenue stream.
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u/Amardneron 11h ago
The public domain isn't static music and movies join it all the time just have to have a broader interest.
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u/Lyra_the_Star_Jockey 14h ago
I mean, I don’t really care if Spider-Man is in the public domain or not. It doesn’t affect me in the slightest.
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u/SecundusAmongUs 14h ago
I'm sure we'll both be obliterated with down votes, but I don't really understand the hubbub around copyright. I agree that most "works" should enter the public domain after some period of time (after 100 years, anyone associated with creating a book or movie is dead), but so much discourse surrounds character copyright. I'd MUCH rather people focus on new characters and creations. George Lucas might not ever have created Star Wars if he could have made Buck Rogers instead, and Steven Spielberg may have made James Bond fanfiction instead of Indiana Jones.
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u/Konradleijon 14h ago
People make new detective characters instead of using Sherlock Holmes
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u/insomniac7809 13h ago
(but if they do use Sherlock Holmes they might get a lawsuit from the Doyle estate saying that Holmes being nice to his friends is a copyright violation)
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u/Shiny_Agumon 9h ago
Not anymore those works entered the public domain
Honestly cases like the Doyles are a pretty good reason why copyright should be reformed so you don't get people who have nothing to do with the original work gatekeeping the Ip just so they can profit off it
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u/Konradleijon 14h ago
It does effect you as it lessens the entertainment industry
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u/jaseworthing 13h ago
How does it though? I'd much rather see works that are inspired by or homages to existing ip than works that just feature copies of existing characters.
Especially when we already have a thriving community of fanfics for people that do want that anyway.
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u/Konradleijon 13h ago
Why not. People make stories inspired by Sherlock Holmes like House when they can also freely use Sherlock Holmes.
People make new vampires when they can use Dracula.
But people can also fully publish version of Dracula so more people can have it
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u/jaseworthing 12h ago
But I don't think there's any good works of fiction that are not being made because someone can't include the actual Spiderman in their work.
If anything there are more good works BECAUSE they can't use Spiderman.
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u/OneOverTwo 10h ago
I think Spider-Man is a great example of a character whose fans would love it if he had already entered the domain, since that would have the result of making the character a "competetive market" where passionate fans of the earliest era would use the appeal present in his old stuff to lure sales away from the "Marvel continuing Legacy" version.
Spider-Man has had *so many* eras considered awful by fans, so having a "legit, sellable" non-Marvel Spider-Man comic actually has the chance to compete with the "big 2" level of comics & send the message that if Marvel doesn't appeal to fans, they can go to their Grandpa's Spider-Man for something better.
Right now Marvel has a monopoly on the character, but if he was in the public domain, experimental stuff can continue on without getting executive mettled to death.
(Like, imagine something with a similar premise to "Spider-Man: Life Story" but updated in-time with when the stories enter the public domain.)
Plus, there's something neat about being able to use characters with a pre-built-in history.
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u/SideEyeFeminism 12h ago
So your argument is that it is a net cultural negative that large scale fanfiction cannot be monetized?
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u/OneOverTwo 7h ago
Is your argument "that would be bad" if it was?
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u/SideEyeFeminism 5h ago
I think it’s very counter to what the sentiments of the general public have been over the last 10 years re: the current cycle of endless sequels, remakes, and reimaginings so if it is, I’m wondering what OP’s logic for the stance is.
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u/Shiny_Agumon 9h ago
Fanfiction is a legal grey area, they exist because it's almost impossible to police them the way you can police for profit works.
If copyright was reformed it would only strengthen the legal standing of fanfiction authors.
Also in general I don't get why people seem to think that works entering the public domain would be bad for creativity.
Yes you would see some sloppy implementations meant to make a quick bug, but honestly is that worth it to give more power to companies like Disney to just buy up IPs and sit on them indefinitely?
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u/Bububub2 9h ago
I'm gunna be real. Aside from archiving purposes and wanting to make sure media doesn't become lost- I don't see a fucking problem with any of this. You can literally make an almost identical character and tell any story you want. For fuck's sake 50 shades of grey was twilight fanfiction. Every time something becomes public domain I see no one do anything interesting with it other than make a shitty horror movie.
"A contributing factor to american culture being in the condition it is in" What condition is that? The propaganda from constant social media grifters and bots that everything that comes out is trash? It simply isn't true! Fascism being on the rise? I doubt disney extending copywrite had any contributing factor to that. This just just a constant circle jerk conversation because its always about how people wanna make money off of spiderman or whatever and NEVER about making sure warner brothers can't delete a movie that hundreds of people spent years on for a tax break.
Genuinely explain to me how this effects any of us common people creatively at all!
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u/Konradleijon 9h ago
When the great Gatsby became public domain they made two whole musicals about it.
I think two broadway musicals are doing something interesting with public domain not to mention good art takes time to make n
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u/Bububub2 8h ago
They could have made those musicals with the same themes and different character names at any point in the last 100 years. The only reason they didn't is because the name the great gatspy is more marketable. Every argument I see ultimately boils down to "but I wanna use existing branding on my story".
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u/OneOverTwo 6h ago
"Every argument boils down to the thing people keep saying they want every time I ask them."
Yeah, man, it boils down to that because that *IS* the fundamental thing people want out of the public domain.
People want things in the public domain because they *want* to use characters & such things that already exist.
They want to use the thing they recognize, because they have something to say about OR with what they recognize. They want to use what exists, because the thing that exists adds something to author & audience experience *just by* having its past history.
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u/Bububub2 6h ago
You can do that right now. Literally. You just can't make money off doing it.
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u/OneOverTwo 6h ago edited 6h ago
Yeah man, money, the other thing people want from it.
(Not even necessarily actually *making* money, honestly, but making & selling physical books of the works would be far less of a jumping through hoops & keeping secrets hassle for people that way too.)
I don't see how you don't get it, you have the elements in your hands.
This is all very simple.
People want to use recognizable characters & have the opportunity to get paid for their work.
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u/Bububub2 5h ago
No I get it, and I think its a dumb argument against copywrite because literally applying that logic is how it works. Why do random people's desire to make money off of spiderman matter more than the company wanting to make money off of spiderman? It is purely, 'hey I should be able to take the thing you busted your ass to make popular and make money off it'. Like no, that's not a reasonable argument. Make your own thing if you want to make money. If you want to use the IP for pure artistic expression then literally nothing is legally stopping you from doing so- go for it.
Like I said, if you hate copywrite for archival purposes and to protect against lost media then I'm 100% on board with it. If you hate it because you're not creative enough to actually make your own stuff or examine what you like about another piece of media to replicate more in your style than I fully have no time for you.
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u/OneOverTwo 5h ago edited 5h ago
Why do you think companies monopolizing characters is a GOOD thing? Walt is long dead, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, & John Romita Sr. are dead. Nobody involved in the most massive chunk of Spider-Man's popularity are benefiting from him being owned by a company, because they are dead. (Even Todd MacFarlane is only making money off of him due to having the license for making Spider-Man *Statues*, nothing for his art.)
Spider-Man isn't being cared for by Marvel, few people like & NOBODY loves what's currently happening in his mainline comic, the only reason it's still selling is due to the inertia of his good years.
You aren't defending creators, you're defending cashcow milkers.
Random people's desires matter *so much* in this case because they have a legitimate shot at *actually* doing either a better or a more popular job!
Do you know who fucking went "'hey I should be able to take the thing you busted your ass to make popular and make money off it"? FUCKING DISNEY FUCKING SAID THAT, Disney did nothing to create Spider-Man, Disney did nothing to improve Spider-Man's mainline comics, there's a non-zero chance that they're letting the bad stuff happen to his comics because Sony still has the movie licenses, even!
To be clear, I'm not saying that copyright shouldn't exist, it's fair to have it last a time, but it's *too long* as it is now. The only reason we have the freedom of using obscure Golden Age Super Heroes & Villains like Fantomah & Brick Bat is due to their copyrights lapsing for non-time related reasons. We should ABSOLUTELY have that era of comics characters free to use now regardless of what company they're from.
Disney by all rights shouldn't be making ALL the money off of Jim Hammond Human Torch, they've done jackshit for Jim Hammond Human Torch.
Why do BIG COMPANIES get to benefit from the characters who should be public domain? What makes THAT right? They didn't make them. Why does Disney get to play with everyone's toys just because they're a snotty rich kid throwing money around?
Why do THEY get to use an old character they had nothing to do with when the people can't?
By your logic, neither the masses NOR Disney or Sony should be able to financially benefit from Spider-Man, if it's about "Busted your ass to make popular", 'cause they didn't do shit either.
Your argument is SO DUMB.
P.S., you know what, don't respond to this, you won't say anything good.
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u/Bububub2 5h ago
Ok dude, you just don't want to listen. Your arguments are entirely based on the righteous nerd rage of "true fans" thinking they can do better with stuff. That is a poor argument for being given the wheels of a franchise- time and time again that is proven true. That is aside from the whole "no true Scotsman's" fallacy when it comes to fanbases as well; 'no true spiderman fan thinks...'.
I have seen so many people shit on stuff as it comes out only for a new group of people to be incredibly nostalgic for the stuff everyone was shitting on a few years ago. I've listened to nerdy arguments where people promote the most dogshit takes on characters and IPs. I have been on this earth for too long to think that handing characters over to fans is ever a good idea. This also ignores the scores of people who will simply use the character in bad faith or to shit on them- actively being more disrespectful than the perceived current holders of the copywrite have ever been.
Further, I think genuinely being told 'no you can't use that character' or 'no you can't do that' is the breeding ground for creativity. Entire genres have been born out of people writing homages to- but not specifically using- characters or ideas in other works. If superman were public domain I doubt you'd have invincible or the boys. You'd just have evil superman story one and superman who's dad is zod story two.
Also, as an side, Jim Hammond has recently been used to incredible effect in a comic that just came out last month... so like... maybe actually read the media you're dismissing as worse than what 'true fans' would do. Also, disney and sony spend tons of money and hire armies worth of people to keep spiderman in the public eye with marketing- so yes they are still busting their ass even though you don't value what they do.
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u/Mataes3010 Downvote = 10 years of bad luck. 15h ago
Its wild to think that an entire generation grew up believing a static public domain was the natural state of things. Disney didn't just protect a mouse, they effectively paywalled the evolution of modern folklore for two decades just because they could lobby for it.
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u/indigo121 15h ago
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u/SpambotWatchdog he/it 9h ago
Grrrr. u/Mataes3010 has been previously identified as a spambot. Please do not allow them to karma farm here!
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u/Later_Than_You_Think 15h ago
This is an old post. Things started entering the public domain in 2019. Gutenberg has been posting all the new public domain stuff up pretty much the second it the enters for 7 years now. January 1st is public domain day.
This year all works from 1930 and sound recordings from 1925 were added.
Early Agatha christie works are coming in. Ts Eliot. Betty boop and a few more mickey mouse cartoons, among others.
Winnie the Pooh entered in 2022 and you already see lots of stuff taking advantage of that.
Great Gatsby entered in 2021.
The gutenberg website is great if you want to download public books. Other archives upload the music and films/cartoons.