The Public Domain

General Discussion
1

This year, a mind boggling ZERO items entered the public domain, due to current copyright laws. For those who don’t know what the public domain is, it’s basically works where the intellectual properties have expired. Things such as Mozart, Beethoven, Newtonian physics, flight patents, all things that better humanity and should be shared after a respectable amount of time for the researchers/inventors/creators to make some profit off their invested time.

Sadly, due to corporate fuckery, copyrights have been extended time and time again (as soon as copyrights are about to expire, industry giants such as Disney, the RIAA, MPAA, and many others, lobby to have them extended). Here is a fun list of things that SHOULD have entered the public domain as of yesterday:

Godzilla
Moby Dick
The Ten Commandments
Around The World In 80 Days
Ian Fleming’s "Diamonds Are Forever"
The King And I
Old Yeller
101 Dalmations
Elvis Presley - Heartbreak Hotel, Love Me Tender, Don’t Be Cruel

as well as research on AI, the effects of LSD on first time users of drugs, the origin of cancer cells, and psychosomatic research.

All of these now have to wait until after 2050 to finally have a chance at entering the public domain again.

http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2013/pre-1976

Gone are the days when popular folk lore (such as Robin Hood, Greek Mythology, the Happy Birthday song) could be used by one and all due to it’s effects on our everyday life. We’re seeing TONS of books and movies that are literally out of print, but the copyright holders are letting them deteriorate while waiting to make money off them instead. Entire parts of our history, gone because somebody wanted to make $1.99 off the book Minority Report.

We’re now a planet that is failing economically, physically, emotionally, and even culturally. Bow before your rich masters. Happy “New” Year.

2

STFU Soviet, mah tax dollurs and my hard work is mine. Greatest economic system in the world, freeloaders, blah blah blah blah blah.

Shit, let me go scoop some water out out of the Atlantic Ocean and claim it as my property. You freeloaders have used it long enough.

edit: For a serious answer, we really need to revise our patent and copyright laws. I don’t think all patents are a bad thing or inherently harmful to business, and I recognize the need to protect inventors(though one could argue that in many cases patents have failed to protect the actual inventors of products instead of the first one to file the patent), but some of them are so overboard and stifling that long after any meaningful profit can be made they still block people from innovating off of an existing design. Same with copyrights, after a long enough time you’re not going to see much of any profit, so keeping things out of the public domain after a certain amount of time just gets silly.

3

What would Henry Rollins do

[details=Spoiler][media=youtube]9D1sbonIHKw[/media]

4

Yeah it fucking sucks. Superman should be going public domain in another decade or two, but won’t for precisely this reason. Mickey Mouse should have been, too.

5

damn these people for trying to make money off of their financial investments

6

Fortunately, everything is in the pirate domain.

7

Disney gots to hang on to dat mouse. :coffee:

8

And my Moby Dick vs Godzilla fanfiction remains unpublishable :frowning:

9

Tell me about it… my Old Yellar x 101 Dalmatians (101 Gang bangs) remains trapped in the realm of erotic fanfiction, and not the literary canon.

10

I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have Superman be in the PD. You know, aside from never ending shitty movies.

11

Damn straight. Herman Melville is still counting up the gold coins coming in from Moby Dick.

12

If it’s based on the books, you might have a chance!

13

I am torn. Something like Superman shouldn’t be Public Domain, there is a friggin movie dropping [S]next[/S] this year. Moby Dick however has been irrelevent as a money maker to the point that it should be Public Domain.

Old Yellar x 101 Dalmatians shows promise though…

  • :bluu:
14

I don’t see why that should have anything to do with it. The Bible is public domain and they made a movie about (part of) that a few years ago.

15

This one confuses me since currently EON productions own the rights anything movie related and print is Amazon since they bought them last year to republish them all due to popular demand.

16

except he sold it to someone else and relinquished the rights to the person he sold it to. if he cared then maybe he shouldn’t of sold it?

17

/smashes head into a wall.

What part of there should be a point of diminishing returns on how long you own something do you not understand?

Let’s try a little exercise so you get this through that skull of yours.

Say somehow I manage to cure cancer. I immediately patent the cure and copyright it so that no one can ever sell the cure but me without my say so. Now say I croak without selling my rights to the cure. According to you, no one will ever be allowed to use that cure as it’d still belong to me by patent/copyright. Hundreds of years go by, and STILL it belongs to me by patent/copyright, so unless in that time someone has found an alternative cure no one can use it and people still die of cancer.

Do you know how fucking retarded that sounds?

18

Do you know how retarded it sounds that people who did nothing suddenly are owners of something they had no hand in creating? Hey look at me I own the rights to the Night of the Living Dead. Thanks for the gift Romero and all that money you spent to create the movie and hours you invested in writing the script and filming the movie. Now I own it for 0 work!

19

It would be weird be if Godzilla and Superman went to public domain. DC and Toho are still alive and kicking and definitely not going anywhere. Superman is still a strong franchise and Godzilla actually still has stuff going on to this day (I believe there is a comic line that is still running atm).

20

SixMachine do you know how retarded that sounds?? BEWD should be able to make his own Godzilla vs. Superman movie where they attack greedy scientists who cure cancer but won’t give the cure to the public because a couple years have past since those characters were invented and he is entitled to use them however he wants