This has strong vibes of “If only Linus Torvalds had charged for Linux, he would have been a rich man today.”. It does not work that way.
> Somewhat ironically though, it's Night of the Living Dead's freely available nature that helped it become the revered classic it is today, as easy access and constant TV airings ensured that more and more people saw the film.
It’s not “ironic”, it’s completely expected. If it was only an old black-and-white movie, still subject to copyright, today the movie would be a historical footnote at best.
Totally in favor of shorter copyright terms though even where there are edge cases where longer terms seemingly have made sense. (In terms of promoting progress of the arts, etc. or whatever the language is, I'm not sure that usually fairly small inheritances qualify.)
That doesn't mean that we should lean into it.
14 years made sense when there were wooden printing presses and the fastest communication was a rider and a horse carrying a handwritten letter sealed in wax. They arguably need less time to monetize today than they did back then. Years-long (or, as it is now decades-long and centuries-long) periods are about giving someone the right to tax culture for many generations, not about incentivizing creativity. It undermines the public domain.
5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value on most works and yet not hampering cultural remixes.
Well, that's one way to look at it. The other way is that it merely limits how much it can be sold for on month 17. When I was in high school, one of the big malls had a dollar-a-ticket movie theater. People would pay for things that are more easily/cheaply available soon, they just won't pay the premiums demanded now.
But there's a third way to look at it... the idea that they never owned the intellectual property anyway. It always belonged to the public domain, they had a temporary lease. And in that view, the idea that they'd have trouble extracting maximum dollars from it on the day before the lease ends is absurd. No one cares, nor should they care.
>I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again a
Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience. I can do all the streaming I need, to any of my devices (or my friends' devices) anywhere in the world. Everything on demand, from every premium channel and streaming service, in the highest resolution. Every minute or every day. I read comments here and elsewhere about people complaining how they have to cancel Netflix, the show's over, but they have to resubscribe to Disney because the new show's on, etc. It's all bizarre. The stuff you guys are willing to put up with is mind-boggling.
>5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value
You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit. Not "value". The magnitude of the grift in the industry that gave us the term "Hollywood accounting" is beyond human imagination or capacity to comprehend. Stop enabling that.
Ethics
> You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit.
The creative industry isn’t wildly profitable. Slash the amount of money movies/books/etc make on average and you dramatically reduce the amount of movies/books/etc published.
After all we could totally remove copyright, but then you don’t get leech off the fruits of other people’s labor if they never preform that labor.
Language has meaning, and the puplic domain is a better situation for society. It is more interesting to say it ascended
The question shouldn't be about how much it costs but why do things cost anything in the beginning, and if they have to what is the amount a specific piece should be retributed for its contribution to society minus how the non-zero cost impacts society.
AIs are being let off the hook with their massive copyright infringement but when a movie being open directly benefits everyone suddenly that's a problem.
This is utterly nonsensical. You've invented a new definition of piracy to try to claim that streaming services are piracy.
Specifically at this point:
>no one pays anyone anything for content
This is literally factually incorrect. Netflix pays billions per year to copyright holders. Just because it's indirect payment in the form of a subscription doesn't mean you're not paying for the right to view content.
The economist I know of who calculated a socially optimal copyright duration, Rufus Pollock, came up with an estimate of 20 something years.
This makes sense from the point of view of finance because the NPV of extra years beyond this is very low. To put it in qualitative terms, no one is thinking about their grandchildren's pensions when they decide to create a work.
Personally I would also have different durations and rules for different types of work: a book, a video, and a piece of software are very different works and need diffferent incentives
That's a very ungenerous take. The film is very good and was revolutionary for it's time. Check out other horror films from the same era and the tone is completely different. Night of the Living Dead changed what horror films could be.
And there's plenty of old black and white movies still in copyright that are highly regarded as classics so I don't know what that has to do with anything.
However, I also think it's reasonable to posit it might not have attained the same status had it not gone out of copyright. Easy access can really affect awareness and buzz around films, especially in certain genres like horror.
Horror films were already shifting in tone by 1968. Psycho was a 1960 release, for example, and The Birds was released in 1963. Carnival of Souls has a similar aesthetic as Night of the Living Dead and was released in 1962.
On top of this, genre films in general, and horror specifically, if anything, have rabid fans that go out of their way to watch movies because of their genre, regardless of accessibility or buzz. Again, George Romero's involvement alone would make sure that even a passing fan of horror (or budding cinephiles) would seek it out.
And this would indeed merit the film a historical footnote. But it would be virtually unavailable, and nobody in a position to make it available would take the chance on an ancient black-and-white film. And it would therefore in all likelihood languish in obscurity.
Not at all similar. Linus explicitly made his software free. Romero didn't _intentionally_ exclude the copyright notice, and had no explicit intention of making it free.
> It’s not “ironic”, it’s completely expected. If it was only an old black-and-white movie, still subject to copyright, today the movie would be a historical footnote at best.
"completely expected" is quite a stretch. Simply making it public domain wouldn't be enough. It still has to be a good movie. I'm sure there are countless other public domain black-and-white movies that no one has ever heard of.
See: MST3K and RiffTrax
I remember a long time ago a language study startup called smart.fm released their material on RSS under a copy left license. Problem was that they didn’t mean to give it away, but worse, they didn’t have the license to relicense the material like that.
I kinda wonder where that puts redistribution of that material.
Software can simultaneously be covered by copyright, trade secret and patents. The patents have to disclose some info, of course.
Even when distributed you can distribute just the binary, and keep the source a trade secret.
Now, fixing a creative work in a tangible medium is all that's required. When does the copyright expire? Nobody will know, because there's no year of publication listed, and no author listed to find out when they die. (Even if there is an author listed by name, maybe it was me; maybe it was the Pulitzer Prize winning author)
This begs the question: if the original movie was copyrighted, how does releasing the same movie with a different title make the new re-release considered a new (not-yet-copyrighted) work? I thought the copyright protection of the original would extend to the renamed version, since they're 99.99% the same. Theoretically, does changing even one frame necessitate a new copyright?
Today things are much easier, if you create something it is copyright. If you want to sue you need to register, but you can register at anytime. If you register you can sue for triple damages for anything that happens after you register, but you can still get damages for things that happened before your register. (The above is my understanding of the law, but I'm not a lawyer)
Probably yes. The way movies are financed is quite the byzantine joy ride if you want to look into it. With random tax incentives depending on where you make it. To finance groups that get control of entire regions. There are quite a large number of videos from independent filmmakers on what is going on. You hear things like 'Disney lost XYZ on a movie'. More than likely they lost someone else's money making sure they recoup first. Like for example the OG star wars has yet to recoup. Probably for some segments of the corporate structure that was created to make that movie that is probably true. Hollywood accounting is a huge mess. So yeah he probably signed off particular distribution rights to get the money to make/distribute the thing.
Many TV show pilots probably fall into the same issue too. I have not dug into it too much but the original pilot of star trek did not have one until a re-release decades later with an obvious digital watermark.
I guess it's complicated because the first release with this title was absent the copyright notice, but the article also says that prints existed with the previous title and a copyright notice, so if they were distributed at all, it'd seem to be a slam dunk that it'd be covered by copyright on the original title and the retitled copy without copyright notices was infringing.
In the case of a self published book, it's pretty obvious. In the case a movie production or otherwise, it gets difficult really fast. Throw in some corporate mergers, acquisitions, & bankruptcies and now you're looking at paying a small team of legal professionals to do research to construct a paper trail for ownership. If the work in question is valuable, obviously it gets done.
In the modern era there is a basically endless stream of video games from a 2-3 decades back where the ownership is completely unclear. The actual video game release rights might be held by one shell company, the video game source code could be held by another group (or even the original author, depending on how lazy people were), and the assets themselves might be held by another group if it was a "branded" or similar content.
gus_massa•2d ago
> For works first published on or after March 1, 1989, use of the copyright notice is optional. Before March 1, 1989, the use of the notice was mandatory on all published works. Omitting the notice on any work first published from January 1, 1978, to February 28, 1989, could have resulted in the loss of copyright protection if corrective steps were not taken within a certain amount of time. Works published before January 1, 1978, are governed by the 1909 Copyright Act. Under that law, if a work was published under the copyright owner's authority without a proper notice of copyright, all copyright protection for that work was permanently lost in the United States.
dahart•3h ago
bluGill•2h ago
Edit: I just remembered that you cannot sue if your copyright is not registered - but you don't have to register until just before you sue. Triple damages applies to anything that happens after the copyright is registered, but that is the only difference it makes.
tzs•1h ago
Patent law allows triple damages in the case of willful infringement, and trademark allows triple damages in the case of a counterfeit mark that the infringer knew was counterfeit.
Copyright does have some things that can increase a damage award but there is no real triple damages mechanism.
The plaintiff in copyright gets a choice. They can ask for either:
• The actual damages plus the profits that the infringer made from the infringement. The latter is only to the extent that the infringer's profits exceeded the actual damages.
E.g., if you lost $100k due to infringement and the infringer made $70k your damages would be $100k. But if the infringer made $120k your damages would be $120k (the $100k you lost plus the $20k the infringer made over $100k).
• Statutory damages. It is often very hard to figure out actual damages so the law allows an alternative. If you elect statutory damages the damages range from $750 to $30000 per work infringed. The amount is determined by the judge or jury.
They can be decreased to as low as $200 if the infringer "was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright".
They can be increase up to $150000 if the infringement is found to be willful. This is the closest thing copyright as to triple damages.
The way registration affects all of this is:
• You have to register before filing a copyright lawsuit. There are some exceptions such as when a foreign copyright owner wants to sue over a work not published in the US but infringed in the US, due to Berne Convention requirements but we can ignore those here.
• You can only collect statutory damages for infringement that commences after registration (unless the registration is within 3 months of first publication).
• You can collect actual damages and infringer profits from infringement before registration.