Can I print my own version of “Romeo and Juliet” and sell it? Can I rewrite “Little Women” as porn and sell it?
I know those corporate scum at Arkham House have somehow managed to keep people from making good use of the Cthulhu Mythos, are there other such tricks lurking out there?
You have to be careful about printing your own copies of DVDs to sell. For example, you will often see cheap DVDs titled “The Best of Dick Van Dyke Show.” But they have a different theme. Because while the episode is in public domain, not all the music is.
That is one of the main reasons for example “WKRP in Cincinnati” rarely clears in re-runs because they can’t clear the music. So they’d have to replace it with clared music to re-run it.
If the work is truly in the public domain, you can do whatever you like with it. As to whether something is, this site gives guidelines.
As far as Arkham house is concerned, that’s their right: all of the Cthulhu Mythos stories were published after 1923 and aren’t PD. They’re preventing the theft and devaluation of a valuable property, and if the thieves don’t like that, I’m not particularly upset.
I don’t for one minute believe that the episodes are in the public domain. Why would they be? People in Hollywood don’t know about copyright?
Music clearances are a totally different matter and have to do with the contractual payment of licensing rights, not copyrights.
The short version of print-based copyright is that you can assume that any book or article printed before 1923 is in the public domain. For anything more recent, you’d need to do a formal Library of Congress copyright search to determine whether the proper renewal of copyright was done.
Other media can be a bit trickier, with odd exceptions, but as a rule of thumb assume the same pre-1923 date for anything as an absolute. More recent works may or may not be in the public domain.
Just because some thieves on eBay claim that the programs they sell are in the public domain doesn’t make it true. Can you provide a real cite for your Dick van Dyke claim?
Oh you mean like that thief Mike Mignola?
Remember that you can’t use someone else’s version to copy from, since that is probably copyrighted by them. Specifically the preface, editors notes, and other parts they added/corrected in Shakespeares text belong to them.
So you might have to be able to prove that you didn’t copy from any of those versions, your was directly from the original Shakespeare Folios. (There are 6 copies still existing, I think, and all are in restricted museum libraries.)
I can’t find a cite for the Dick van Dyke episodes actually being public domain, but it’s not unheard of for a recently produced work to fall into the public domain. Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain because it was originally distributed without a copyright notice, which was at the time a requirement to maintain a copyright. Other works have probably fallen into the public domain because of failure to renew the copyright (back when you had to do that). The fact that you can find a cheap DVD of a few episodes on Amazon.com suggests that these are legitimately in the public domain.
Evil Captor, you’re probably ok on Romeo and Women, but bear in mind that even if something is in the public domain, you can’t necessarily make your own stories using the characters without violating a trademark. Even if Mickey Mouse somehow lapsed into the public domain, you still couldn’t make new Mickey cartoons, since Disney has a trademark. You could only reproduce the cartoons in the public domain. Since trademarks last indefinitely as long as they are defended, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see an unsanctioned interpretation of any currently valuable trademarked characters.
A quick search for “Romeo Juliet public domain” produced several webpages with the full text of the play in the public domain. You could just copy one of them.
Any edition of Shakespeare published before 1923 would also be in the public domain.
Not all of the “Dick Van Dyke Show” is in public domain. Just some episodes. Look for the dollar DVDs that sell at Wal-Mart. They say “Best of Dick Van Dyke Show” give you six episodes from the second season. But when you look they are hardly the “best” episodes. Those remain copywrited.
“Ozzie and Harriett,” “Andy Griffith,” and “The Lucy Show,” also have some episodes, but not all in public domain
Here is a site with a nice list of public domain TV
http://www.buyoutfootage.com/pages/subtops/pd_classic_tv.html
Yeah, there’s lots of media up through the 50’s and 60’s that’s in the PD either because they forget to C notice OR because the rightsholders never thought it’d have archival value, so they either didn’t bother to register it or didn’t bother to renew it for a second term of C after the first 28 year-term granted to works copyrighted before 1977.
Under the Copyright Act of 1909, superceded by the Copyright Act of 1976, you got a 28 year term and then could renew for a second 28 year term. Due to extensions passed by later Congresses, even material that’s much older than 54 years is still under C, but for works made b/w 1909 and 1976 the two-term structure still prevails; but with terms just longer than originally anticipated.
Most anything in those cheapy DVD’s at Wal-Mart are going to be legit in the PD becaue it’s so easy for rightsholders to find and sue the manufacturer if they weren’t.
–Cliffy
OK, thanks, I am thinking of a book printed before 1923 in fact.
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Actually, there are more than six copies. Rather a lot more, in fact. The latest estimate is that there are 228 of them (although counting what is meant by a ‘copy’ is more difficult than you might think). And you can even buy one if you want to.
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I’m unfamilar with the name or the case, but if he’s using copyrighted works (including derivative copyrights), then yes, he’s a thief. He has stolen from the legitimate owners of those rights.
No, you can take any of Shakespeare’s text freely. The only thing copyrighted is the additional material. That’s why you see that nearly all commercial reprints of PD works have a critical essay as part of the package: they essay can be copyrighted, and the work can have “Essay copyright 2006” at the front to fool people into believing the entire work is copyrighted.
There is, of course, one exception, where Shakespeare’s words are under copyright: The Marovitz Hamlet, where the play’s dialog was switched around to give it an different meaning. It’s all Hamlet, just in a different order, and if you tried to perform it, you’d have a suit on your hands.
You can copy a “slavish copy” of a public domain work- say a postcard of a piece of artwork. I’d imagine a few minor text corrections would be a slavish copy.
Mike Mignola does the Hellboy comic. I would describe his flights of gooey fancy as Lovecraftian, heavily influenced by the Cthulhu mythos, but not explicitly derivative. As far as I remember, he doesn’t use Lovecraft’s actual names for anything: Innsmouth, Yog-Sothoth, Unknown Kadath, etc. The beasties he draws, however, are decomposed, tentacled, many-eyed, and otherwise recognizable as being in the Lovecraft vein. From what I recall, he’s half a hair on the right side of the line.
The Copyright Act of 1976 went into effect on January 1, 1978.
Works published between January 1, 1964 and January 1, 1978 automatically get a renewal for a second copyright term. That’s why the number of public domain works drops off dramatically after 1963.
Exactly. He’s a creative artist who would LIKE to use bits of the Cthulhu Mythos in his stories, much as Lovecraft wished. But he can’t because scummy greedheads like Derleth are trying to control access to the Cthulhu Mythos for their own profit. I wouldn’t be nearly so bothered by copyright if it didn’t lead to shit like this so often. The weird thing is that some folks apparently love this sort of thing. You’d think only those who benefit directly from the greed would support it.
The purpose of copyright law is to allow the rightful owner of the work to “control access” to it for his “own profit.” It seems to me that the problem with the Cthulhu works is that there is a dispute regarding who the rightful owner is. It seems it might even be the case that those who currently control the works obtained control over them by some underhanded means (the Wiki article is rather vague on this point). In any case, that is not the fault of the copyright system. No matter what system is set up, there will be some cases in which someone commits fraud.
However, this should not be a problem for the Hellboy stories. Writers are free to come up with original material. An author shouldn’t have to rely on reusing works that someone else created in order to tell a story.
As for this:
Wishing isn’t enough. If you want your creations to be in the public domain, then you have to do something about it. Notably, it seems, Lovecraft didn’t take sufficient care to ensure that his works would be handled properly by the right people.