Batman-Doom That Came To Gotham, contains an entity “He Who Waits At The Gate, Iog Sotha!”. For those who don’t know, Yog-Sothoth is titled “He who is the gate, and the guardian of the gate, and the key to the gate.”
Reality[ Chuck More than a few of HPL’s works were copyright pre 1923. There is further question as to whether August Derleth acquired copyright or trademark to HPL’s works and the distinctive names, likenesses, and nonEuclidean horrors therein legally. It’s more of a case of Derleth claiming rights, and nobody bothering to dispute it for decades.
Just for the record, Evil Captor was referring to August Derleth, a friend of Lovecraft’s (and an author in his own right), who after Lovecraft’s death, Derleth set up his own publishing house, Arkham House, to collect and publish Lovecraft’s work. Arkham House is fairly aggressive about protecting copyright on Lovecraft’s work and preventing unlicensed derivative work.
Despite having a poster named Derleth I assumed that Evil Captor was referring to the actual August Derleth. August was HPL’s friend, could not match the skill found in a Cthulu thread here, and bought, or claimed legal ownership of, all of HPL’s copyrights and trademarks after Lovecraft’s death. One one hand, Derleth is the single person responsible for Lovecraft being remembered. OTOH, he was a litigous and greedy bastard with questionable legal standing. Today Arkham House and Chaosium claim trademark through Derleth (most of HPL’s copyrights have lapsed), both companies have finally begun to turn a blind three-lobed-burning eye to new Mythos works distributed for free, but remain ready to sue anybody infringing on their (questionable) trademarks.
BTW
The following names may come up, and do not refer to SDMB posters
It means a corporation has not yet twisted the arm of the government to extend the lease on its cash cow. I’ll be waiting till Disney feels like it needs to hold on to Mickey Mouse for another millenium or two.
Fucking congress.
Ugh, you corporate ass-licker. They are protecting their fudal rights. That’s like saying a lord is protecting his valuable property from theft and devaluation. He shouldn’t be given it in the first place. Whose good, besides his own, is his ownership serving? Just because it’s in the law, doesn’t mean it’s right. Intellectual property never made it into the Bible, and it pisses me off when people feel like it did.
If you ever quote me, or mention my ideas to another, or repeat my words in your head, in regard to anything i’ve ever posted here, I’m going to sue your dispicable thieving ass, you jackass. Because you are hurting my ability to extract money from all this.
Actually, shit, I just realized that by posting here i’m relinquishing all rights to the straight dope. Damn you, Cecil, you sneaky bastard! I can’t even discuss things on a public forum without giving someone the right so sue me for repeating my own words. This is fucking ridiculous.
Alright, whatever, I know this isn’t Great Debates.
Since this is a forum for dispelling ignorance, may I dispel a myth about the copyright extension. The European Union was the first to extend copyright terms to 95 years. For copyright holders in the United States to receive equal protection of their works in those countries, the U.S. copyright law had to match. Virtually every major copyright holder in the U.S., from software publishers to motion picture studios to book publishers to music publishers, supported the copyright extension. To say the extension was done because of Disney is to trivialize the real issues involved.
Alright, alright, i’m mostly wrong. However it’s not true that I retain all my rights. Try reading the disclaimer on the bottom of every page. I’m not even sure what it means. I can certainly put up a webpage with my material, but how does that apply to third-party publishers? And when they say “no material…may be reposted” how does that apply to quotes? And certainly to quotes of full posts? Or, better yet, the google cache or waybackmachine?
And as for fair use… I had an argument about this on another thread. If I copy an article from, say, the locked area of the economist, for clearly non-commercial and scholarly purposes. And it does not impact the economist’s bottom line. Is that fair use? The letter of the law sure makes it seem that way, but like that hardly matters.
Anyway, I went a little too far but damn does it piss me off when people call copyright violators thieves and feel that that’s that. It’s like calling slave liberators thieves. Maybe what they do is right, maybe it’s wrong. Economics get affected one way or another. Other principles get affected too. Think about the issue, don’t just assume that what’s the law is automatically what’s right. There are no immutable principles, and laws get created based on utilitarianism (ie it’s about what ends up in sum benefiting the common good, not just the authors).
In short, physical property that you make belongs to you mostly because if someone else takes it you’ll be left with no benefit from it at all (and then you won’t try making it and everyone will be left with nothing). Copyrights also have reason to exist because in many cases if people can take your ideas freely you’d have no reason to create them.
However, in MANY other cases it is NOT true. Moreover, we have the power to create compensation schemes specifically to address this point. Thus, intellectual property is by far not the same thing as physical property. Moreover, when the rights holder has earned more than enough money for himself to get past that initial issue, the justification for intellectual property really subsides. Taking music that “belongs” to record companies doesn’t really hurt them, therefore it’s not as bad as other forms of “stealing” (but I think there are few who think it really is).
And as for people who like to think in absolutes… ah, hell, they’re usually too stupid to argue with.
(Someone perceptive might point out that by the above argument stealing from the rich is not as bad as stealing the same thing from the poor. That is precisely true. It isn’t, and stop thinking in self-righteous absolutes.)
oh, btw, that doesn’t necessarily mean that our law ought make a distinction between stealing from the rich and the poor… but that is only because trying to make such a distinction just creates too many questions and headaches that it is impractical. However, we do make them pay higher taxes, after all. Shifting the burden of theft onto the rich will also be a form of tax and might possibly be justifiable. (In theory, at least.) This is all why we have to think about questions with a clear and open mind, and not fall back on absolutist labels.
Your questions are unclear. Third-party publishers, like if you get someone else to publish a book you put some posts in, or something else? “How does it apply to quotes” where, and posted by whom and for what purpose? Google, as far as I’m aware, does not cache the SDMB. The Wayback Machine seems to be down for the moment.
The letter of the law hardly matters…why? This is GQ, for pete’s sake, and the question has a legal, factual answer. As you’ve stated, this isn’t GD.
Copyright violators are thieves, according to the law. Slave liberators were thieves (or some type of criminal, anyway), according to the law. Great Debates is the place to bellow, “That shouldn’t be the law!” General Questions is where we answer questions based on facts to the best of our ability.
I don’t know about anyone else, but as someone trained as a lawyer, as someone specializing in intellectual property law, and as someone who spends hours on the clock and off the clock as a journalist and a writer, both protection of copyrights and protection of free speech under the fair use doctrine are both very important to me and both things I depend on every day.
Of course there are people who will abuse the system, and the principle complaint with regard to the Cthulhu works seems to be the allegation that August Derleth and his successors illegitimately obtained control over the works. That certainly might be the case, but you can’t have a legal system in which you refuse to protect some works because you suspect that ownership has been obtained wrongly. You have to wait for the system to decide once and for all who the rightful owner is. In some complicated cases, this might take years or decades, but those cases are the exception. However, those cases will also be the most notorious. They might colour an observer’s views about copyright law in general to an unjustified extent.
The disclaimer is a very straightforward assignment of licensing rights, similar to every publishing contract. You have an automatic copyright over your words from the moment you write them. You can freely use, quote, repost, and disseminate your words at any time. You may not do so without anyone else’s words, however, without their explicit permission.
You have assigned a license to the Reader to be able to use your words without further payment. They may use them in a book of columns or in advertising for the site or in other ways. They have not restricted your rights to use your words in any other way.
Third parties - those who are not posters or the Reader - cannot use any posts without explicit permission., except for fair use snippets.
If posters follow the rules to quote no more than fair use amounts of outside material, then fair use still applies. Quotes of full posts are handled by the rights licensed above. The Google cache or waybackmachine or other archive appears to be covered by fair use law. The logic appears to my non-lawyer understanding to be similar to that of microfiche copying of entire pages of magazines for archiving purposes. As long as the whole original is archived, rather than pieces, it is legitimate.
As has been pointed out a thousand times in copyright threads, whether a copy makes an immediate economic impact or whether you charge or don’t charge for it is irrelevant to the law. You cannot copy a whole article, period. That is the letter and the intent of the law. It is the very essence of the copyright law. It matters a great deal. It is everything.
Argue this in GD, but given your totally inadequate understanding of any of the issues involved, don’t be surprised if others fail to be impressed by your thoughts.
