Tin Pan Alley? Just how old are you?
~Max
Not old - just fucking educated.
A fair trade-off could be reached between giving people some degree of exclusive usage vs the public being able to do exactly what they want with it.
I think that a period of exclusivity should correspond with a reasonable “working life”. 30 years after the point of creation sounds about right. Then it becomes public domain and anyone can access and use. That doesn’t prevent anyone having a decent crack at making a good living out of it but allows further creative use of ideas and images, music and art after that point.
If you’ve failed to make your money from it in that period of time then that suggests it is probably begging for someone else to pick it up and enhance it anyway.
So yes, that would mean anyone could record and profit from music and art created before 1990. Anyone could re-record Sgt. Pepper and profit from it if they did a good job and the public were willing to part with their cash for it. Someone could re-shoot “Unforgiven” (one of my favourite films) shot-for-shot, word for word and scene for scene if they so choose.
I’d foresee very little damage to creativity from such a system. People are always going to want the excitement of the new as well as the comfort of the familiar.
All the benefits you listed could be achieved by releasing the restriction on derivative works. I say let the copyright holders keep the rights to their work itself for life. That way sleeper hits are still a thing.
What I mean is, to take Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as an example, the rights holder would keep the exclusive right to make copies of the actual '66-'67 recordings by the Beatles for seventy years or whatever it is now. But after thirty years, so in '97, the general public is free to record and sell covers or derivatives without paying for a license.
~Max
Yes, that is sort of the general gist of what I was trying to suggest. You are probably being much more legally precise than I am.
Under U.S. law today, there are a lot of registrations–and, indeed, a lot of litigation–regarding not cloth, but, rather textile designs. This happens under the principle of applied art, or art applied to a useful item.
Generally speaking, copyright protection doesn’t extend to useful items (those are the domain of patent protection), in particular, clothing. However, if a creative and original work of expression is “applied to” a useful item, like, say, a T-shirt, then it can separately be protected under copyright law. The key concept is “conceptual severability.” If the claimed expression can be conceived as something separate from the useful article, then it might be protected as a work of expression.
Textile designers have taken advantage of this avenue and very frequently register textile designs. It’s very, very common for textile manufacturers to sue “knockoff” textile houses and clothing retailers for using knockoff textile designs. As I said, this is a huge area of copyright litigation.
There was a Supreme Court case a couple of years ago involving designs for cheerleading uniforms. That market is dominated by a particular producer (Varsity Brands), and a competitor (Star Athletica) started putting out competing uniforms (presumably less expensive). There was some degree of outrage, because the designs being claimed could be described as simple geometric shapes and common themes like stripes, which are ordinarily not protectable.
Queen Elizabeth I and King James I regularly handed out monopolies on common resources goods like cloth, salt, starch, leather, etc. This was done by letters patent. It caused a lot of unrest, leading to the Statute of Monopolies in 1624.
~Max
You are absolutely correct. Between 1909 and 1976 it was 28 + 28. I just got it wrong.
My gripe about copyright is that in order to get my papers published I have to transfer the copyright to the publisher (with no quid pro quo) and cannot put them on my web site.
That sounds like a problem with your particular publisher, not a problem with copyright law. There are some academic journals that use an open-access policy, like PLOS ONE. Even journals like Nature will soon let you publish under a gold OA license like CC BY, if you’re willing to shell out the extra money (somewhere around $11,000).
~Max
I know that the IEEE allows preprints to remain on sites like ArXiv and allows authors to provide copies on their website if the files are clearly marked. Here’s the IEEE Author FAQ on posting their papers:
The IEEE recognizes the need for authors to share and develop their work with colleagues and peers. Permitting authors to post the accepted version of their articles allows this collaborative effort while preserving the value of IEEE’s electronic database…
Yep.
Copyright law gives the rights to the author in the first instance. It’s up to you to exercise those rights to your satisfaction. If one publishing company doesn’t offer you a deal you like (right to reprint, for example), you look for a publisher who will give you what you want.
At the publication I worked for, we routinely gave outside authors a license as part of their authorship contract to post their works on their own websites and to get free copies for conferences or seminars or classes or whatever.
Well, I’ve ignored the copyright issues and posted them anyway. But a colleague of mine got a stiff lawyer’s letter from a publisher for doing that.
Nearly everything I’ve published in the past 25 years has been with one free online journal that asks for only a one-time licence to publish. I am the TeX-editor for the journal, but have not used that to influence publication.
I don’t think this was the context. The law in question was the Copyright Act of 1710 (also known as the Statute of Anne) and its subsequent additions. The original law applied to books. It was later expanded to cover things like plays, works of music, engravings, and sculptures. So it appears that the things it protected were creative works rather than commodities like salt, starch, or leather.
I’m not sure I understand the issue here. If I wrote a novel, for example, and then sold it to a publisher, I’m pretty sure the publisher would not want me putting my novel up on a website. They are, after all, trying to make money by selling my novel and me giving it away for free is going to cut into their sales. So isn’t exclusivity a standard part of any contract an author signs with a publisher?
What happens in situations where a work has two or more creators, who jointly hold the rights. Let’s say my friend and I write a novel together and it’s a big hit. A producer approaches us and wants to buy the movie rights. I want to sell them but my friend is an pure-hearted artist who doesn’t want to see his creative work sullied by Hollywood.
What’s the basic principal at work? Does the use of a jointly produced creative work require the unanimous consent of all of the co-creators or just the consent of one creator? What happens if one of the authors dies a year later and the other lives for another fifty years? When does the work go into public domain? Would there be a period when the early dying author’s copyright expired and the surviving author became the sole copyright owner?
Each owner has the right to sell es own rights, but the other owner’s rights are not affected. So, the publisher would have to get both of you to sign in order to get exclusive rights. This kind of thing makes the movie business very complicated and it’s why a lot of projects never make it to production.
It’s a lot easier with music, because music publishers and record companies generally aren’t looking for exclusive rights. They just need one of the owners to sign on the dotted line.
That’s unlikely. What would usually happen is the that the early dying author’s heirs sell the exclusive rights to the same producer.
Before the Statute of Anne, the Stationers’ Company held a similar monopoly on the right to copy books. If that’s not the context, I don’t know what is. You can’t literally copy cloth.
~Max
The conference I’m involved with is an IEEE conference. I’ve submitted the papers to the IEEE database for many years, but there has never been a problem with our putting the papers on a proceedings site or distributing the proceedings in paper or CD formats. Each paper has the IEEE copyright notice, however. And I know many professors who post their papers on their websites and have never heard of a problem.