[HN Gopher] Party Like It's 1925 on Public Domain Day (Gatsby an...
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Party Like It's 1925 on Public Domain Day (Gatsby and Dalloway Are
In)
Author : apollinaire
Score : 88 points
Date : 2021-01-09 04:38 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| mvellandi wrote:
| I made http://www.great-gatsby.com last week as a web-book
| project to practice responsive design.
|
| Since ebooks are generally superior with bookmarks and more
| features, I tried to compensate by at least by making the chapter
| navigation, text sizes, and line spacing at multiple screen sizes
| enjoyable. I used Tailwind CSS and Alpine JS for static pages
| which became a little wonky at times, but I'm okay with it.
| Arubis wrote:
| A little tangential, but are there any ongoing efforts to reduce
| the incredibly long term of copyright that have a shot in hell of
| success? I'm pleased that the periodic re-extensions that defined
| my youth have stopped, but would be saddened of that we're the
| end of the story.
|
| Usually it takes a Big Visible Event to nudge something like that
| into happening, and I can't picture what that'd be. Failure of
| imagination, perhaps.
| acabal wrote:
| I'm not sure if there's an effort to _shorten_ copyright
| (unfortunately), but the fact that things are starting to enter
| the public domain again is already a big win for culture.
|
| I imagine companies like Disney would lobby pretty hard against
| shortening copyright. A possible middle ground would be to
| return to the regime where copyright had to be registered and
| renewed regularly, with a cost to doing so.
| pavlov wrote:
| The cost should be exponential. First 20 years free. Ten
| years more costs $10,000. Another ten $20,000. Etc.
|
| Under this model, it would cost about $2.5M to maintain a
| copyright for a full century. If a work still remains
| valuable, you're looking at spending millions annually on
| renewals, with the cost doubling every decade. It's an
| incentive to innovate rather than collect royalties on the
| old stuff forever.
| Thorentis wrote:
| Such a system only benefits the exact people and companies
| which we _don 't_ want abusing the copyright system. Why
| would Disney bother paying their lawyers millions of
| dollars to lobby for another extension when they can pay a
| small (comparative to royalties they receive) fee to
| automatically have it extended?
| dstick wrote:
| Agreed, even if you add two 0's to that number, it would
| still benefit Disney (et al), and skew the system
| negatively for smaller content creators.
| pavlov wrote:
| Small content creators benefit almost nothing from
| content >20 years old anyway, rare exceptions
| notwithstanding. Having a real tax on the most valuable
| IP would be a net benefit.
| cma wrote:
| You could set it up so the fee funds small grants for
| artists.
| pavlov wrote:
| The difference is that the renewal fee is a real tax on
| IP, whereas Disney paying lawyers mostly benefits
| lawyers.
|
| I don't mind if Disney still owns "Snow White" a century
| from now, if they're paying a $100M tax to do so.
|
| Such a fee on _each_ copyrighted work is a huge burden
| even for a large corporation. They'd choose carefully
| what they want to retain.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| This scheme would seem to be of most benefit to the rich
| and successful, or bigger companies, while smaller
| companies or mid-level authors would be screwed over.
| especially ones who had a hit late in their career and
| could stand to profit off of their earlier works but didn't
| waste the money to keep them in copyright, not having had
| the money to waste.
| Arubis wrote:
| I've seen this and similarly structured ideas floated since
| the Slashdot days, and they resonate with me--but there's
| never a corresponding path to actually get buy-in from
| legislators. Feels similar to, but distinct from, a tragedy
| of the commons situation--the commons would benefit from
| supporting something like this, but there's no organizing
| to make it happen and insufficient individual incentive to
| do it on behalf of the general public.
| anonunivgrad wrote:
| Beyond the tragedy of the commons w/r/t the general
| public, the other problem (or maybe a specific aspect of
| the same problem) is that the commercial beneficiaries of
| shorter copyright are companies and projects that don't
| exist yet. It's hard for hypothetical future businesses
| to lobby against existing current businesses.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| Legal reforms are unlikely, but there have been some voluntary
| efforts.
|
| Creative Commons used to have a "Founders' Copyright" [0]
| program that emulates the original U.S Copyright system. You
| enter a contract and delegate your copyright to CC, CC adds
| your work to a maintained list. After 14 years (or 28 years if
| renewed), CC grants permissions to allow unrestricted uses of
| your work by others. Tim O'Reilly was a prominent supporter, a
| few O'Reilly books were supposed to be published under this
| program [1]. Unfortunately, this program is no longer active.
| I'm not sure why, but I guess it was due to maintenance cost.
|
| The new experimental Copyleft Next License [2] also includes a
| Sunset Clause. It's a strong copyleft license, but 20 years
| after the initial publication of a work, the copyleft
| requirements no longer apply, it automatically degenerates to a
| MIT-style license. I like the idea - If nobody cares about a
| long-obsolete version of a copylefted program, you may as well
| to maximize its remaining value by allowing unlimited uses (as
| long as new code is still being written, the copyleft of the
| current version remains in effect). Perhaps not good for all
| programs, but suitable for many.
|
| AFAIK, a general license suitable for all works doesn't exist
| yet. But it should be easy to write one, for example...
|
| > Copyright (C) 2021 segfaultbuserr. All rights reserved. An
| irrevocable License is granted hereby: 20 years after the
| initial publication of this Work, you may reuse the Work in
| accordance to the conditions of CC-0 in Appendix. Meanwhile,
| you may not use, distribute or modify the Work without the
| explicit permission from the author.
|
| > Appendix: [CC-0 text]
|
| The proprietary license used before expiration can also be
| replaced with any other licenses.
|
| [0] https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Founders_Copyright
|
| [1] It's also unclear whether anything has ever been actually
| published under Founders' Copyright by O'Reilly. The website
| says, "we're applying to hundreds of out-of-print and current
| titles, pending author approval." But did any author approve
| it?
|
| [2] https://github.com/copyleft-next/copyleft-next
| acabal wrote:
| The Great Gatsby is up for free on Standard Ebooks:
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/f-scott-fitzgerald/the-gre...
|
| There's also the great 1925 WWI novel by Ford Madox Ford called
| No More Parades: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ford-madox-
| ford/no-more-pa...
|
| (The 3rd part of the series becomes US-PD in 2022.)
| mvellandi wrote:
| I figured y'all would post it right away, and I linked to the
| standard ebook from my web-book page at http://great-gatsby.com
| Big fan of your group's work!
| tempest_ wrote:
| So does Steamboat Willie enter the public domain in 3 years?
| verisimilitude wrote:
| I was hoping that would come up! No, probably:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#S...
| toyg wrote:
| I think this source, linked from that wikipedia page, is
| actually more directly enlightening:
| http://copyright.nova.edu/mickey-public-domain/
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(page generated 2021-01-09 23:00 UTC)