US Is Left Waiting For Godot On Public Domain Day: Once Again, Absolutely Nothing Enters The Public Domain This Year

from the what-public-domain dept

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Every January 1st is supposed to be "Public Domain Day," in which all works published in a certain year move into the public domain. And while some parts of the world get to celebrate Public Domain Day this year with the freeing of works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Klee, Leon Trotsky, Walter Benjamin and others, here in the US, we come up empty yet again . Not a single work entered the public domain in the US on January 1st, thanks (yet again) to constant copyright extensions, which include retroactive extensions. Retroactive extensions, of course, make absolutely no sense. If the point of copyright is to act as incentive for the creation of new works, that incentive obviouslyin getting those works created. To then retroactively extend the copyright is to, quite blatantly, go back on the deal, and take away the rights of the public with no recourse or compensation.And, boy oh boy, were there a lot of wonderful works that would have and should have entered the public domain this past week, if we followed the laws as they existed when those works were created. Headlining the group, what could be more fitting than the famous play, which is all about waiting for someone or something that never comes.Other works of interest?by William Golding,by Aldous Huxley andby Dr. Seuss. The first two volumes oftrilogy by Tolkien would be free to build upon. A bunch of movies would have moved into the public domain as well, including, Alfred Hitchcock's versions ofand, Kurasawa's amazingand Disney's. Chances are that many of us will not live to see any of those worksenter the public domain, despite the promise that was given to us by the US government that they would all enter the public domain by now.Copyright defenders love to claim that infringement is a form of "theft." Yet, they never seem troubled by the idea that copyright extensions like this have clearly taken away the public's clearly stated rights to make use of these works under the deal that was made with those content creators at the time those works were officially published. It seems to me that taking away such rights from the public is significantly more troubling than someone downloading a song they never would have paid for in the first place.

Filed Under: public domain