<
https://walledculture.org/research-shows-that-when-given-the-choice-most-authors-dont-want-excessively-long-copyright-terms/>
"Last week
Walled Culture mentioned the problem of orphan works. These are
creations, typically books, that are still covered by copyright, but
unavailable because the original publisher or distributor has gone out of
business, or simply isn’t interested in keeping them in circulation. The
problem is that without any obvious point of contact, it’s not possible to ask
permission to re-publish or re-use it in some way.
It turns out that there is another serious issue, related to that of orphan
works. It has been revealed by the New York Public Library, drawing on work
carried out as a collaboration between the Internet Archive and the US
Copyright Office. According to a report on the
Vice Web site:
the New York Public Library (NYPL) has been reviewing the U.S. Copyright
Office’s official registration and renewals records for creative works whose
copyrights haven’t been renewed, and have thus been overlooked as part of
the public domain.
The books in question were published between 1923 and 1964, before changes
to U.S. copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew
their copyrights. According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and
director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books
published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights
holders opted not to renew their copyrights.
Since most people today will naturally assume that a book published between
1923 and 1964 is still in copyright, it is unlikely anyone has ever tried to
re-publish or re-use material from this period. But this new research shows
that the majority of these works are, in fact, already in the public domain,
and therefore freely available for anyone to use as they wish.
That’s a good demonstration of how the dead hand of copyright stifles fresh
creativity from today’s writers, artists, musicians and film-makers. They might
have drawn on all these works as a stimulus for their own creativity, but held
back because they have been brainwashed by the copyright industry into thinking
that everything is in copyright for inordinate lengths of time. As a result,
huge numbers of books that are freely available according to the law remain
locked up with a kind of phantom copyright that exists only in people’s minds,
infected as they are with copyright maximalist propaganda."
Via Kevin O'Brien, "It is all about the giant media corporations making more
money. But they always trot out the artists as an excuse."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
