There is a reason to be cheerful this morning, it is Public Domain Day, which is the day when a new bunch of hitherto copyrighted works comes out of copyright and enters the US public domain. For readers who don't live in the US, there is a reason to celebrate because the copyright terms in the US are longer than in other parts of the world. There is a story about the power of political lobbying in a liberal democracy.
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is one of the works liberated for the delight of Americans this morning. According to the director of Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Congress hit a 20-year pause button before these could enter the public domain.
The 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act was the mechanism by which this legal steal was implemented. In passing it, American legislators were doing the same thing they've been doing for a long time. Congress enacted the first copyright law in 1790 and gave authors 14 years of protection. In 1976, Congress extended the term by 19 years and in 1998 it was 75 years. According to Lawrence Lessig, in the 20 years after the Sonny Bono Act, there will be zero copyrights in the public domain.
To figure out how this happened, you don't need to be a detective. It's possible to see campaign contributions to US legislators in the relevant years. There was also the fear that Mickey Mouse would make his escape public. Americans have had to wait two decades to be able to reuse works that Europeans have easy access to.
Today's US copyright on the last two stories in The Case-Book of SherlockHolmes is about to expire, so it's relevant to the current situation. Stephen Joyce, James Joyce's grandson, has been an enforcer of intellectual property rights for a long time.
Authors and inventors need protection against being ripped off
Even if the books themselves had escaped to the public domain, the estate claimed that the characters ofHolmes and Dr. This was challenged by a well known lawyer and scholar. The case went through a number of American courts before it ended up in the hands of Judge Richard Posner of the 7th circuit.
Posner ruled that the business strategy of the Doyle estate is to charge a modest licence fee for which there is no legal basis, in the hope that the writer or publisher will pay it. The estate needs to change its business model because he was a private attorney general.
Intellectual property is not evil but that aspects of it have been monopolised and weaponised by corporate interests and that legislators have been supine in the face of their lobbying. Protection against being ripped off is needed by authors and inventors. The patent system does a good job of rewarding clever people for their ingenuity. If a patent only lasts for 20 years, why should a copyrighted work last for 70 years? To know that the American republic's founding fathers got that one right, you have to ask. Happy New Year!
Jack Shafer wrote a column titled "Time to Close Down the Elon Musk Circus", which is a great example of why journalists shouldn't be obsessed with Musk and social media.
Walter Kirn wrote a post on the Free Press about the poor quality of modern products.
A paper on the current obsession of the tech industry is available at arXiv.org.
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