If you're excited that things are entering the #PublicDomain — which you should be! — perhaps it's worth considering reforming copyright.
In many places currently it's 70 years after the death of the author, or longer. This is insanity.
An important piece of culture made by a young author could be locked behind copyright (with rights usually held by publishers, not authors themselves anyway) for over a *century*.
That's how you get #Disney to own almost everything.
Reform #copyright!
It's infuriating. How much art have we lost *because* it was not allowed to be preserved for posterity due to corporate copyright gobblers.
even with fairly recent TV programmes made in 90s and 00s aimed at youth audiences in Europe, particularly those featuring pop music any archives are often deliberately wiped (or not even kept in the first place) despite tech being able to preserve them due to the risk of copyright lawsuits. Worse still, a lot of producers of 90s rave music sold out to major labels (at least here in UK) so stuff constantly disappears from YouTube etc..
@MachineGrrrl I wondered why I saw very little archive stuff from MTV Europe. Was the archive that burned in UK, PL or USA when it happened? I've only heard about archive stores in USA burning, but I read a lot of "999/112 news from UK/Europe and don't recall any news reports about any incidents in UK/Europe (but they could I guess just have been reported as a "normal" fire in business premises)
> rights made by those who donate
this truth, that restrictions established through agreements even *exist*, often gets smothered entirely by copyright discourse
copyright law, for all its problems, can be seen as an attempt to harmonize an even messier and often more restrictive thicket of disparate private practices.
It's like people ignore entirely the very existence of contract law.
Great page here about works entering the public domain - and including some extra analysis about copyright generally:
* an analysis about attempts to keep Sherlock Holmes locked down that should (🤞) be guide for Disney
* section on saving silent films and the inadvertent destruction due to copyright
* the effects of copyright harmonisation due to trade deals between countries.
Tweet By Jennifer Jenkins, Director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all! On January 1, 2023, copyrighted works from 1927 will enter the US public domain. 1 They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. These include Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and the final Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, the German science-fiction film Metropolis and Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller, compositions by Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and a novelty song about ice cream.
@Bafty fantastic resource, thank you!
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
Machine Grrrl
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
Spark Purcell (they/them)
dzho
Bafty