A fight to protect the dignity of Michelangelo’s David raises questions about freedom of expression; AP, March 28, 2024

Colleen Barry, AP; A fight to protect the dignity of Michelangelo’s David raises questions about freedom of expression

"The decisions challenge a widely held practice that intellectual property rights are protected for a specified period before entering the public domain — the artist’s lifetime plus 70 years, according to the Berne Convention signed by more than 180 countries including Italy.

More broadly, the decisions raise the question of whether institutions should be the arbiters of taste, and to what extent freedom of expression is being limited...

Court cases have debated whether Italy’s law violates a 2019 European Union directive stating that any artwork no longer protected by copyright falls into the public domain, meaning that “everybody should be free to make, use and share copies of that work.”

The EU Commission has not addressed the issue, but a spokesman told the AP that it is currently checking “conformity of the national laws implementing the copyright directive” and would look at whether Italy’s cultural heritage code interferes with its application."

Lifecycle of Copyright: 1928 Works in the Public Domain; Library of Congress Blogs: Copyright Creativity at Work, January 8, 2024

 Alison Hall , Library of Congress Blogs: Copyright Creativity at Work; Lifecycle of Copyright: 1928 Works in the Public Domain

"This blog also includes contributions from Jessica Chinnadurai, attorney-advisor, and Rafael Franco, writer-editor intern in the Copyright Office.

Over the last several years, we have witnessed a new class of creative works entering the public domain in the United States each January 1. This year, a variety of works published in 1928, ranging from motion pictures to music to books, joined others in the public domain. The public domain has important historical and cultural benefits in the lifecycle of copyright...

Below are just a few of the historical and cultural works that entered the public domain in 2024."

Court of Appeal ruling will prevent UK museums from charging reproduction fees—at last; The Art Newspaper, December 29, 2023

 Bendor Grosvenor , The Art Newspaper; Court of Appeal ruling will prevent UK museums from charging reproduction fees—at last

"A recent judgement on copyright in the Court of Appeal (20 November) heralds the end of UK museums charging fees to reproduce historic artworks. In fact, it suggests museums have been mis-selling “image licences” for over a decade. For those of us who have been campaigning on the issue for years, it is the news we’ve been waiting for.

The judgement is important because it confirms that museums do not have valid copyright in photographs of (two-dimensional) works which are themselves out of copyright. It means these photographs are in the public domain, and free to use.

Museums use copyright to restrict the circulation of images, obliging people to buy expensive licences. Any thought of scholars sharing images, or using those available on museum websites, was claimed to be a breach of copyright. Not surprisingly, most people paid up. Copyright is the glue that holds the image fee ecosystem in place.

What has now changed? Museums used to rely on the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, which placed a low threshold on how copyright was acquired; essentially, if some degree of “skill and labour” was involved in taking a photograph of a painting, then that photograph enjoyed copyright. But subsequent case law has raised the bar, as the new Appeal Court judgement makes clear."

Disney loses famous Mickey Mouse copyright in 2024, along with many others; CBS News, December 30, 2023

 CBS News ; Disney loses famous Mickey Mouse copyright in 2024, along with many others

"Copyright protections on many well-known books, films and musical compositions are set to expire in 2024. Disney's Mickey Mouse is getting a lot of attention as one famous iteration of the classic mouse is set to enter the public domain. CBS News' Jo Ling Kent has the story."

Column: Mickey Mouse and ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ enter the public domain on Jan. 1, a reminder of our crazy copyright laws; Los Angeles Times, December 26, 2023

MICHAEL HILTZIK, Los Angeles Times ; Column: Mickey Mouse and ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ enter the public domain on Jan. 1, a reminder of our crazy copyright laws

"Once a work enters the public domain, Jenkins says, “community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable access to cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. ... Anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.”

In some cases, extended copyright seems to work against the public interest. Consider the stringent control exercised by the estate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — mostly his children — over his speeches and writings such as the “I Have a Dream” speech he delivered in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963...

The irony of the term extension is that Disney, which pushed so hard to keep its own creations out of the public domain, is perhaps our most assiduous exploiter of, yes, the public domain.

The core material of some of its most successful and profitable movies comes from Hans Christian Andersen, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and Charles Perrault — often freely reimagined and rewritten by Disney artists and writers. 

Disney’s “Fantasia” mined musical history for compositions by Bach and Beethoven, but if the copyright terms Disney pushed for in 1998 were in place when the film was made in 1940, the compositions used in the film by Stravinsky, Ponchielli, Dukas, Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky would still be under copyright protection. If Disney had to pay licensing fees to those creators, the film probably could not have been made."

Mickey Mouse, Long a Symbol in Copyright Wars, to Enter Public Domain: ‘It’s Finally Happening’; Variety, December 22, 2023

Gene Maddaus, Variety; Mickey Mouse, Long a Symbol in Copyright Wars, to Enter Public Domain: ‘It’s Finally Happening’

"Every Jan. 1, Jenkins celebrates Public Domain Day, publishing a long list of works that are now free for artists to remix and reimagine. This year’s list includes Tigger, who, like Mickey Mouse, made his first appearance in 1928. Other 1928 works include “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Buster Keaton’s “The Cameraman.” 

The celebrations are relatively recent. After Congress extended copyright terms in 1998, 20 years went by when nothing entered the public domain. Works began to lose copyright protection again in 2019, and since then, it’s been open season on “The Great Gatsby,” “Rhapsody in Blue” and Winnie the Pooh...

Lessig fought the extension all the way to the Supreme Court. He argued that Congress might keep granting extensions, thwarting the constitutional mandate that copyrights be “for limited times.” He lost, 7-2, but the debate helped advance the movement for Creative Commons and an appreciation for the benefits of “remix culture.”

“That movement awoke people to the essential need for balance in this,” Lessig said. “At the beginning of this fight, it was a simple battle between the pirates and the property owners. And by the end of that period, people recognized that there’s a much wider range of interests that were involved here, like education and access to knowledge.”...

He continues to support reforms that would free up a vast body of cultural output that remains inaccessible because it lacks commercial value and its ownership cannot be determined."

Something is afoot with copyright this Public Domain Day; The Guardian, January 1, 2023

John Naughton, The Guardian; Something is afoot with copyright this Public Domain Day

"The issue highlighted by Public Domain Day is not that intellectual property is evil but that aspects of it – especially copyright – have been monopolised and weaponised by corporate interests and that legislators have been supine in the face of their lobbying. Authors and inventors need protection against being ripped off. It’s obviously important that clever people are rewarded for their creativity and the patent system does that quite well. But if a patent only lasts for 20 years, why on earth should copyright last for life plus 70 years for a novel? You only have to ask the question to realise that the founders of the American republic at least got that one right. Happy new year."

Sherlock Holmes will finally escape copyright this weekend; The Verge, December 28, 2022

ADI ROBERTSON, The Verge ; Sherlock Holmes will finally escape copyright this weekend

"Watching the copyrights on art expire still feels like a novelty. After all, the US public domain was frozen in time for 20 years, thawing only in 2019. But this weekend’s Public Domain Day will give our cultural commons a few particularly notable new works. As outlined by Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, the start of 2023 will mark the end of US copyrights on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes stories — along with the seminal science fiction movie Metropolis, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and the first full-length “talkie” film The Jazz Singer."

Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Images Into Public Domain; Smithsonian Magazine, February 25, 2020

Katherine J. Wu , Smithsonian Magazine; Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Images Into Public Domain

"For the first time in its 174-year history, the Smithsonian has released 2.8 million high-resolution two- and three-dimensional images from across its collections onto an open access online platform for patrons to peruse and download free of charge. Featuring data and material from all 19 Smithsonian museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo, the new digital depot encourages the public to not just view its contents, but use, reuse and transform them into just about anything they choose—be it a postcard, a beer koozie or a pair of bootie shorts.

And this gargantuan data dump is just the beginning. Throughout the rest of 2020, the Smithsonian will be rolling out another 200,000 or so images, with more to come as the Institution continues to digitize its collection of 155 million items and counting...

The database’s launch also marks the latest victory for a growing global effort to migrate museum collections into the public domain. Nearly 200 other institutions worldwide—including Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago—have made similar moves to digitize and liberate their masterworks in recent years. But the scale of the Smithsonian’s release is “unprecedented” in both depth and breadth, says Simon Tanner, an expert in digital cultural heritage at King’s College London.

Spanning the arts and humanities to science and engineering, the release compiles artifacts, specimens and datasets from an array of fields onto a single online platform."

It’s Copyright Week 2020: Stand Up for Copyright Laws That Actually Serve Us All; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), January 20, 2020

Katharine Trendacosta, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); It’s Copyright Week 2020: Stand Up for Copyright Laws That Actually Serve Us All

"We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, addressing what's at stake and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation...

We continue to fight for a version of copyright that does what it is supposed to. And so, every year, EFF and a number of diverse organizations participate in Copyright Week. Each year, we pick five copyright issues to highlight and advocate a set of principles of copyright law. This year’s issues are:

• Monday: Fair Use and Creativity
  Copyright policy should encourage creativity, not hamper it. Fair use makes it possible for us to comment, criticize, and rework our common culture.
• Tuesday: Copyright and Competition
  Copyright should not be used to control knowledge, creativity, or the ability to tinker with or repair your own devices. Copyright should encourage more people to share, make, or repair things, rather than concentrate that power in only a few players.
• Wednesday: Remedies
  Copyright claims should not raise the specter of huge, unpredictable judgments that discourage important uses of creative work. Copyright should have balanced remedies that also provide a real path for deterring bad-faith claims.
• Thursday: The Public Domain
  The public domain is our cultural commons and a crucial resource for innovation and access to knowledge. Copyright should strive to promote, and not diminish, a robust, accessible public domain.
• Friday: Copyright and Democracy
  Copyright must be set through a participatory, democratic, and transparent process. It should not be decided through back-room deals, secret international agreements, unaccountable bureaucracies, or unilateral attempts to apply national laws extraterritorially.

Every day this week, we’ll be sharing links to blog posts and actions on these topics at https://www.eff.org/copyrightweek and at #CopyrightWeek on Twitter.

As we said last year, and the year before that, if you too stand behind these principles, please join us by supporting them, sharing them, and telling your lawmakers you want to see copyright law reflect them."

Textbooks are pricey. So students are getting creative.; The Washington Post, January 17, 2020

Lauren Lumpkin , The Washington Post; Textbooks are pricey. So students are getting creative.

"The exact toll taken by college textbook costs is in dispute. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that even as tuition has risen, no cost of college life has increased faster than textbooks. The bureau found that book prices rose 88 percent between 2006 and 2016, and the College Board — which administers the SAT exam — reported that students budget more than $1,200 each year for textbooks and other class supplies, including technology. 

 

Student Monitor, a New Jersey research firm, has published a much lower estimate for student textbook costs — about $500 annually — and said student spending has been on the decline...

 

George Mason and hundreds of campuses throughout the country — including American University and the University of Maryland — are slowly adopting open educational resources, materials that are written by academics for the public domain and available at no cost to students and professors."

SpaceX Just Retroactively Put Copyright Restrictions on Its Photos; Motherboard, December 11, 2019

Karl Bode, Motherboard;

SpaceX Just Retroactively Put Copyright Restrictions on Its Photos

"As SpaceX began supplanting NASA in humanity’s quest to explore outer space, Motherboard pondered in 2015 what would happen to the public’s unfettered access to space imagery data (images taken by NASA are in the public domain and can be used by anyone for almost any purpose.) Thankfully, SpaceX soon after made the important decision to offer mission images under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) License, allowing them to be freely shared and even remixed by anyone. This is the least-restrictive Creative Commons license in existence and allows anyone to use the photos for almost anything (you could, for example, make and sell a photo book or calendar of SpaceX images if you wanted to.)

But a little noticed change to the SpaceX Flickr account this week stripped away the CC0 license affixed to the company’s images, replacing it with an “Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic” license. That, in turn, imposed notable and potentially confusing restrictions on how those images can be shared and re-used."

Should You Be Allowed to Copyright a Law? We're Going to Find Out; Gizmodo, December 4, 2019

Whitney Kimball, Gizmodo; Should You Be Allowed to Copyright a Law? We're Going to Find Out

"Copyright law, boring on its face, has posed various unprecedented threats to intellectual freedoms in recent internet history. It threatens to kill our links, kill our news, kill our memes, kill our precious videos of babies dancing to Prince. And yesterday, the Supreme Court considered the momentously stupid question: should you be able to paywall a law?"

Video and audio from my closing keynote at Friday's Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain; BoingBoing, January 27, 2019

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing; Video and audio from my closing keynote at Friday's Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain

"On Friday, hundreds of us gathered at the Internet Archive, at the invitation of Creative Commons, to celebrate the Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain, just weeks after the first works entered the American public domain in twenty years.
 
I had the honor of delivering the closing keynote, after a roster of astounding speakers. It was a big challenge and I was pretty nervous, but on reviewing the saved livestream, I'm pretty proud of how it turned out.

Proud enough that I've ripped the audio and posted it to my podcast feed; the video for the keynote is on the Archive and mirrored to Youtube.

The whole event's livestream is also online, and boy do I recommend it."

We Are! ... Happy Valley? Penn State applies for trademark on moniker; The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 2, 2019

Bill Schackner, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; We Are! ... Happy Valley? Penn State applies for trademark on moniker

"Josh Gerben, a trademark attorney in Washington, D.C., tweeted about the Penn State application Dec. 28, calling it a “trademark ‘land grab.’”

He said Happy Valley should remain in the public domain, since the university did not create the expression and the words are used broadly in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. He said others should be able to profit from it.

“It’s a generally accepted term for a geographic area in which the university happens to reside,” he said. “It seems out of place for the university to come in and say they should be the exclusive provider of Happy Valley clothing throughout the country. That’s exactly what they are asking to do.”"

Harvard Converts Millions of Legal Documents into Open Data; Government Technology, November 2, 2018

Theo Douglas, Government Technology; Harvard Converts Millions of Legal Documents into Open Data

[Kip Currier: Discovered the recent launch of this impressive Harvard University-anchored Caselaw Access Project, while updating a lecture for next week on Open Data.

The free site provides access to highly technical data, full text cases, and even "quirky" but fascinating legal info...like the site's Gallery, highlighting instances in which "witchcraft" is mentioned in legal cases throughout the U.S.

Check out this new site...and spread the word about it!] 


"A new free website spearheaded by the Library Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School makes available nearly 6.5 million state and federal cases dating from the 1600s to earlier this year, in an initiative that could alter and inform the future availability of similar areas of public-sector big data.

Led by the Lab, which was founded in 2010 as an arena for experimentation and exploration into expanding the role of libraries in the online era, the Caselaw Access Project went live Oct. 29 after five years of discussions, planning and digitization of roughly 100,000 pages per day over two years.

The effort was inspired by the Google Books Project; the Free Law Project, a California 501(c)(3) that provides free, public online access to primary legal sources, including so-called “slip opinions,” or early but nearly final versions of legal opinions; and the Legal Information Institute, a nonprofit service of Cornell University that provides free online access to key legal materials."

How copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston’s new book from the public; The Washington Post, May 7, 2018

Ted Genoways, The Washington Post; How copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston’s new book from the public

"Now, according to the Vulture introduction, the Zora Neale Hurston Trust has new representation, interested in getting unpublished works into print and monetizing those archives. That’s great, from a reader’s perspective, but it also reveals a larger problem where scholarship of literature between World War I and II is concerned. It’s mostly due to the Walt Disney Co.’s efforts to protect ownership of a certain cartoon mouse. Over the years, the company has successfully worked to extend copyright restrictions far beyond the limits ever intended by the original authors of America’s intellectual property laws. Under the original Copyright Act of 1790, a work could be protected for 14 years, renewable for another 14-year term if the work’s author was still alive. In time, the maximum copyright grew from 28 years to 56 years and then to 75 years. In 1998, Sonny Bono championed an extension that would protect works created after 1978 for 70 years after the death of the author and the copyright of works created after 1922 to as long as 120 years.


This worked out great for Disney — which, not coincidentally, was founded in 1923 — but less so for the reputations of authors who produced important work between the 1920s and 1950s. Because copyright law became such a tangle, many of these works have truly languished. Here, Hurston is the rule rather than the exception. I have a file that I’ve kept over the years of significant unpublished works by well-known writers from the era: William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson and Weldon Kees, among others. The works aren’t really “lost,” of course, but they are tied up in a legal limbo. Because of the literary reputations of those writers, their unpublished works will eventually see the light of day — whenever their heirs decide that the royalties are spreading a little too thin and there’s money to be made from new works. But other important writers who are little-known or unknown will remain so because they don’t have easily identifiable heirs — or, worse, because self-interested, or even uninterested executors, control their estates."

Current copyright regime makes entertainment industry boring; The Daily Texan, June 18, 2017

Usmaan Hasan, The Daily Texan; Current copyright regime makes entertainment industry boring

"The current system of copyright and intellectual property protections quells artistic expression gives consumers the short end of the stick.

Mickey Mouse, as a property of Disney, enjoys bipartisan support in Congress. He was created in 1928, and under the existing copyright regime of the time, Disney’s right to Mickey should have ended in 1956 at the soonest, 1984 at the latest. Yet with some Disney magic, without fail, Congress expands copyright protections every time the Mickey is about to lapse into the public domain.

The hypocrisy coming from Disney is staggering. It has gained its immense wealth by monetizing properties in the public domain – like Cinderella, a centuries old fairy tale owned by no one – lobbying for copyright protections for those properties, and then reworking properties while constantly expanding the lifetime of their protections. It is a company that has managed to exercise artistic reinterpretation of cultural touchstones while making it nearly impossible for others to do the same. In fact, Disney has made its wealth by making movies on at least 50 works in the public domain."

It's Copyright Week: Join Us in the Fight for a Better Copyright Law; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 1/16/17

Kerry Sheehan, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); 

It's Copyright Week: Join Us in the Fight for a Better Copyright Law

"We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of the law, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation...

Here are this year’s Copyright Week principles:

• Monday: Building and Defending the Public Domain. The public domain is our cultural commons and a crucial resource for innovation and access to knowledge. Copyright policy should strive to promote, and not diminish, a robust, accessible public domain.

• Tuesday: You Bought It, You Own It, You Fix It. Copyright law shouldn't interfere with your freedom to truly own your stuff: to repair it, tinker with it, recycle it, use it on any device, lend it, and then give it away (or re-sell it) when you're done.

• Wednesday: Transparency and Representation. Copyright policy must be set through a participatory, democratic, and transparent process. It should not be decided through back room deals, secret international agreements, or unilateral attempts to apply national laws extraterritorially.

• Thursday: 21st Century Creators. Copyright law should account for the interests of all creators, not just those backed by traditional copyright industries. YouTube creators, remixers, fan artists and independent musicians (among others) are all part of the community of creators that encourage cultural progress and innovation.

• Friday: Copyright and Free Speech. Freedom of expression is fundamental to our democratic system. Copyright law should promote, not restrict or suppress free speech.

Every day this week, we’ll be sharing links to blog posts and actions on these topics at https://www.eff.org/copyrightweek and at #CopyrightWeek.

If you’ve followed Copyright Week in past years, you may note that this year, we didn’t designate a specific day to focus on fair use. Fair use—the legal doctrine that permits many important uses of copyrighted works without permission or payment—is critical to the law’s ability to promote creativity, innovation, and freedom of expression. Fair use is a part of each of this year’s principles."

Germany’s Latest Best Seller? A Critical Version of ‘Mein Kampf’; New York Times, 1/3/17

Melissa Eddy, New York Times; Germany’s Latest Best Seller? A Critical Version of ‘Mein Kampf’:

"The decision to bring out a new edition of a work that advocated an Aryan “master race” provoked fierce debate before publication. One side argued the new work was an important step toward illuminating an unsavory era in Germany.

The other insisted it would only encourage nationalists and xenophobes at a time when the country was engulfed in its own debate about refugees and the threat posed by foreigners."