Happy Public Domain Day! Here's to many more

Happy Public Domain Day everyone! Today is the day that copyright expires on a whole range of works. As we reported this morning, from today works by Sigmund Freud, WB Yeats, Ford Madox Ford and illustrator Arthur Rackham are today part of the public domain. They can be made cheaply available as educational editions, translated into braille or made into audiobooks, all without anyone needing to give permission or any fees changing hands. They are also available to be reinterpreted and re-used by new artists.

That's under threat, however. The entertainment industry is bent on continuously extending copyright. They are determined to complete the corruption of copyright by turning it from an incentive to create into a property law. They won't stop until the public domain has been erased entirely. Sadly our Government is only too happy to help. Evidenced-based arguments won't convince our Government, but a slap-up meal with a movie mogul or the chance to jam with a pop star will win their support.

Librarian John Mark Ockerbloom has written a post about Public Domain Day. I'll quote a little of it here:

The dividing line between the public domain and the world of copyright could well have been different. In 1953, for instance, US copyrights ran for a maximum of 56 years, and the last of that year’s copyrights would have expired today, were it not for extensions. Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a page showing what could have been entering the public domain today– everything up to the close of the Korean War. In contrast, if the current 95-year US terms had been in effect all of last century, the copyrights of 1914 would have only expired today. Only now would we be able to start freely digitizing the first set of books from the start of World War I.

With the dividing line better known nowadays, do we have hope of protecting the public domain against more expansions of copyright? Many countries still stick to the life+50 years term of the Berne Convention, including Canada and New Zealand. In those countries, works from authors who died in 1959 enter the public domain for the first time. There’s pressure on some of these countries to increase their terms, so far resisted. Efforts to extend copyrights on sound recordings continues in Europe, and recently succeeded in Argentina. And secret ACTA treaty negotiations are also aimed at increasing the power of copyright holders over Internet and computer users.

I urge you to read in full. It's informative and so are the links.

James Boyle, a law professor at Duke Law School in North Carolina, is also worth reading. Taking Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 as an example, Boyle explains:

When the book was written, Bradbury got a copyright term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years if he or his publisher wished. Most authors and publishers did not bother to renew — very few have a commercial life longer than a few years. That meant that about 93% of books and 85% of all works from 1953 passed into the public domain within 28 years. But Bradbury’s book was a commercial success. The copyright was renewed and as a result it would have been entering the public domain [on] January 1, 2010. [...] But copyright law has changed since then. Copyright terms have been twice retrospectively extended. Now, Fahrenheit 451 is not slated to enter the public domain until 2049.

For Bradbury’s book, this means that the reading public, the braille printer, the budding playwright, the school library face either higher prices, or legal restrictions on reuse or both. And they get no benefit from it. Clearly, the incentive of 28 + 28 years was enough to encourage him to write the book and the publisher to publish it. The evidence is that.. it happened. Retrospectively extending copyright is deadweight social loss — harm without benefit.

Again, you should read the full post. You should also read Boyle's comment where he reiterates the unfairness of retrospective copyright extension and points out the value of the public domain. Had Shakespeare been subject to today's copyright lobby, for example, he could not have written Romeo and Juliet.

No copyrights expired in the US today because of a 1998 copyright extension. The earliest that copyrights will begin to expire there will be 2019 and that's assuming the laws aren't changed again before then. We face the same future in the UK if we allow the music industry – who are the current shock troops of the copyright lobby – to have their way. Sadly, they are winning so far.