"Hi Planet Money, today is public domain day. I see that Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis is now in the "public domain." I was curious what that meant at a practical level for a German language silent film.
If Planet Money Movies wanted to release their own version of Metropolis, how would they do it? Can you just go to Amazon, buy the Blu Ray, and somehow release your own? What about the anti-piracy measures on the Blu Ray? What about the work that Transit Film did in restoring the film from the original negative? Does that count as some sort of newly original work? It's a silent film and a foreign film. How does the soundtrack and translation work?
If you have to make a new copy from the original reels, what if someone is hoarding them? Does that mean you could buy all the copies and prevent someone from releasing a public domain version?"
The article mentions that Charlie (Bird) Parker's music is now public domain in most of the world (life + 70 years), but most of his records are collaborations with other artists like Dizzy Gillespie who died much later, less than 50 years ago. I also wonder if that even matters if the records are owned by corporations.
In those cases, how would I know if a record is public domain or not?
https://reason.com/2026/01/01/betty-boop-enters-the-public-d...
Just like with "Steamboat Willie" Mickey, it's only the very first iteration of the character.
Yes.
For example, wikipedia has a copy of Metrpolis and that's basically what happened
Restoration itself does not grant a new copyright. Other elements included in a restoration may be copyrighted e.g. new music or the graphic design of intertitles. A new translation is also copyrightable; essentially it's only the "original elements" that enter the public domain. Working around the anti-piracy measures of a blu-ray might be a crime, idk, but that's irrelevant to the copyright discussion; once you have a copy even if it came from an 'illicit' source, you're free to copy & distribute as you wish.
But yes, you need to acquire a copy first; if you can't find a work at all, how would you copy it, practically?
In the US, bypassing DRM is a crime even if the intended use is legal. There are exceptions for things like criticism and accessibility, but I don't believe they'd be relevant.
Maybe it'd be as simple as selling your new copies as "for review purposes" and it'd be legal, I'm not sure.
This is a legitimate problem in public domain releasing. If you're trying to release a really good public domain version then you might need access to very high quality source materials. With a movie it would obviously be nice to scan the camera negatives. If the studio has those negatives in a vault, then you're cooked.
Didn't Bill Gates or some others buy up thousands of old artworks and put them on ice so they could paywall the scans?
This part at least, yes. A work being in the public domain doesn't mean someone is obligated to help you redistribute it.
What will enter the public domain in 2026?
> The nation becomes enslaved to the Chinese leader Murti Bing. His emissaries give everyone a special pill called DAVAMESK B 2 which takes away their abilities to think and to mentally resist.
Interesting. That's quite a bit before 1984 was written.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46118808
> I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off?
I've always been a fan of this, but here's a great detraction:
> I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator. Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010. IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
This is a very solid point. Works sometimes only become popular decades after their initial release.
Perhaps a way to protect individual artists would be to limit the number of copyrights held by a particular entity. The more you aggregate or hold on to, the steeper the cost to maintain the copyright. I'm sure loopholes like "we're a holding company of holding companies" might be invented to counter this, but if we tied this to real people rather than corporations it might work.
Copyrights shouldn't last longer than humans.
Someone would retort that patent is not same as copyright. But really dude that's all just made up stuff by politicians and corporations. In the end Tesla died pennyless and these corporations and entities get to hoard all the human creativity till what it looks like an eternity for my meagre life span.
Game of Thrones was originally published in 1996, but the more recent books are more recent. I think that GRR Martin's books would be giving him sizeable profit, even if someone else were able to make GoT fanfiction in the same universe, and the GoT TV Series would still have to pay him to use the more recent copyrighted books, not just the settings and characters from the original.
There is already intrinsic value in having written the original work, and that intrinsic value will make you the best person to consult on a TV adaption or make sequels, even if the original work is public domain and in theory anyone could adapt it.
If an author makes something 20 years ago, doesn't build on the universe any more beyond that, and is unable to compete in their own universe they built against other authors once it goes public domain and becomes popular, well, then tough luck for the author.
Let's look at how this works for software: every piece of open-source software out there is something that in theory another company could take and sell as their own. Red Hat Linux is Open Source, so sure anyone can make their own... and yet Red Hat can sell consulting services and new versions of it because they're the only group with proper expertise there.
> limit the number of copyrights held by a particular entity
Entities are unfortunately quite easy to fake and difficult to define in a fool-proof way.
If you can still license copyrights, then holding companies would become the norm. Like, right now LucasArts owns StarWars, and LucasArts is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Disney, but if we had a limit on how many copyrights an entity can hold, Disney wouldn't acquire LucasArts, and would instead pay for an exclusive copyright license.
28+28+... might be a better model. I know there's a bunch of decent stuff from the 1990s which will never again have any real economic value, but would be fine for soundtracks or tictoks or MAME or etc.
Published in 1924, it’s a short read, I would recommend, I personally find it more compelling than Orwell’s work
For example commercial 3D printing (using FDM) was likely significantly stalled until the relevant patent expired.
Culture is of course important but there can always be new successful Alternatives.
We have enough electricity that everyone in the USA could have a generous free allowance.
We've decided it's better to charge for electricity, and if an AI company can pay for it to train models, but someone freezing to death in their home cannot pay for it, that capital is a signal that the data-center should get the electricity, not the dying individual.
This isn't a matter of copyright, this is a matter of how we structure society.
Anyway, hollywood hated this situation and was glad to see it under control. The issue is now viewing is pretty limited. NBC made it a prime time event.
(Mentioning some commodoretard's 'theory' on copyright detracts from your post, imo. They just didn't bother going after him)
The Divorcee - Norma Shearer won best actress for this performance of a sophisticated woman. She evens the score after her husband has a brief affair, and as this is pre-Hays code, she isn't punished for it.
Hell's Angels - produced by Howard Hughes, is worth watching for the dogfighting stunts alone. 4 people died filming them.
Holiday - Inferior to the later Hepburn/Grant remake, but still a solid rendition of the play.
L'age d'Or - Luis Buñuel's surrealist showcase
Animal Crackers - the Marx brothers, it's still funny
It is eerily similar to our times, too, unfortunately.
I don't care much about Betty Boop and I don't really care about Pluto and Mickey all that much, but I'm very excited for The Maltese Falcon's novel being available, since I think that that one could actually be adapted into something pretty modern.
Also, All Quiet on the Western Front is very arguably one of the very best movies ever made, and certainly one of the very best of the 30's if nothing else, so I am very much looking forward to fan restorations.
Life + 70 can mean the work is protected 120 years (publish at 40, dies at 90)?
1. Anyone can use anything that is in the public domain.
2. Any creation that uses elements from the public domain is also, automatically, in the public domain.
3. Activate retroactively: When the first book in a series (for example) gets into the public domain, then the whole series (and franchise) becomes public domain.
(3) depends on what the initial rule is for something to get into the public domain.
P.S: It's a thought experiment, not an actual "let's implement it now!" thing.
I am aware that this is not realistic, for many reasons, but just like Richard Stallman, or the right to repair movement (e. g. Louis Rossmann) being vocal about it, or scientists who will prefer to publish with open access rather than be subject to the greedy Elsevier paywall, after the public already paid for the research - we need to strive for ideals here. So, all must be in the public domain. I actually think it should be without delay; seems usually the waiting time before it gets into the public domain is ... 75 years? Or any number where I am definitely no longer alive. So that is bad.
Thus - public domain the everything. \o/
(I’m happy to have contributed three to the launch this year, hope you enjoy them.)
Do you mean for humans? We have this weird asymmetry where copyright law applies to humans but a large company training an LLM is not subject to copyright law at all.
That could be 150 years of copyright.
For example, lyrics to The Internationale were composed in 1871 and music in 1888. They fully entered public domain... in 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale#Authorship_... Over 140 years of copyright.
US laws are looser on paper but viciously enforced.
95 years for works owned by corporations (long enough to become lost and/or irrelevant).
Catalog of Copyright Entries, New Series. Part 1, Group 2: Pamphlets, Leaflets, Contributions to Newspapers or Periodicals, Etc. Maps 1929: Vol 26 No 1-12
Been meaning to do a Kafka for a while but the Gutenberg editions are later translations that aren’t actually public domain. This is the first time a Kafka novel has entered the US PD.
The other two I picked from the list of “works Standard Ebooks wants for public domain day” back in October. We’re reasonably organised about this.
1. People still do software based on the GNU license. What's the difference?
2. I'm a mathematician - math is not copyrighted, yet it's still being done.
3. Is it really so important for society that copyrighted movies be based on old stories? Won't society benefit from new stories and characters?
To be clear, I don't propose to really implement it. But the existing system also sucks. I'm thinking that maybe incorporating such an idea into the existing system - limiting what you can do with public domain work - can be beneficial.
This is an internet myth pushed by certain sci-fi writers doing incompetent research.
Disney were certainly in favour of the US's most recent copyright extension, but the main driver of it was the need for the US to move to a similar period to the EU for international treaty reasons.
The EU had moved to Life+70 years as a model because it unified to the longest period in the block when it unified the copyright period across the entire EU, under the logic that no copyright owner should have their term reduced as a result.
The longest period in Europe was Germany, and Germany's long copyright period was the result of lobbying from local German publishers, nothing to do with American companies.
It's really a bit of US exceptionalism to think Disney had much to do with it.
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The calendar turns, and once again a lively procession of books, images, films, and music leaves copyright behind and steps into the ever-growing public domain! On this year's Public Domain Day (which falls each January 1st) we welcome, in lots of countries around the world, the words of Wallace Stevens, Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Einstein, and in the US a bevy of brilliant books including William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Langston Hughes’ Not Without Laughter, Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage, and, in their original German, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund.
Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain, but there are three main types of copyright term for historical works which cover most cases. For these three systems, newly entering the public domain today are:
Some of you may have been following our advent-style countdown calendar which revealed day-by-day through December our highlights for these new public domain entrants. The last window was opened yesterday, and while such a format was fun for the slow reveal, for the sake of a good gorgeable list we’ve exploded the calendar out into a digestible array below. Enjoy!
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As I Lay Dying is a Southern Gothic novel by American author William Faulkner, consistently ranked among the best novels of the 20th century. The title is derived from William Marris’s 1925 translation of Homer’s Odyssey, referring to the similar themes of both works.
The novel traces the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her poor, rural family’s quest to honor her wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi, as well as the motives—noble or selfish—they show on the journey. It uses a stream-of-consciousness writing technique and varying chapter lengths, and is narrated by 15 different characters over 59 chapters.
Faulkner said that he wrote the novel from midnight to 4:00 a.m. over the course of six weeks and that he did not change a word of it. He spent the first eight hours of his twelve-hour shift at the University of Mississippi Power House shoveling coal or directing other works and the remaining four hours handwriting his manuscript on unlined onionskin paper. As I Lay Dying represents a progenitor of the Southern Renaissance, reflecting on being, existence, and other existential metaphysics of everyday life, and helped to solidify Faulkner’s reputation as a pioneer, like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, of stream of consciousness. (Wikipedia)
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Swallows and Amazons is a children’s adventure novel by English author Arthur Ransome. It is the first book in the Swallows and Amazons series, followed by Swallowdale.
Set in the summer of 1929 in England’s Lake District, the book relates the outdoor adventures and play of two families of children. These involve sailing, camping, fishing, exploration and piracy. The Walker children (John, Susan, Titty and Roger) are staying at a farm near a lake in the Lake District of England, during the school holidays. They sail a borrowed dinghy named Swallow and meet the Blackett children (Nancy and Peggy), who sail a dinghy named Amazon. When the children meet, they agree to join forces against a common enemy – the Blacketts’ uncle Jim Turner whom they call “Captain Flint” (after the parrot in Treasure Island).
The book was inspired by a summer spent by Ransome teaching the children of his friends, the Altounyans, to sail. At the time, Ransome had been working as a journalist with the Manchester Guardian, but decided to become a full-time author rather than go abroad as a foreign correspondent. Three of the Altounyan children’s names are adopted directly for the Walker family. However, later in life Ransome tried to downplay the Altounyan connections, changing the initial dedication of Swallows and Amazons and writing a new foreword which gave other sources. (Wikipedia)
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Not Without Laughter* is the debut novel of Langston Hughes, the American writer, activist, and leader of the Harlem Renaissance.
The novel portrays African-American life in Kansas in the 1910s, focusing on the effects of class and religion on the community. In telling the story of Sandy Rogers, a young African American boy in small-town Kansas, and of his family—his mother, Annjee, a housekeeper for a wealthy white family; his irresponsible father, Jimboy, who plays the guitar and travels the country in search of employment; his strong-willed grandmother Hager, who clings to her faith; his Aunt Tempy, who marries a rich man; and his Aunt Harriet, who struggles to make it as a blues singer—Hughes gives the longings and lineaments of Black life in the early twentieth century an important place in the history of racially divided America.
Hughes said that *Not Without Laughter* is semi-autobiographical, and that a good portion of the characters and setting included in the novel are based on his memories of growing up in Lawrence, Kansas. A review in *The New York Times* said that the novel is “very slow, even tedious, reading in its early chapters, but once it gains its momentum it moves as swiftly as a jazz rhythm”. (Wikipedia)
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Narcissus and Goldmund (in German, Narziß und Goldmund), also published in English as Death and the Lover, is a novel written by the German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. At its publication, it was considered Hesse’s literary triumph.
The novel is the story of a young man, Goldmund (German for “Gold mouth”), who wanders aimlessly throughout Medieval Germany after leaving a Catholic monastery school in search of what could be described as “the meaning of life”. With the help of Narcissus, a gifted young teacher, and following an epiphanic experience with a beautiful Gypsy woman, Goldmund leaves the monastery and embarks on a wandering existence. He has numerous love affairs, studies art, and encounters human existence at its ugliest when the Black Death devastates the region. Eventually, he is reunited with his friend Narcissus, now an abbot.
Like most of Hesse’s works, the main theme of this book is the wanderer’s struggle to find himself, as well as the Jungian union of polar opposites (Mysterium Coniunctionis). Goldmund represents nature and the “feminine conscious mind” (but also anima, a man’s unconscious), while Narcissus represents science and logic and God and the “masculine conscious mind” (but also animus, a woman’s unconscious).
A film adaptation, directed by the Austrian Oscar-winning director Stefan Ruzowitzky, was released in 2020. (Wikipedia)
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All Quiet on the Western Front is a 1930 American pre-Code epic anti-war film based on the 1929 novel of the same name by German novelist Erich Maria Remarque. Directed by Lewis Milestone, it stars Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray, Slim Summerville, and William Bakewell.
The movie follows a group of German students moved to enlist in the army as part of the new 2nd Company. Their romantic delusions are quickly shattered during their brief but rigorous training under the abusive Sergeant Himmelstoss. After being sent to the Western Front, their idealism is destroyed by the harsh realities of combat.
Considered a realistic and harrowing account of warfare in World War I, the film opened to wide acclaim in the United States and made the American Film Institute’s first 100 Years... 100 Movies list in 1997. (Wikipedia)
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Vile Bodies is the second novel by Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books, and a prolific journalist and book reviewer. It satirises London’s post–First World War “bright young things” — a group of Bohemian young aristocrats and socialites in London — and the press coverage around them. Waugh originally considered the title Bright Young Things but changed it; the published title echoes a narrator’s remark on crowds and parties: “Those vile bodies”.
The novel follows a vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, who hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the hedonistic fulfillment of their desires. Waugh’s acidly funny satire reveals the darkness and vulnerability beneath the sparkling surface of the high life.
The book shifts in tone from light-hearted romp to bleak desolation (Waugh himself later attributed it to the breakdown of his first marriage halfway through the book’s composition). Critics have noted the novel’s fragmented scenes, jump-cuts, and telephone dialogue, often linking its method to cinema and to modernist effects. Some have defended the novel’s downbeat ending as a poetically just reversal of the conventions of comic romance.
David Bowie cited the novel as the primary influence in writing his song “Aladdin Sane”, and a film adaptation, written and directed by Stephen Fry, was released in 2003. (Wikipedia)
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Years of Grace is the first book by the American playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Margaret Ayer Barnes. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1931.
The story, beginning in the 1890s and continuing into the 1930s, chronicles the life of Jane Ward Carver from her teens to age 54. This novel follows many of the same themes as Barnes’s other works. Centering on the social manners of upper middle class society, her female protagonists are often traditionalists, struggling to uphold conventional morality in the face of changing social climates. Barnes’s alma mater Bryn Mawr College, along with the characters of college presidents M. Carey Thomas and Marion Park, figure prominently in this work.
The New York Times commented that “this story of the death of an old order and the birth of a new one, of the perpetually renewed conflict between succeeding generations... holds the reader’s attention to the end.” Despite the success of Years of Grace, it is not Barnes’s best-known work; that honor belongs to Dishonored Lady, a play she co-wrote with Edward Sheldon, which was adapted twice into film. (Wikipedia)
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Hell-Bound Train is a 1930 film written and directed by James and Eloyce Gist. A self-taught husband-and-wife team with a shared religious mission, they produced at least three silent films for African American church audiences, touring them across the United States. Shown alongside sermons, these works used cinema as a vehicle for evangelism. In Hell-Bound Train — which Eloyce is said to have rewritten, re-edited, and partly refilmed after James’s initial version — the viewer passes from carriage to carriage as the filmmakers stage various “Jazz Age” sins, including dancing, drinking, and gambling, all overseen by a mischievous devil conductor. Though Hell-Bound Train has gained some renewed attention via Kino Lorber’s Pioneers of African-American Cinema box set and a brief run on the Criterion Channel, this film — one of the few surviving silent works by an African American woman — is still often absent from retrospectives on early women filmmakers, perhaps because of its modest production values and overtly moralizing tone. (Wikipedia)
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The Man Without Qualities (in German Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is an unfinished modernist novel in three volumes and various drafts, by the Austrian writer Robert Musil, published in parts from 1930 to 1943.
The novel is a “story of ideas”, which takes place in the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’s last days. The plot often veers into allegorical digressions on a wide range of existential themes concerning humanity and feelings. It has a particular concern with the values of truth and opinion and how society organizes ideas about life and society. The book is well over a thousand pages long in its entirety, and no one single theme dominates.
The story takes place in 1913 in Vienna, the capital of Austria-Hungary, which Musil refers to by the playful term Kakanien. Part I, titled A Sort of Introduction, is an introduction to the protagonist, a mathematician named Ulrich whose ambivalence towards morals and indifference to life make him “a man without qualities”. In Part II, Pseudoreality Prevails, Ulrich joins preparations for a celebration in honor of 70 years of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph’s reign. Part III, entitled Into the Millennium (The Criminals), is about Ulrich’s sister Agathe. They experience a mystically incestuous stirring upon meeting after their father’s death.
Musil worked on the novel for more than twenty years: his detailed portrait of a decaying fin de siècle world has strong autobiographical features. Musil’s almost daily preoccupation with writing left his family in dire financial straits. (Wikipedia)
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Ash Wednesday is a long poem written by T. S. Eliot during his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, the poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God.
Sometimes referred to as Eliot’s “conversion poem”, Ash Wednesday, with a base of Dante’s Purgatorio, is richly but ambiguously allusive and deals with the move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. The style is different from his poetry which predates his conversion. Ash Wednesday and the poems that followed had a more casual, melodic, and contemplative method.
The poem’s title comes from the Western Christian fast day that marks the beginning of Lent, forty days before Easter. It is a poem about the difficulty of religious belief, and concerned with personal salvation in an age of uncertainty. In it, Eliot’s poetic persona, one who has lacked faith in the past, has somehow found the courage, through spiritual exhaustion, to seek faith.
The initial reception of Ash Wednesday was largely positive, though many of the more secular literati found its groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfiting. Edwin Muir maintained that “‘Ash Wednesday’ is one of the most moving poems he [Eliot] has written, and perhaps the most perfect”. (Wikipedia)
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The Murder at the Vicarage is a work of detective fiction by the British writer Agatha Christie. It is the first novel to feature the character of Miss Marple and her village of St Mary Mead (characters that had previously appeared in short stories).
The story is set in the quiet English village of St Mary Mead, where life is seemingly peaceful until Colonel Protheroe, the local magistrate and a widely disliked man, is found shot dead in the vicar’s study. The vicar, Leonard Clement, is the narrator of the story. Just before the murder, he had remarked that “anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe would be doing the world a service” — a comment that comes back to haunt him.
Several suspects quickly emerge, as well as Miss Marple, who proves, though she appears at first as a nosy old spinster, to have unmatched observational skills and a deep understanding of human nature. (Wikipedia)
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The Castle (in German, *Das Schloss*) is a 1926 novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist known only as “K.” arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle supposedly owned by Count Westwest. Kafka died before he could finish the work, but suggested it would end with K. dying in the village, the castle notifying him on his death bed that his “legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there.” Dark and at times surreal, *The Castle* is often understood to be about alienation, unresponsive bureaucracy, the frustration of trying to conduct business with non-transparent, seemingly arbitrary controlling systems, and the futile pursuit of an unobtainable goal. (Wikipedia)
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The Far-Away Bride is the most famous book by the English feminist, novelist, poet, and travel writer Stella Benson. It was published in the United States first in 1930 and as Tobit Transplanted in Britain in 1931. It won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for English writers in 1932.
The novel deals with a family of Russian émigrés in Manchuria. Its characters are the old, grumbling and tearfully sentimental Russian intellectual, Malinin; his disheveled, kind-hearted and unbearable wife, Anna; and Seryozha, their resourceful 19-year-old son. Spending their time in laziness, indulging in exaggerated Russian disorder and comical quarrels growing out of every trifle, they are incongruously happy. The humorous and adventurous action of the novel starts when Seryozha sets out, on foot, on a business trip to the Korean city of Seoul (where he must recover 200 yens); it is there that he finds his “far-away bride” — a charming and whimsical Russian girl who has already broken seven hearts and whose heart he finally conquers.
Benson described the novel as an “accurate modernization” of the Book of Tobit, a work of Second Temple Jewish literature dating to the 3rd or early 2nd century BC; The New York Times described The Far-Away Bride, rather, as a “spirited parody of it.” Benson’s novel, writes the reviewer, is “a truly felicitous comedy of the human personality”. (Wikipedia)
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The Defense (in Russian, Zashchita Luzhinais) is the third novel written by Vladimir Nabokov after he had emigrated to Berlin. It appeared first under Nabokov’s pen name V. Sirin in the Russian émigré quarterly Sovremennye zapiski and was thereafter published by the émigré publishing house Slovo as The Luzhin Defense in Berlin.
The novel tells the story of Luzhin. As a young boy, unattractive, withdrawn, sullen, he takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster, but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality. His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when the intricate defense he has devised withers under his opponent’s unexpected and unpredictable lines of assault.
The character of Luzhin is based on Curt von Bardeleben, a chess master Nabokov knew personally, and Nabokov links the events in the central chapters to moves as encountered in chess problems. The book was adapted to film in 2000, as The Luzhin Defence. It was directed by Marleen Gorris, and starred John Turturro as Luzhin. (Wikipedia)
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The Maltese Falcon is a detective novel by American writer Dashiell Hammett, originally serialized in the magazine Black Mask beginning with the September 1929 issue. The story is told entirely in external third-person narrative; there is no description whatsoever of any character’s thoughts or feelings, only what they say and do, and how they look. The novel has been adapted several times for the cinema and is considered part of the hardboiled genre, which Hammett played a major part in popularizing.
The novel follows Sam Spade, a private detective in San Francisco, in partnership with Miles Archer. The beautiful “Miss Wonderley” hires them to follow Floyd Thursby, who she claims has run off with her sister. Archer takes the first stint but is found shot dead that night. “Miss Wonderley” is soon revealed to be an acquisitive adventuress named Brigid O’Shaughnessy, who is involved in the search for a black statuette of unknown but substantial value. Red herrings abound.
Although Hammett himself worked for a time as a private detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in San Francisco (and used his given name, Samuel, for the story’s protagonist), Hammett asserted that “Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been, and, in their cockier moments, thought they approached.” (Wikipedia)
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Insatiability (in Polish Nienasycenie) is a speculative fiction novel by the Polish writer, dramatist, philosopher, painter and photographer, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy). It is Witkiewicz’s third novel, considered by some to be his best.
Consisting of two parts — Przebudzenie (Awakening) and Obłęd (The Madness) — the novel takes place in the future, circa 2000. Following a battle, modeled after the Bolshevik revolution, Poland is overrun by the army of the last and final Mongol conquest. The nation becomes enslaved to the Chinese leader Murti Bing. His emissaries give everyone a special pill called DAVAMESK B 2 which takes away their abilities to think and to mentally resist. East and West become one, in faceless misery fueled by sexual instincts.
The book combines chaotic action with deep philosophical and political discussion, and predicts many of the events and political outcomes of the subsequent years, specifically, the invasion of Poland, the postwar foreign domination as well as the totalitarian mind control exerted, first by the Germans, and then by the Soviet Union on Polish life and art. (Wikipedia)
Read more about Witkiewicz’s artworks in our essay “Documenting Drugs” by Juliette Bretan
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Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum theory. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc^2, which arises from special relativity, has been called “the world’s most famous equation”. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for “his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”.
In 1905, sometimes described as his *annus mirabilis* (miracle year), he published four groundbreaking papers. In them, he outlined a theory of the photoelectric effect, explained Brownian motion, introduced his special theory of relativity, and demonstrated that if the special theory is correct, mass and energy are equivalent to each other. In 1915, he proposed a general theory of relativity that extended his system of mechanics to incorporate gravitation. A cosmological paper that he published the following year laid out the implications of general relativity for the modeling of the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. In 1917, Einstein introduced the concepts of spontaneous emission and stimulated emission, the latter of which is the core mechanism behind the laser and maser, and which helped lay the groundwork for later developments in physics such as quantum electrodynamics and quantum optics. (Wikipedia)
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Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.
Stevens’s first period begins with the publication of Harmonium (1923), followed by a slightly revised and amended second edition in 1930. It features, among other poems, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, “Sunday Morning”, “The Snow Man”, and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. His second period commenced with Ideas of Order (1933), included in Transport to Summer (1947). His third and final period began with the publication of The Auroras of Autumn (1950), followed by The Necessary Angel: Essays On Reality and the Imagination (1951).
Many of Stevens’s poems deal with the making of art and poetry in particular. His Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955 and Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came largely only as he approached 40 years of age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence titled “Phases” in the November 1914 edition of Poetry) was written at age 35, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with Santayana. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned 50. According to the literary scholar Harold Bloom, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius. (Wikipedia)
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Charles Parker Jr. was an American jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer. Parker was a highly influential soloist and leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and advanced harmonies. He was a virtuoso and introduced revolutionary rhythmic and harmonic ideas into jazz, including rapid passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions. Parker primarily played the alto saxophone.
Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual rather than just an entertainer.
His style of composition involved interpolation of original melodies over existing jazz forms and standards, a practice known as contrafact and still common in jazz today. Examples include “Ornithology” (which borrows the chord progression of jazz standard “How High the Moon” and is said to be co-written with trumpet player Little Benny Harris), and “Moose The Mooche”. The practice was not uncommon prior to bebop, but it became a signature of the movement as artists began to move away from arranging popular standards and toward composing their own material. Parker contributed greatly to the modern jazz solo, one in which triplets and pick-up notes were used in unorthodox ways to lead into chord tones.
Miles Davis once said, “You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker.” (Wikipedia)
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Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized versions of German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer.
Mann was a member of the hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in his first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901). Further major novels include The Magic Mountain (1924), the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1933–1943), and Doctor Faustus (1947); he also wrote short stories and novellas, including Death in Venice (1912).
When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland and when World War II broke out in 1939, he moved to the United States, then returned to Switzerland in 1952. Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur, German literature written in exile by those who opposed the Hitler regime. (Wikipedia)
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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit, Catholic priest, scientist, paleontologist, philosopher, mystic, and teacher. He investigated the theory of evolution from a perspective influenced by Henri Bergson and Christian mysticism, writing multiple scientific and religious works on the subject, his most popular being The Phenomenon of Man, published posthumously in 1955. His mainstream scientific achievements include his palaeontological research in China, taking part in the discovery of the significant Peking Man fossils from the Zhoukoudian cave complex near Beijing. His more speculative ideas, sometimes criticized as pseudoscientific, have included a vitalist conception of the Omega Point. Along with Vladimir Vernadsky, he contributed to the development of the concept of the noosphere.
In 1962, the Holy Office issued a warning regarding Teilhard’s works, alleging ambiguities and doctrinal errors without specifying them. Some eminent Catholic figures, including Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, have made positive comments on some of his ideas since. The response to his writings by scientists has been divided. His work was controversial to some scientists and religious leaders because Teilhard combined theology and metaphysics with science.
Teilhard served in World War I as a stretcher-bearer. He received several citations, and was awarded the Médaille militaire and the Legion of Honor, the highest French order of merit, both military and civil. (Wikipedia)
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Roger Mais was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.
He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952. Mais published more than a hundred short stories, most appearing in Public Opinion and Focus, with others collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man. He wrote more than thirty stage and radio plays, as well as three novels: The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), Brother Man (1954), and Black Lightning (1955).
Mais’ topics most frequently were the social injustice and inequality suffered by black, poor Jamaicans. Accused of sedition for writing the article “Now We Know,” a 1944 denunciation of the British Empire, the Jamaican novelist was tried, convicted and imprisoned for six months. His political activism, anti-colonial writing, and imprisonment helped galvanize Jamaican nationalism. (Wikipedia)
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Saadat Hasan Manto was a Pakistani writer, playwright and novelist from Punjab, who is regarded as the greatest short-story author in Urdu literature. He was active from 1933 during British rule till his death in 1955 after independence.
Writing mainly in Urdu, he produced 22 collections of short stories, a novel, five series of radio plays, three collections of essays, and two collections of personal sketches. He is best known for his stories about the partition of India, which he opposed, immediately following independence in 1947. Manto’s most notable work has been archived by Rekhta.
Manto was tried six times for alleged obscenity in his writings; thrice before 1947 in British India, and thrice after independence in 1947 in Pakistan, but was never convicted. He started his literary career translating the works of Victor Hugo, Oscar Wilde and Russian writers such as Chekhov and Gorky. His first story was “Tamasha”, based on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre at Amritsar. His final works, which grew from the social climate and his own financial struggles, reflected an innate sense of human impotency towards darkness and contained satire that verged on dark comedy, as seen in his last story, “Toba Tek Singh”. (Wikipedia)
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Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was an English artist and sculptor. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War. Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, Hepworth studied at Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art in the 1920s. She married the sculptor John Skeaping in 1925. In 1931 she fell in love with the painter Ben Nicholson, and in 1933 divorced Skeaping. At this time she was part of a circle of modern artists centred on Hampstead, London, and was one of the founders of the art movement Unit One. At the beginning of the Second World War Hepworth and Nicholson moved to St Ives, Cornwall, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Best known as a sculptor, Hepworth also produced drawings – including a series of sketches of operating rooms following the hospitalisation of her daughter in 1944 – and lithographs. She died in a fire at her studio in 1975. (Wikipedia)
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Hannah Arendt was a German and American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.
Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of wealth, power, fame, and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, tradition, and totalitarianism. She is also remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, for her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and for the phrase “the banality of evil”.
In 1933, Arendt was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism. On release, she fled Germany, settling in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. When Germany invaded France she was detained as an alien, but she escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950. With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established, and a series of works followed. These included the books The Human Condition in 1958, as well as Eichmann in Jerusalem and On Revolution in 1963. She taught at many American universities while declining tenure-track appointments. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, leaving her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished. (Wikipedia)
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Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Evans’ published his first photos at the age of 27. Much of Evans’ New Deal work uses the large format, 8 × 10-inch (200×250 mm) view camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are “literate, authoritative, transcendent”.
Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the George Eastman Museum.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Evans took up photography in 1928 around the time he was living in Ossining, New York. The Great Depression years of 1935–36 were a period of remarkable productivity and accomplishment for Evans. In 1936, employed by the National Recovery Administration, he photographed three impoverished sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama. The photographs became iconic and were praised for effectively capturing the negative effects of the Great Depression in the American South. Between 1940 and 1959, Evans was awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships in Photography to continue his work of making record photographs of contemporary American subjects. (Wikipedia)
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1. People who make money from GPL software typically make their money from support contracts or from running a service. Unlike software, photography, books, music and movies don’t require any ongoing maintenance once created to keep them running or up to date. There is some value in the distribution of physical copies, but digital distribution would have almost no value.
2. Math is pretty much in this boat already. Most math work is either directly paid for by a company that consumes it, or is academic work with incredibly high barriers to entry and constant hustling for grant funding. I wouldn’t wish that on any field, would you?
3. Take for example Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. While the characters are new, they draw upon a rich mythology from the public domain (eg dragons, goblins, wizards, witches, etc).
It is an interesting discussion, but I expect removing the freedom to use public domain works outside of the public domain would was to very bad outcomes.
The GPL family of licences are significantly different from Public Domain. There is still the option of relicensing for commercial use, for example, which is moot under a public domain status. Though some¹ treat the GPL as PD anyway…
MIT might be a more valid comparator, so to answer the question from that PoV: Money. Many OSS contributors do it to scratch their own itch, or for some definition of “community”, the cost of contribution is generally low (or feels like free) and they don't need anything back. Some are supported by donations or sponsorship but not the majority. Those in commercial environments are supporting projects (by contributions or sponsorship) that are useful to that commercial interest, so there is a benefit there but no need for direct payment (they may get payment for support and/or consulting services or via subscriptions for a paid-for hosted instance of whatever). Someone making a film of a book, or a licensed sequel/prequel/other, unless they are doing it for love or just shits & giggles like some fan-made efforts, generally needs/wants to make profit from it, especially in the case of film/TV which can have a large up-front cost - that is unlikely to happen if the new derived work is automatically public domain.
> 2. […] math is not copyrighted, yet it's still being done.
Not for Hollywood level money, it usually isn't :)
> 3. […] Won't society benefit from new stories and characters?
Yes, it certainly would IMO. But it turns out there is less easy money in that. People flock en-mass to works based on familiar IP more than they do to original works, for better or (often) worse. To paraphrase MiB: A person is classy and appreciates original good art, people are a bunch of dumb consumers of fast food for the mind.
Original works do sometimes smash through that barrier of course, they then often become the new IP that a bunch of derived works are based on so in several years time they are part of the cycle makers of new original works are competing with.
> 3. Is it really so important for society that copyrighted movies be based on old stories? […]
No. But it is important for the entertainment industry, for the reason noted above. What is good for society isn't necessarily the same as what people are willing to pay for, and what is good for the producers of works (away from those doing it purely for their own satisfaction or sense of artistic vision) is what people are willing to pay to experience.
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[1] Onyx, makers of the Boox line of GPL violating e-ink devices, to name one of them², see comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41412582 for more discussion about that.
[2] I pick them out from that small crowd because I might have been interested enough to buy one of their products were it not for this issue. Unfortunately many buyers are unaware of the matter, or are aware but don't care sufficiently for it to change their buying decision.
The right question to ask is what do they have in common, and the answer is nothing but an artificial legal construct of IP. To write public domain software you need a computer and 2 sqm of space (or even less) that you occupy while working. Material resources needed to shoot one movie are one big reason you need financial model.
2. math is irrelevant here, has nothing in common with movies or music
3. yes. It’s our culture and our history.
That's on purpose to allow the same parties (if not called out by the public) to run to the EU to demand more "parity" increasing the EU limits too. Back and forth forever.
I think the differences between inventing a story or song and inventing a theory are not as great as you pretend.
The big difference really is status quo and tradition.
But I would have to say that yes, it is mainly the EU that drives longer copyright, because EU copyright is not based on a model of doing things to help society but because there is a moral right of ownership that is possessed by the creator of a work. This of course explains why often something is out of copyright in the U.S but still under copyright in the EU but I don't think I have ever heard of the reverse applying (I'm sure HN can come up with an edge case though)
I do not pretend anything and I‘m not talking about inventing a story. I‘m talking about movie production, which, even with heavy use of AI is by orders of magnitude more expensive than a piece of free software, and certainly cannot be done with a single computer.
Movies absolutely can be created with one computer. There was a movie shot entirely on an iphone. They can be edited on an iphone too. Heck, movies can be created without a single computer. That was the only way to make movies for many decades.
I don’t understand where did you get that from. I did not „choose“ that. Please re-read the conversation.
> There was a movie shot entirely on an iphone.
And? Are you claiming that someone can shoot „All quiet on Western front“ with iPhone and on low budget?
> Heck, movies can be created without a single computer. That was the only way to make movies for many decades.
Yes. What is your argument exactly?