All of my friends know I’m a copyright geek. Well, actually, a copyright reform geek. I feel our current copyright laws are ridiculously draconian, and I’m constantly railing against the myth of perpetual copyright and arguing that DRM violates the doctrine of fair use. By the way – do you know the MPAA just said in court that you’re a criminal if you make even one back-up copy of a DVD? According to them, if you pay $19.99 for a movie and the disc gets damaged, your only legal option is to pay $19.99 for a new copy. This despite the long-standing doctrine of Fair Use, and despite the fact that blank media actually carries a few cents’ tax to cover royalties from copyrighted material being copied to them.
In the past few years, I’ve been told I needed to defend the “position” that the works of Bram Stoker, Jules Verne, and Mark Twain are in the public domain by people who wanted to stop somebody from adapting one or the other.
First of all, all of those authors’ works were published prior to 1923, which makes them public domain in the United States. This is because anything printed in the U.S. prior to 1923 is in the public domain.
The original U.S. copyright lasted for a 28-year period, which could be renewed once.
The current copyright law – thanks to Sonny “Look Out For That Tree” Bono – is that copyright lasts for the life of the artist, plus 70 years.
This means that if the copyright of works by Stoker, Verne, and Twain were subject to the Bono Copyright Extension (which, I would like to remind you, they are not), then Stoker’s works would have been in the public domain since 1982, Verne’s since 1975, and Twain’s since 1980.
But they were public domain much, much earlier than that because they were published prior to 1923 and the Bono Copyright Extension never applied to them. The maximum any of these works could have lasted under copyright was 56 years, and most of them probably only remained under copyright for 28 because—as was the case with H.P. Lovecraft’s works—nobody ever thought to renew the copyrights.
Again: However you slice it, these works are in the public domain in the United States. Plain and simple. Close the book, drink a cold glass of water, go to bed.
Then, tonight, I had one of my friends text me while I was waiting to hear a speech.
He said, “I need a simple, easy-to-read source on copyright. Somebody on my project is insisting Poe’s stories are copyrighted.”
Yeah.
Poe died in 1849.
1849!
1849!
Even if the Bono Copyright Extension applied (and it doesn’t), that would mean his work had been in the public domain since 1919.
Copyright hawks and lawsuit-happy professional organizations like the MPAA and RIAA have created a mythology of perpetual copyright, and it is destroying our ability to build on our cultural foundations. Kids today are terrified to build off of Edgar Allen Poe – a man who has been dead for over a century and a half. How long will it be before somebody is insisting that Shakespeare’s work (he died in 1616, for those of you keeping score) can’t possibly be in the public domain?