Persistence of Copyright

jchilds wrote:What happens if you toss cloning/clone heirs into the mix with respect to copyright? Could the evil corporate lawyers somehow manage a situation where WDE has a living WD able to assert that copyright in the 20th century PD?

Not under the Beowulf Code.

In ... In Enemy Hands, IIRC, the discussion about who would succeed Honor as Steadholder Harrington covered that without the explicit directive of the original,
clones are not considered to be the original person.

Kytheros wrote:

jchilds wrote:What happens if you toss cloning/clone heirs into the mix with respect to copyright? Could the evil corporate lawyers somehow manage a situation where WDE has a living WD able to assert that copyright in the 20th century PD?

Not under the Beowulf Code.

In ... In Enemy Hands, IIRC, the discussion about who would succeed Honor as Steadholder Harrington covered that without the explicit directive of the original,
clones are not considered to be the original person.

Yep. If the author had themselves cloned the clone would (under the Boewulf code) be considered a child of the author. (If the cloning wasn't done under the direction of the author then the clone has no automatic legal rights to the author's stuff or estate). So in a life + 70 copyright scenario the clone desert change the equation any more than a non-clone child would have.

Now cryogenic suspension might be a different was to screw with the rules. if your frozen your aren't dead, or at least can be revived. I'm sure the legal status of cryofrozen people had to get sorted out centuries ago in the honorverse but there's been no reason for RFC to cover it. But possibly evil corporate lawyers could convince an author to get cryofrozen before death to extend the copyright indefinitely. (And of course prolong itself screws things up on that front)

Jonathan_S wrote:Now cryogenic suspension might be a different was to screw with the rules. if your frozen your aren't dead, or at least can be revived. I'm sure the legal status of cryofrozen people had to get sorted out centuries ago in the honorverse but there's been no reason for RFC to cover it. But possibly evil corporate lawyers could convince an author to get cryofrozen before death to extend the copyright indefinitely. (And of course prolong itself screws things up on that front)

Well, the legal precedent in our world right now is that, since you have to be legally dead before cryogenic procedures can start, the person going into the freezer will have to set up a trust fund or something similar.

In the Honorverse, something similar has happened when STL colonization was a thing: The colonists basically handed their estate over to a colony trust (in return for guaranteed land plots on the new world etc), which then managed the accumulated holdings until such time as FTL contact could be reestablished.

That being said: Copyright loses meaning when it becomes unenforceable. Right now, the only reason copyright works is because we're all stuck on one planet, and it thus becomes possible to bind everyone to a set of common rules (which may or may not work out in practice; see for example China's notoriously lax enforcement of foreign copyrights). Once civilization goes interstellar, with the only point of contact being the occasional starship crossing the void, Copyright is only enforceable as an ancillary thing in a greater trade network. Assuming that a colony is self-sufficient, the usual incentives used today to force nations to agree to mutual copyright enforcement schemes fall away.

Now, once something like the Solarian League emerges, those instruments become available once more, but even then: The distances and time lags involved make it very hard to justify expending effort on off-world enforcement of copyright. Today's justification is that copyright circumvention constitutes theft, a loss of revenue for the rights holder, but what does, say, Montanan law enforcement care about damages inflicted on a producer of terran sitcoms?

The E wrote: Today's justification is that copyright circumvention constitutes theft, a loss of revenue for the rights holder, but what does, say, Montanan law enforcement care about damages inflicted on a producer of terran sitcoms?

"Come and knock on our door..."

JohnRoth wrote:

Fox2! wrote:In the year 1920 PD, is a certain mouse still copyrighted?

Is the most evil transtellar not Technodyne, nor Axelrod, nor even Manpower, but WDE (Successors)(Pty) LTD?

Heh.

They'd have to rewrite the entire basis of intellectual property rights in literary properties for that to be possible. In reality, I don't think so. There are already people who are pointing out that "life of author plus 70 years" violates the spirit of the copyright clause in the US Constitution, which says: "for a limited time."

What Disney is really afraid of is someone doing "Brokeback Willie."

They've extended the copyright duration before, apparently for the mouse.

What they really need to do is permit the conversion of copyright to trademark. That would permit Disney to protect their mouse (something I find quite reasonable) without having to protect everywhere their mouse appears (something I find unreasonable.)

Actually, I wouldn't mind an infinite-duration copyright if it had a use-or-lose to it. To maintain a copyright you must continue to have the product for sale at no more than a small multiple of the original inflation-adjusted price. Successor similar versions count for this purpose but you can't just copy the name onto new material. (Consider applying this to our machines: MsDos would have lapsed, Win 3.x would have lapsed, Win 9x would have lapsed but Win 10 is a successor to XP, it wouldn't have lapsed.)

Loren Pechtel wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:Heh.

They'd have to rewrite the entire basis of intellectual property rights in literary properties for that to be possible. In reality, I don't think so. There are already people who are pointing out that "life of author plus 70 years" violates the spirit of the copyright clause in the US Constitution, which says: "for a limited time."

What Disney is really afraid of is someone doing "Brokeback Willie."

They've extended the copyright duration before, apparently for the mouse.

What they really need to do is permit the conversion of copyright to trademark. That would permit Disney to protect their mouse (something I find quite reasonable) without having to protect everywhere their mouse appears (something I find unreasonable.)

Actually, I wouldn't mind an infinite-duration copyright if it had a use-or-lose to it. To maintain a copyright you must continue to have the product for sale at no more than a small multiple of the original inflation-adjusted price. Successor similar versions count for this purpose but you can't just copy the name onto new material. (Consider applying this to our machines: MsDos would have lapsed, Win 3.x would have lapsed, Win 9x would have lapsed but Win 10 is a successor to XP, it wouldn't have lapsed.)

The mouse IS trademarked.

That is separate from the Copyright of a mouse film

WDC has has also trademarked the duck, the dog, the mermaid, and others.

It is the TRADEMARK is what prevents others from making a doll of the mouse without permission.

Copyright law says the early mouse films can be reproduced and sold commercially without permission.

There is a grey area as to how much the trademark law and copyright law overlap. Some legal scalars say that trademark law rules and you can't sell old mouse films because of the mouse trademark. Other legal scalars say that copyright law rules and you can. I am not aware of any case where the principal has gone to test in court, either for the mouse or for anything else where trademark and copyright overlap. (the mouse is powerful, and since no one wants to take him on, they all stop short of court.)

Fox2! wrote:In the year 1920 PD, is a certain mouse still copyrighted?

Is the most evil transtellar not Technodyne, nor Axelrod, nor even Manpower, but WDE (Successors)(Pty) LTD?

JohnRoth wrote:Heh.

They'd have to rewrite the entire basis of intellectual property rights in literary properties for that to be possible. In reality, I don't think so. There are already people who are pointing out that "life of author plus 70 years" violates the spirit of the copyright clause in the US Constitution, which says: "for a limited time."

What Disney is really afraid of is someone doing "Brokeback Willie."

Loren Pechtel wrote:They've extended the copyright duration before, apparently for the mouse.

What they really need to do is permit the conversion of copyright to trademark. That would permit Disney to protect their mouse (something I find quite reasonable) without having to protect everywhere their mouse appears (something I find unreasonable.)

Actually, I wouldn't mind an infinite-duration copyright if it had a use-or-lose to it. To maintain a copyright you must continue to have the product for sale at no more than a small multiple of the original inflation-adjusted price. Successor similar versions count for this purpose but you can't just copy the name onto new material. (Consider applying this to our machines: MsDos would have lapsed, Win 3.x would have lapsed, Win 9x would have lapsed but Win 10 is a successor to XP, it wouldn't have lapsed.)

Actually, my thinking for a long time has been to create a new intellectual property right in a literary universe that works much like copyright - you can't place a story in that universe without permission, just like you can't make a derivative work without permission.

You want to write a Victorian detective novel? Go right ahead, just don't include Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, 221 B Baker Street, Inspector Lestrade, Professor Moiaraty (sp?). Assuming, of course, that the owners of the IP had kept it in force by creating new works and keeping them in print (or available).

The right would spring into existence when the creator makes a second work in the same universe.

darrell wrote:The mouse IS trademarked.

That is separate from the Copyright of a mouse film

WDC has has also trademarked the duck, the dog, the mermaid, and others.

It is the TRADEMARK is what prevents others from making a doll of the mouse without permission.

Copyright law says the early mouse films can be reproduced and sold commercially without permission.

There is a grey area as to how much the trademark law and copyright law overlap. Some legal scalars say that trademark law rules and you can't sell old mouse films because of the mouse trademark. Other legal scalars say that copyright law rules and you can. I am not aware of any case where the principal has gone to test in court, either for the mouse or for anything else where trademark and copyright overlap. (the mouse is powerful, and since no one wants to take him on, they all stop short of court.)

Not to mention that pretty much all of the major and minor media companies will side with the mouse on this kind of issue helps a lot in keeping anyone other then them from trying to profit on their work.

I'm more interested in the copyright implications of Prolong.

How does copyright work when the original creator is now 300+ years old and still going strong? This would be the equivalent of Mozart still writing concertos today and his ENTIRE back catalogue would still be in his personal control. This will really challenge copyright as up until now the life of the creator in no more than one or two generations before people can re-interpret the work etc. In a prolong society you could be looking at 10-12 generations of rights guarantee.

darrell wrote:The mouse IS trademarked.

That is separate from the Copyright of a mouse film

WDC has has also trademarked the duck, the dog, the mermaid, and others.

It is the TRADEMARK is what prevents others from making a doll of the mouse without permission.

Copyright law says the early mouse films can be reproduced and sold commercially without permission.

There is a grey area as to how much the trademark law and copyright law overlap. Some legal scalars say that trademark law rules and you can't sell old mouse films because of the mouse trademark. Other legal scalars say that copyright law rules and you can. I am not aware of any case where the principal has gone to test in court, either for the mouse or for anything else where trademark and copyright overlap. (the mouse is powerful, and since no one wants to take him on, they all stop short of court.)

I'm no intellectual property lawyer but my thought would be that a trademark shouldn't prevent you from distributing a complete unaltered copy of a work whose copyright had lapsed. After all there shouldn't be any market confusion, it is Disney's Steamboat Willie; simple not sold by Disney.

But if you edited it to take off the Disney attribution, or reedited it to change the story, then there's a much stronger case that that's unauthorized use of their trademarked characters. And I certainly see where Disney has a legitimate interest in preventing knock-off Mickey Mouse films; as they may be of substandard quality or feature activities that aren't appropriate for the image Disney want to present - that's where their trademarks on their characters prevent unsanctioned use of them in new works.

But who knows if the courts would make the same determination that I would