Turner grabs public domain movies
p2pnet.net News View:- A Variety.com article discusses how Turner Classic Movies has negotiated the copyright to six RKO Radio movies from the 1930s.
But there’s an obvious question: Aren’t these works in the public domain?
The answer is that they are in the public domain in Canada, given we have a fixed term of 50 years from the date of publication.
Any movie published prior to 1956 was in the public domain as of January 1 of this year, and is now available for cultural recycling.
The answer for countries like the USA is more complex, and there are tables of copyright terms you can look at. The question seems to hinge on whether it was published with a copyright notice, and whether the copyright had been renewed.
Demanding that copyright “shall not be subject to any formality”, such as registration or renewal, was one of the major flaws in the Berne Convention, and is likely one of the reasons the USA took until 1989 to ratify.
I wonder if, since Industry Canada has recognized the value of clarifying when Generic Drug manufacturers can build upon past patented creativity, whether they’ll see the value of similarly simplifying copyright term.
Movies being at publication date+50 years is long but clear, while the recent proposed change of photography from date taken+50 to life of unknowable author+50 is a drastic backwards move.
We also need to be thinking, as a country with negotiating at WIPO, to fix some of the outdated clauses of the Berne convention.
Now that we’ve digital technologies, it makes far more sense to have a registration and renewal system such that we can catalogue the small number of works which are still under copyright protection, rather than trying to create databases of the vast majority of human creativity which is in the public domain.
Note: Canada ratified Berne in 1928, 61 years earlier than the USA. Remember this difference when you hear claims from the USA that Canada has ‘obligations’ to quickly ratify the 1996 WIPO treaties.
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
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October 18th, 2006 at 8:58 pm
“A Variety.com article discusses how Turner Classic Movies has negotiated the copyright to six RKO Radio movies from the 1930s.”
This raises some questions for the p2p community:
Ok, if a Canadian downloads any of these six public domain (in Canada) movies from an American unauhorized source (where the movie is not in the public domain) is there copyright infringement by the American uploader or the Canadian downloader?
And what if a Canadian uploads any of these six public domain to an American is there copyright infringement by the American downloader or the Canadian uploader?
Where does the Canadian or American get the information as to the copyright status of a movie so as to know if it is ok to upload or to download without any authorization?
As a narrow minded judge (and his repeater) would say, ignorance is no excuse. Really?
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com