librarypunk - 079 - Public Domain 2023 feat. Nancy Sims

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

New Year New works in the Public Domain! This week we have Nancy Sims to talk about what’s entering the Public Domain in 2023. Of course we had to touch on AI authorship and copyright, Naruto the monkey, and a possible solution for regular weeding discourses.  Readings https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2023/ https://vimeo.com/696206791 - Sherlock Holmes presentation by Nancy https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/29/canada-steals-cultural-works-from-the-public-by-extending-copyright-terms/ Chapter 2 of Jamie Boyle’s “Public Domain” book - https://www.thepublicdomain.org/download/ - especially pages 19-23 or so, but the rest of it is also really telling about some historical thinking on exclusive IP rights. (With all the caveats about “founding fathers” that have ever caveated.)  Media mentioned https://xkcd.com/294/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(film)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_(TV_series)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Ado_About_Nothing_(1993_film)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clueless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Own_Private_Idaho  

Women hold up half the world. I'm Justin. I'm a scholar of communications librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library. My pronouns are they them? I'm Jay. I am a music library director and my pronouns are he him. I'm Nancy. I have a guest. Oh, sorry. Would you like to introduce yourself? It's fine. Happens all time. Sure. I'm Nancy. I am a copyright specialist librarian and I use, I'm ambivalent about my own pronouns. So I welcome any.

Welcome. Twitter copyright powerhouse, Nancy Sims. Legend. These are all very interesting interpretations. Yeah, we don't recognize traditional academic clout, only like how popularly we are on Twitter. So it's like we've had AJ on and that's like having a king on. Yep, yep, totally get that. I've got some Reddit, ask Reddit, ask, ask, ask, ask.

Those people are dumb, dumb. Okay. All right. Public Library seeking ideas for mystery bag, loot crates. Our public library has been doing mystery bags on and off this past year, and we've built up a bit of a following, just when we are running out of ideas of topics, items to include. In the past, we've done things like self-care with bath bombs, recipes, a bookmark tea, a small chocolate bar, and a book from the library to return, and a friend's book to keep. Another one was centered around tea with an antique free from the local church thrift store cup, a few tea bags, books, a few tea bags, books, a friend's book. Again, one from the library, one with the friends. Send around tea. We've done foreign countries, travel, a Halloween bag, et cetera.

We put these things in large paper grocery bag with a barcode of anything that has to be returned on the outside and staple them shut. We are almost out of donated bags and are thinking of switching to returnable barcoded tote bags. A library nearest does custom printed boxes, but those don't fit in our book drop. We're looking for more ideas. If you have one, please share. So what would you put in a bag? of mysteries. And this is for checking out or

to keep? I think it's a mixture of things that are to keep and then usually like a library book. So it's like a theme. So you have like a library book and then you build the bag around the book. I liked the sneaky

way of offloading friends books into these one from the friends for you to keep and one for you to return from the library. I didn't have any, like, good ideas right off the bat, but I wondered if there were ways to reuse even the kinds of things people, you know, we get donations that aren't really even things people want to use as books, like old encyclopedia sets and stuff. Like, would there be ways to turn those into things people might want for crafts or projects or, like, you know, old crossword puzzle books or something? I didn't have any good ideas when I was thinking about this, but I liked the, here's how we sneak the things back out into the other people's, uh, trash.

flow problems. Yeah, because we had the regular weeding discussion about what do people want. Yeah, I think dictionaries and stuff like that are definitely good for art books. Yeah, I actually did a like an encyclopedia like art book in like seventh grade. So definitely a fun art project where you do like a little like based on whatever letter it is of like the dictionary or encyclopedia. and then we would have to like, it's like, okay, if someone had like the letter H for theirs, then they had to like do so many like pages where they did a cool thing where each of the things they did was of that letter and they could like cut holes out and then like, you know,

paste the rest of the book and stuff. So like little arts and crafts projects, you could put stuff in there like that has to do with the letter or the subject. Could be fun. I would do the thing where you ban out the book and you cut. shapes into it. And then the bag could be structured around how to do that. So instructions on how to get the file, how to print it out, how to make book art. And that way, you could really offload a bunch of books that way because it's a mixture of a project. And it's got, I don't know

if you would probably wouldn't be able to get tools, but at least you could get instructional pamphlets to put in there. And you could get like a basic like shopping list of tools you'll need. So like an Xacto and a printer. You can print at the library. But you could just put some designs in there, just print out a bunch. And it's nice because then it can help show patrons, and even, like, teach the skill to patrons of, like, this is the types of books that libraries tend to get rid of. And also, we don't have to be so precious about material objects.

Like, just you can cut up a book. It's fine. You're not going to, like, get in trouble, right? The book police aren't going to come get you unless there are people with, like, sticks up their asses, right? And so that could be like, Patterson that nobody wants anymore. Please, please.

Right. Like it's fine. You're not going to get in trouble for like cutting up a book. And like especially like you're going to be making art out of it. Like that's super fun. Sorry, just James Patterson's ghost writer like rising out of the ether to taunt you because. Yeah.

I think there's somebody who's either on staff at my library or who's retired and now does does it as like art projects like that with books. where the fan them out and cut and fold them into cool shapes, because they've definitely been used for retirement gifts for a couple of people from our library because they make really cool things. I should figure out who that was. And I think it's, well, I mean, taking the whole idea in a slightly different direction, but like that idea of showing people who use libraries what you're saying about, like the material object isn't sacrosanct.

Look, even people in libraries, you know, even people who work there, make this kind of art. Yeah. And we'll finally outgrow the, oh no, it's a dumpster full of books. And someone called the authorities. Like, maybe we'll outgrow that as a society. But it just happened like this week again forever. So who knows.

I think that's good. We'll just do that one for today. I'll save the others for later. So that was Ask Reddit. Those people are dumb-dums. So New Year, New Public Domain entries for 2023. Quick definitions. and actually we don't have many,

we do have lawyers on once in a while, but I would like to hear a concise definition of public domain from a lawyer. I guess that's probably me. No, I'm sorry, I was talking to Sadie. The bird lawyer. Birds aren't real. The public domain means things in different contexts.

So just like for the copyright-specific issue of the public domain, the library, the one that pops up the most in libraries, the public domain is all the things that are like things that have copyrights that don't have copyrights. And that's either things that had copyrights, but the copyrights ended, or things that never had a copyright to start from. And so what are these like copyright things? You mean things that are like uncopyrightable, like government docs? Yeah. So, yeah, like things that have copyrights is a really broad category, and it does vary a little bit between different countries. But I mean things like,

books, movies, music, sculptures, other visual artworks, performing artworks, to some extent, those vary more in different countries. In some countries, databases have some rights that are copyright-like. So all of that stuff, you know, you can't tell looking at a book whether there is a copyright or not. So that's what I mean by like things that are like things that have copyrights. Most books in the last couple hundred years had a copyright at some point, but there are some books that had copyrights and don't anymore, and there are some books that never had copyrights. For example, just what you raised, US federal government works. Yeah. And what is the difference

between slash relation with like public domain and open access? Because I feel like open access is also a term people hear a lot about and we've talked a lot about on here. Yeah, for sure. One thing I sometimes will do, especially when I'm introducing this to people who may have heard lots of those, these overlapping words, is talk about the difference between public domain, open access, and public access. Ooh, yeah. Because, like, things that are publicly accessible is a super amorphous category, right? Something is publicly accessible online if you have internet access, which is a big if. But, like, things that are publicly accessible online are things that anybody can get to.

And some people confuse that for public domain. So they'll say, I found it on Google Images so it doesn't have a copyright, right? No, you found it on Google Images because it's publicly accessible. But then people also publicly accessible things, people also confuse that with an open access. So it publicly accessible, super catch-all would be like things anybody can get to. If something's on a bookstore shelf or you have to pay to get it, it's still publicly accessible. Public domain as far as copyright goes has a specific legal definition. Open access has a couple of different semi-official definitions,

and people use them interchangeably, but like the super purist IST definition is like the Budapest Open document from a while back now. I think the super purist definition of open access is things that are available for anybody with an internet connection to read, and that also are free from copyright restrictions or are available to share. In at least U.S. academia and I think most northern hemisphere, well, not even like the people who throw more money at research publishing, the countries like that, open access is often only that

research publications that are available to anybody with an internet connection. and they leave off the and they have sharing rights part of the definition. Gotcha. Which is as you say, these are all things that are really easy to confuse with each other. That's part of why is because they're all used a little bit slippery ways. Yeah. It's allowed a lot of problems with the way that the publishers are trying to retain clicks on their websites by allowing you to have an online-only version that you can share and put in your repository

rather than giving you something with an open, letting your version of record, not even the version of record, the accepted manuscript be under an open license so that you can just put it in your repository. And then they embargo the actual putting in your repository for a long time. Like access versus what can you do with it? Yep.

Yeah, basically. Yep. It's just a link that you're not allowed to download from. So it's sort of like, it's almost like controlled digital lending in a way. Yeah, putting the, you know, a lot of, it's not just publishers like we see it with, commercial streaming content.

Like, you can still download most new music in various ways, but a few people do. Like, lots of new TV and movies, you can't get in a digital file that you can have. And it's the same kinds of things are done with academic publications in the open access world where they want to make it available for people to get to, but not necessarily available for people to have their own copies that they can manipulate later reshare or share, let's say the publisher goes down. Okay. Who gets to share it after that?

Those kinds of things. Yeah, like with like public domain stuff and SARFM derailing. I feel like often it's like movies, books and music that tend to be like the big ones that people tend to like think about. And that's been a huge discussion lately with like, you know, things that have never had a physical release. So like one of my favorite horror movies, the empty man, which only came out a couple of couple years ago, but it has never had a physical release ever. It's like just streaming. And so if I

wanted to like quote, own a copy, I would have to get a pirated copy and like burn it on a disc or or or something. And so I wonder how that's going to affect public domain and however many decades or years. And even public access. Yeah. Because for example, a lot of like this is totally a little bit off topic, but it's something I think about a lot with respect to the public domain and also respect to libraries in general. If they won't let libraries even buy copies that we get to keep of movies, of music, of TV shows, of books, if we can't buy copies that we get to keep, we all know if you work in libraries for a while, you'll find some time when somebody who, some company that published something 30 years ago comes back and asks your library for your copy because they don't

have it anymore. And that's happening on a huge, sped-up cycle now where there's a bunch of shows that HBO Max, for example, was doing wild and creative animation stuff. And when they decided to shift their sort of focus under new

corporate leadership, they didn't just stop making new versions of these shows that very popular shows. They took them off the streaming services. They're not there anymore. You can't legally watch them anymore. And libraries were never able to buy copies.

And so, A, there's the public access problem, and then B, there's the public domain problem of, like, these companies aren't going to have copies in 10 years, much less whatever, 95 or something. Yeah, I imagine this is a problem that because it will affect those companies, because they might want them back in the future, that this not selling DVDs and physical copies hopefully will self-correct pretty soon. But moving on to, I also want to, well, I don't think we have to cover the burn convention right now. But that's an international copyright thing. It's an international copyright treaty that has caused our public domain to shrink and slow down and freeze for a long time. But what's new in public domain 2023? Duke University put out a nice little roundup of some stuff that is everything from 1926. that just entered the public domain this year.

So I think a big one is the film Metropolis. Bam-a-Bam-Ber-Bam. So excited. And the final Sherlock Holmes stories, which will come up again. So I believe that's all of Sherlock Holmes is now in the public domain. So I think that's going to give the estate of Doyle. They won't have as much to do, I feel. They're going to get very bored because they can't sue people, which seems to be mostly what they were interested in doing.

I think it's really interesting that the ice cream for ice cream sauce. is now finally, apparently in the public domain when I don't think anybody even realized that was not like the happy birthday song where like people just use it all the time anyways for whatever. So that was the one that surprised me on the list. I think, I mean, I'm obviously like hype about Metropolis, especially because like the film history of Metropolis and how many quote versions of Metropolis that there are. Like even though it's like, okay, like, yeah, there's if there's like restorations or additions those are still in copyright but with metropolis what even is the original print because like lost footage of it was found out like i don't know like

argentina or something like 10 years ago and there's so many different cuts of it that like i don't know if we know what the original cut of metropolis even is and so i find that one really fun and then the jazz singer i also find it really fun since that's like the quote quote like first talky and um you know singing in the rain is like about that transition into hollywood and babylon which i did not like, but just came out, is about that as well. And so I wonder what that being in the public domain will do about like films commenting on that era in Hollywood, for example. And that's what I have to say. It'll definitely make film courses easier in the next 10 years or so because it'll actually be films people want to study. Most of the stuff now is not something you

would use in a film class. But as we get into like the 30s and 40s, it'll actually be films people want to study because right now it's kind of like silent era. stuff only. No, it's not. He said he also works a shit in film classes in college. I was going to throw in there that actually, at least in the U.S., most viewing of film in classes and or for educational use doesn't have to wait until it's in the public domain. But it is true that for things like public showings or like more expanded access to the historical films, like one of the reasons there aren't extant copies of Metropolis that are, we're sure the original is part, well, I don't know for sure that this is true of Metropolis. This is actually true for lots of other

film is like nobody legally could make copies of it and the people who had copies of it didn't keep their copies in good shape. So there aren't like it's, it's to a certain extent copyright protection is is really good for creators. And then at a certain point, Copyright protection actually makes it more difficult for works to survive sometimes. And I think that that's really true for some of the early film history. So I'm a big fan of more copies keeping things safer and with things coming out of the public domain, coming into the public domain out of term protection, some of those early film history things more people will have access to and then more people will be able to make and hopefully preserve copies in the long run.

Yeah, there are just so many examples of like, I think it's like, It's the passion of Joan of Arc where it's like the version we have is not actually like the original intended version because it was like destroyed on purpose or something. And we have like some sort of like extra extra cut copy or something that wasn't intended to actually be the thing because the original cut of it was destroyed or something. And it's still like one of the most perfect beautiful films ever fucking made. But yeah, instances of that where it's like if someone didn't have like a reel of this in their closet or. or something that we might not ever, you know, we would have lost this film. Sorry, I really like film history. Yeah, well, it also makes things easier for distance learning, too, if it's just in the public domain, because a lot of things with film classes is,

can you get it streaming? Can you get the DVD? If you have the DVD, if it's an online class, then how do you copy the DVD? How do you stream it? And, like, that raises so many copyright problems that people just don't do it. So it'll be easier for at least the more films

from the 20th century that get into. to the public domain will just be easier to just put out into like your syllabus and people can just go watch it on YouTube. Yeah. And for people who aren't like taking an officially enrolled course, right? There's lots of people who aren't taking classes who should be able to get at these things. And that'll be great. That's one of the wonderful things when things become more shareable in the public domain.

It's like, you know how many times I had to watch Metropolis in one semester in different classes in college in one semester? So now we're getting to the era where like it's big. ones, you know. Yeah, that's what I was saying. I was surprised that nothing, no sound compositions entered the public domain, which seemed strange to me. There were, there were written compositions that you can make identical to the recordings, but the recordings didn't enter the public domain. Rubbing my grubby hands together about music copyright. It shows how few things were, I guess, in the public domain, or does it have to do with the new music copyright law?

No, this has a whole bunch of little moving pieces, and I do not claim to understand all of them. I'm like, I've said this before. Music copyright is its own subspecialty, partly because the business practices in commercial music production have evolved so that there's all these kinds of things that people talk about as copyright things that actually have no basis in statutory law. So if you read the law, there's nothing, there's, if you've ever heard of sync licenses, there's this thing that everybody in music, in music, treats as a definite copyright right is the right to control synchronization of your music to a video picture. Like if your music is used in a movie soundtrack, it's because they have a sync right from you. There's no statutory basis for that. So there's a billion business practices like that in music copyright. But there's also the actual code for music copyright in the statute. The section

that is about music copyright is almost as long as the right. rest of the U.S. copyright code. So I, when we get into the thicket of music copyright, I go, but there's one thing that I can tell you for sure here. Sound recordings weren't covered by federal copyright law at all until the 1976 Act took effect and the Act took effect on January 1st of 1978. No sound recordings had any federal copyright before then. Some- Some states had some states had some protections for sure. But then there have been some laws recently that have tried to reach back and normalize some of those pre-76 sound recordings. And that's where it gets into a level of detail that I don't have a good track of. But it sounds like maybe Jay does. I mean, I do not have a law degree. I took a copyright class in college. But I was working in a music library in college with Kathleen Delarenti. as my boss. Then that's how I got interested in music copyright because of her. And then her

husband does like, put like fair use music. And she was like doing stuff with my best friend as like a case study for like teaching students like copyright and putting their music up on streaming and selling it and whatnot. And so like that's what got me interested in copyright was music copyright. So I don't claim to understand a lot of it. But I know how convoluted it is and how each different aspect of like a composition, like, has its own, like, copyright nonsense. And, like, yeah, no, because now I'm just going to go off about that one, like, Bridgewater entertainment versus N.W.A., whatever case that makes me mad. And also I'll shut out now. Let's go into Sherlock Holmes. So for a while, Sherlock Holmes was used as an example of things that are

of a work that is partially in the public domain. So you could use traits of the for works that were already in the public domain. And then as other parts later on, you were not allowed to use. I can't remember, Nancy, if you were making a point that that was always kind of dubious in terms of, is this just a general detective or like archetype kind of person? Did you want to talk about that a little bit? Because this still has in effect for like Superman. Yep.

Yeah. So it's a, it's a place where like if you read sort of the, the, the, the how the law is supposed to work stuff about U.S. copyright law. And I'm being real specific about U.S. copyright law here because I think other countries do some of this, but not quite the same way we do. Partly because other countries have had more consistent terms of copyright for a longer time. We've changed our term of copyright a bunch of times. So it sort of matters whether various things were published on certain dates more in the U.S. than it does in some other countries. If you look at how copyright law is supposed to work, characters in theory didn't get a copyright.

Ideas don't get a copyright. At some point, a character is unique enough that it will have a copyright. U.S. law has actually evolved on this point, on these points. There's a whole bunch of different cases that you can point to that are like, there's cases about like an ad that doesn't actually say James Bond. at any point, but is like somebody who looks like a tuxedo wearing kind of spy in a fancy car and sort of very strongly implies James Bond. It may even be in and Aston Martin. I'm not sure. And it's in an advertisement and they didn't license the character. And so there were there were these, there's been

cases like that over mostly in the 20th century of trying to say like what is it that is copyrightable about a character versus what's just an idea. Sherlock Holmes is a good, example, superheroes are also really good examples. What's kind of resulted is you can sort of talk about character traits as having copyrights. So things that are like identifiably, Superman is a superhero with super strength who is of, you know, non-Earth origin. That is from the very original Superman publications. But Superman didn't fly originally. That got added later. And so there's actually, there's been case law a lot of discussions around Superman, like different people control different versions of Superman. With the Sherlock Holmes stuff,

it didn't matter very much in the U.S. Well, it did a little bit. There was this very long period because we changed our copyright terms for a couple of times where we froze our public domain. And so everything published prior to 1923, all published work. from prior to 1923 were in the public domain and published works from after 1923 were out of the public were covered by copyright that there was I may have been over 20 years I'm not sure exactly how long the period was that that was frozen it was a long long time a lot of people in libraries still think that 1923 is like this magic year and most of the home stories were published before then so for a long time 1923 was the only relevant year.

And in the UK, I'm pretty sure. This is something where I was not quite sure in that video and I'm still not quite sure of the details here. I think that Sherlock Holmes has not had a copyright under UK law for quite a while. But there was a long period when the only point of contention under U.S. law was 1923. Pre-1923 stories definitely didn't have a copyright. So you definitely could use those for. a movie or for a book that's a takeoff on Sherlock Holmes. They didn't have a copyright. But there were also these books from after 1923 and the Conan Doyle estate would go after people and say,

you owe us licensing fees. And people would be like, but I'm not talking about the post-1923 character traits. And sometimes that would get you out from under it. And sometimes it wouldn't. There's, again, cut me off if I get too rambly here. But there was a declaratory judgment case where somebody who really wanted to have this like clear once and for all went to court and said, I want to do stuff with pre-23 homes. Am I allowed to do that? And the court said, yes, you are allowed to do that. That was fairly late in the time period of the Conan Doyle estate kind of messing around with this pre-23, post-23 distinction. But that was like 2013. Yeah, that was a pretty, yeah, 2013 sounds right, pretty recent case. And the reason I say it's fairly late in that is,

that the 1923 year unlocked unfroes in 2019. So it's been moving forward since then. And as we're talking about today, the very last Holmes story said there were, I think maybe four post-23 stories. One unlocked almost immediately. Two were later and unlocked like last year. And then this last one unlocks this year.

And so now there is absolutely no claim that any Holmes traits have, any copyrights under U.S. law. Bring back Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd century. You can do it now. You don't have to pay anyone. Well, arguably, some of the people who have made things based on Sherlock Holmes, like, right? Like, there's like a, I don't know, there was a Michael Cain movie parody when I was a kid. Like, there've been a whole bunch of Holmes parodies.

Like, at some point, Holmes is so pervasive. Like, if you start making something that is based on homes but is a parody, are you at some point starting to draw from some of those later? works that were parodies of the earlier Holmes works and will they be able to come after you for yeah I don't know wasn't there like a whole deal with that like Enola home show they the Conan Doyles in the state tried to do something with Enola Holmes I don't remember exactly what they were attempting with that one because I'm pretty sure that he was like nice or something that was the trait he was nice when he hadn't been yeah they were aiming for something from a post 23 story and it was a

Like, they had to have known it was only a couple of years until all the stories were out anyway. So it was a little bit of a last gasp on their part, I think. I'd be interested to see if they end up trying for trademark control of anything related to homes, because they certainly could have some elements of like, we're the only authentic homes kind of sources. That's something that's not as timebound. Yeah. You mentioned what's copyrightable and eligible subject matter. there is, since these AI tools have been coming out in the past couple of years that are very powerful and causing a lot of people to, I think, prematurely freak out about certain things.

But, yeah, I mean, it's going to immediately impact things. Public domain and AI generated content. You put a little note in here. Yeah. And that also, I mean, that includes things that are like, what's in the public domain that gets created now? And is that including AI generated content? And then I put a note that the Naruto. monkey selfie case.

The only reason that was ever, because everyone always talks about like, oh, it's a monkey. He owns the copyright. But that was always going to be about AI. That was always going to be can a non-human because law only impacts persons. So if it doesn't impact a monkey, would it impact an artificial intelligence because they're not persons? And the law doesn't bind non-persons. You can't put an elephant on trial even if you're Edison, right?

And I'd be curious to see, like, who the code writers are. and what role they play. But that's just me. Remind me what this Naruto monkey case is again, because I saw that note was like... The monkey who took a selfie. Yeah, there was a case a few years ago where a picture started circulating online. It's like it's a really eye-catching picture. And it's not just eye-catching, it's sort of mind-grabbing. It's a monkey who took a picture of himself or herself that became a point of contention later.

Don't misgender the monkey. Well, wait, okay, okay. And then later as to whether the photographer's story was, whether he had changed his story or not. In any case, it's a high quality photo taken with a high quality camera. The original post said something like, I left my camera out while I was doing something else, and I came back to find the monkey playing with it, and this photo resulted. And probably almost as soon as any copyright nerds looked at it, they said, if the monkey took it and you didn't intend for them to take it, there's,

absolutely no chance there's a copyright in this picture. You can use tools to create a photo. So potentially, if you intended for the monkey to take the picture, then the monkey is a tool you are using to express your own creative impulses. And so the immediate change of the story was I intentionally left my camera out for the monkey to play with it. And I'm totally, I agree that this was absolutely always a little bit about AI, but also one of the main, one of the main litigation parties was the PETA, the people for the ethical treatment of animals. So there was a little bit of some other kinds of sort of setting up legal arguments going on here. It wasn't just about copyright, but it was always and interestingly with potential for things like AI. And one of the

reasons I talked about eligible subject matter in talking about Sherlock Holmes is because there are some things where even when there is a copyright, the people who own Sherlock Holmes don't get to own them. And that's like ideas are not copyrightable. They're never, you're, the idea of a scientific detective was never owned. You could always, you know,

write a detective who used modern scientific methods to investigate things. And, and indeed, that has become a whole genre of detective literature. The idea of that kind of detective was never owned. There are other things that are never owned. And there's been a longstanding rule in U.S. law, at least,

but probably other places, that the source of a copyright is creative expression and artistic choices, and of course only a human can make those. And that's why there was longstanding rules that animal-created works can't have a copyright. Potentially you could use an animal as a tool with intent. I mean, actually, like, some sort of studio-created artworks kind of are like that, right? Human animals are used as tools. Chihuli, for example, is the glass, really popular glass artist.

Chihulli hasn't made any of Chihulli's glass sculptures in many, many years. There's a whole team of people who built them. But the artistic driving force is this artist, supposedly. So sometimes humans are tools for other people's art. But that's one of the things that's a big bone of contention with AI-generated visual art text. I haven't seen or heard really compelling music yet. but I bet it's coming. And there's currently some discussion at the Copyright Office.

I think there's maybe even a preliminary opinion, is AI-generated art copyrightable if a human didn't make the creative choices. There's a billion different arguments about places humans might have made creative choices in the process of generating AI content, but there's no determinative one right now. Yeah, because it's like, I would argue that like, you know, there's code to be written and how many people wrote the code for whatever generator. And then like I saw this really good post about like when Dolly was like first hitting it big and people were doing the like, you know, shit posty type prompts of it. Like I'm going to do like Carl Marx doing like slam dunks like, you know, cool stuff like that.

And how the point wasn't the art that was made. it was showing the prompt and how funny and clever or smart the person was to come up with that prompt to then get whatever image. And so whatever image wasn't even the point. It was the prompt. And so then I would argue that like all the actual stuff that goes into making AI art is all the code that a human being wrote. And then the prompt that a human being came up with.

And anything that comes after that, like I make like generative. artwork sometimes and I have like it will come out different every single time I do it based on various factors but I still like wrote the code for it right sometimes I don't even like I don't know so it to me it's like yeah an AI quote a computer made AI art but then like who made that computer who put in the prompt so that's why the argument that like it doesn't stand up like it doesn't have copyright, just doesn't, I don't know, make sense to me, but... Well, this is, so this is something like copyright nerd lawyers and this, I'm like, I don't just mean copyright nerds and I don't just mean nerdy lawyers. I mean copyright nerd lawyers.

It's a small slice, but I know a lot of them. This is the sort of thing we'll sit around and talk about. You've hit on two of the main arguments for why AI generated artworks, why the works might be copyrighted, and there's two immediate counters, one for each of them. One is, if the code is the human's creative contribution, then the code is copyrightable. But the output that comes out of that code is no more copyrightable by the code writer than files that come out of Photoshop belong to the people who wrote the Photoshop code. That's one argument. And then for the discussion about the prompt generation is the creative work,

well, then maybe the prompt is copyrightable, except there's actually already some law and rulings on shortphrase. So maybe, maybe, maybe not. Yeah. Is the prompt enough creative contribution to say that the resulting artworks are copyrightable by the person who made the prompt if the artworks are not predictable by the person who made the prompt? And they're not, right? Like you can't, you put in the prompt and you get multiple things back or depending on, but I'm thinking about most of the visual art generators. but you can't predict what it's going to be.

So you can't really say that the prompt was your creative contribution to the exact work that came out. Like this is going way down the rabbit hole. Backing up, though, a half step, right? Because a lot of people, the idea that a new thing, like the artwork that comes out of a visual image generator, could not have a copyright, even though there was work involved, even though there was somebody creative thinking about producing this thing, is a hard, idea. And so I'll go back to an example that one of my favorite copyright teachers, Susan Cornfield, who's a practitioner in Michigan who taught an advanced seminar that I took, she posed to us early on, is if you have a camera and you knock it off of a table and it takes a picture on the way down, like the shutter release gets triggered as it's falling to the

floor, there is a picture, but were there actually creative choices made in the the creation of that picture. You know, my, my, after many, too many discussions about that, my take on that is no. And Naruto is kind of the same. Like, if the original story is true, then no human made choices resulting in that picture. AI generated is more complicated. There are absolutely human choices involved. But are they determinative of the art that came out? Not from everything I understand about how AI models work and machine learning, really, not AI. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a conflation of, of what is art? Like, is AI art art? I would say, yeah, obviously. But art is not automatically

copyrightable, but we're used to it being automatically copyrightable because of the way it's produced. And so we go, oh, it is art, therefore it is copyrightable. But copyright is this weird, like, you should read, everyone should read April Hathcock's paper on copyright as sort of a patriarchal institution. And it's very much, it assumes there is one author. One creative genius, which is not how creativity works. And it assumes that's why all these weird things about like intention and difference, all that stuff matters. I remember getting into it one time someone needed to take photos of slides, but slides like dissection slides. And those do they have creativity in them because you have to create them in such a way that they are viewable in a microscope.

And so we had to get into like sculpture copyright. And it's like, well, if you took a picture of a sculpture, do you control the copyright of the picture? And this is like an OER discussion. So like, could we put this on an OER, basically? Is we wanted to take photos of these slides? And we wanted to. So if you took the photo, could you do it?

Is there enough originality in the photo? It was like a big thing that came up. And I don't think we came to like a conclusion. Capitalism is the problem, as always, with all of this. In many ways, right? One of the things that I, this is the same kind of like ideas about how things work crashing together because they're in conflict. One of the things I'll talk about is really similar to what you're talking about with like microscope slides. Scientific figures.

So ideas aren't copyrightable and facts aren't copyrightable. And there is in fact an element of this whole like what's not eligible for copyright called the, this is not in any of our notes as we planned this episode. I apologize, but there's this idea called the idea expression dichotomy. And this is absolutely things that April Hathcock was talking about. Like, we have this idea that you can separate ideas from how people express them. There's all kinds of problematic constructs underlying this. But there's also something called the merger doctrine in U.S. law, which is if there's only one way to express an idea, then you can't have the copyright around that either.

And that's where we get to things like equations are not supposed to have copyright. rights, chemical molecules, right? You can't have a copyright in what the actual composition of a chemical molecule is. You usually can't even get patents in something that basic. So I run into this issue with academics a lot where, like, I say things like this diagram in your paper is of, about facts, or this diagram in your paper is representing an idea. And because of that, there isn't a copyright. I'm usually bringing this up because somebody has transferred away the copyright in their work. They have given it away to a publisher. And then they want to reuse their figure later. And they're like, can I, do I have to get permission, this and that? And I will bring up this idea that I don't think there is a copyright here.

There's no, this is a, this is a, this is a, and it's a figure in a paper. So it has to have a copyright. I'm like, it's a figure in a paper that conveys only factual information. and factual information is not copyrightable or a table is one of the things that will happen. So there are ways that some of those things have can get copyrights, but people are so used to this idea that it looks like X, therefore it has a copyright, that when you start saying, yeah, it looks like X, it doesn't have a copyright, that's hard. And also, it doesn't have a copyright sounds to a lot of people like there's no value here, there's no creative value here, there's no discovery value here. And of course, that's not it at all, right? This is being very idealistic about copyright. The reason ideas don't have copyrights is because they're so important that we don't want to give anyone exclusive control of them.

But that's very hard for people to reconcile with this really broad system we have where so many things do have copyrights and have exclusive control. When you say, I don't think there is a copyright in this thing that you produced, and that's good. because it's so important that everybody should get to use it, that runs up against the whole lot of presumptions that most people have about why they should control and own and even monetize their research and creative output that's really challenging. Has anything like that ever affected? Because I feel like when we talk about the public domain,

like public domain day and it's always like here are the works, the old things entering copyright. This sort of like vague nebulous, like does this count? Is this a thing that like looks? like it should have copyright but isn't or is this an idea or is this copyrightable? Like have there been instances of like when public domain day is coming around and we're not sure if something is about to enter the public domain or it has already or anything? There's a few things like that.

Most of those kinds of like we're not sure if there is still a copyright. Most of those are actually about technicalities about things like registration or whether there was a copyright symbol on it in the right place at the right time. Gotcha. Usually these conceptual things are, they're usually left a little bit more in sort of an interpersonal negotiation space or just in like a, I'm trying to decide what the next, what the right path for dealing with a problem is. Do I decide to treat it like it has a copyright or not? There is one thing, I only know this because I wrote about it, there's a case several years ago

where a researcher copied some equations and diagrams from another researcher and published them before the person who had originated this research. And there's a court case about it. And the court case, they never, they try arguing copyright. And unfortunately, they don't have enough teeth. There's not enough there there in the copyright. It's an equation primarily. And it's figures that don't, that don't have, they don't have, quote, creative expression. The figures are very factual. So the judge, when I wrote about it, I said something like this. Like, you can read it in the opinion. that the judge wishes the judge could do something with copyright here because it's a clear injustice. It's clearly somebody swiped somebody else's stuff and published it before the first

person could. But they're arguing copyright. And this is really, really not the kind of stuff that has a copyright. So it's new work. It's valuable, you know, research. It's definitely a ton of effort on the part of the researchers. So the judge wants to be able to use copyright. But he can't. There's really no basis in law for claiming that these things have a copyright and the copyright was infringed. And unfortunately, the lawyers didn't argue anything else. And one of the unfortunate ways that the law works is you have to argue all of the possibilities at once. If you don't say they infringed my copyrights and this was unjust enrichment and this was, there's a whole bunch of other sort of non-copyright things you could argue about this kind of stuff. Fraud could have been in something

they could argue in that case. If you don't argue those all at once, you lose them. You have to, you don't get to say, I think it's a copyright problem and lose on the copyright problem and go back for a fraud attempt. So that's something where I know of a specific instance where this new work, valuable work, research effort, all very interesting. And yet there isn't a copyright here. This is in the public domain. You don't get to argue a copyright infringement here. It should move on because we could talk about AI and what's copyrightable all day. Canada recently and somewhat very quietly has just put a pause on their public domain. So I wasn't aware that Canada had been using this life of the author plus 50 years for a lot longer. So basically

they're already dealing with life of the year plus life of the author plus 50 years. And we won't have to worry about that until post 78 stuff as far as I can tell. More or less. Basically what happens is because this went into effect at the end of December, their copyright from this year for the next 20 years, nothing will enter the public domain for another 20 years. So they've got nothing new coming in because everything has retroactively gotten an extra 20 years. So there's going to be 20-year dry spell in Canada for public domain work because it's keeping in line with the Byrne Convention. So I think that's a pretty big deal. I mean, I heard about it coming up and I knew that there are people trying to stop this bill, but it was basically already done.

Because when you talk about international trade agreements, it's just done deals, you know? Well, this is like on that particular front, this is a really interesting one because burn, I actually do not have these years, you know, on the tip of my brain, right? Byrne was always measured in the life of the author. And the burn convention started in the 1880s. So burn signatory countries have measured in the. the life of the author for a very long time. I don't know when Canada started using Life of the Author Plus 50 years as their term. And I also don't know off the top of my head when the Byrne Convention

switched to Life of the Author plus 70. We had Life Plus 50 for a little while in compliance with Byrne. And then in 1996, we upped it to Life of the Author plus 70 also in compliance with burn. What it means to like those later changes that from like from 50 to 70, sometimes people say like talk about like the Mickey Mouse copyright extension like Disney is the fault of all of this. It's not actually only Disney, right? It actually is that these other countries have other models of how copyright works and so they think it should be longer. And yet it's also something that corporate content holders really exploit to try to expand things. So what's really interesting is that we upped our term to Life Plus 70 in 1996.

Canada has been resisting that until now. So they've been under international pressure to lengthen their copyright terms for a really long time. And they didn't and they didn't and they didn't and then they did. One of the things that I haven't followed it super closely, one of the things that is going on is that that was something where the U.S. was putting significant pressure on them to extend the terms. I'm not quite sure why they agreed to retroactive extensions, because that is a particularly stupid thing. We did it. It wasn't great when we did it. And it doesn't make any sense under any of the justifications for how copyright works, but it happens when people extend the terms. Yeah, I imagine a lot of the pressure in the 90s, especially, I don't know about

the history of the Burn Convention. But I imagine what happened was a lot of the time. It's a lot of the lot of this was, so when the burn convention first came about, the United States was still like a pirate nation. So we still were copying a lot of things from the UK. We stole novels. We were doing all this kind of stuff. Now, we tend to associate that with China. And I think there's definitely some Chinese global competitiveness that, okay, we're on the top in the IP game. Therefore, we're going to extend the IP game. Because I'm not used to international conventions that are not just puppets of the U.S. So I assumed when the Byrne Convention said 20 more years, it's because the United States wanted 20 more years. So in this case, maybe it isn't, and that's why it was so

strange to me. I think there's more than just the U.S. that wanted 20 more years. But I also think that it's really interesting that Canada resisted the pressure to extend things. Like whatever pressures were put to bear to get the U.S. to extend it, which is to say, you know, definitely a lot of US-based corporate copyright holders, like those pressures showed up and were, you know, were catered to in the 1990s for the U.S. And it took Canada another 30 plus years to cave to those pressures. Unfortunately, and there have been a bunch of attempts, even just in the last few years, to get them to extend it.

And they have managed to avoid it until now. So, unfortunately, that one went pretty quickly. I think we should talk about economic rights of copyright systems. For instance, the way that we talk about copyright, especially in the United States, is about the protection of authors and the protection of creators. And in the Jamie Boyle's public domain book, which I read a long time ago, and I went over chapter two, Nancy's recommendation. And a lot of it was in the Constitution itself, it's framed as to promote economic growth generally. So the progression of sciences and useful arts, rather than the economic. benefits that accrue to individuals as a property right, as like a natural property right.

And there's actually some really interesting stuff for Thomas Jefferson is talking about, like, look, property law, man, is just like a construct. It's just what society deems useful. And like, that's basically the same stuff that he was, that Marks built off of, he was building off lock and saying, yeah, these are just laws that exist for the benefit of people. And so if we didn't want copyright to be longer, we can just not do it. if we want copyright to cover fewer things. There's nothing in the Constitution actually makes us do that.

Really, all of our copyright law seems to mostly come from international agreements at this point. Yeah, absolutely. It's really interesting the places where there are these differences in the theories of what copyright is about internationally. Because, like, when you read about U.S. for all that I hate this idea of like framers intents, like, that's not how it should ever have worked. But it is interesting to look at what people were thinking about when they wrote things like, you know, the clause in the constitution that patent and copyright come out of. And it's real clear that all of them thought that in general monopolies were a bad thing.

Like that's, well, I don't know all of them, but that was widely accepted conventional wisdom at the time. Monoplies are bad. The nation of Cory Doctoros creating a government. Exactly, right? Monopoly are bad. Well, I mean, monopolies are bad. They had far fewer, like monopolies are bad, but definitely we have far fewer people competing with us because, you know, women can't own businesses and people who aren't white men can't do

much and people who don't own property can't do much. Like, so there's all those kinds of problems with it. But like, when you look at it, they're all kind of going, we should do something to help protect works. That was already sort of established as a legal principle from the 1700s onward. A lot of European law had something about like there's rules about copying stuff. So there was like there's rules about copying stuff, but most of them give exclusive control to some kinds of people and usually exclusive control is bad. So what's our reasoning for why we should give anybody exclusive control? And in Europe, especially in France, there's a whole field of we give people control of their work through laws because of these natural rights. And

because they're the creators and there's a natural inherent connection between the creator and the work. And that's why it was always measured in lifetimes, for one thing. Whereas if you look at like those underpinnings of U.S. law, most of the people, and this is also in some of UK law, most of the discussion is kind of like, we think people, if people don't get to control their works, they get frustrated when other people profit off of them right away. Therefore, we're going to give a period of exclusive control. but it was always short. It was always super short. In early Anglo law, it was seven years renewable for 14 and then in early US law it was 14 years renewable for 28. And at a certain point in US law, it was 28 years renewable for 56 years. But it was always like these terms of years and they always ended and you, you know, for the longest one, you had to renew. Side note, multiples of

seven is an echo of the apprenticeship systems of ancient, like, guilds in the UK. Like you were an apprentice for seven years and a journey person for seven years. And then you were a free to go practice your trade on your own. Like US law was in multiple of sevens up until 1976 because of old as super antique British apprenticeship rules. Like that one always blows my mind. I was hoping it was some like hermetic like Freemason shit. Yeah.

It's wild how long things like that can persist in legal systems for absolutely no reason. But we had this theory that it was about providing economic incentives to creators that the terms should always be limited. Like almost all of the early writing about copyright in U.S. legal discussions is taken for granted that the terms should be very limited because the long-term goal is economic and other expansion and quote progress, research progress, all of those kinds of things. the public domain, like to connect it all together, right? Like the individual rights are incidental to the public domain to some degree in this economic model. Like we want more works because we want progress. That's a collective goal.

We want there to be more things for people to share and know. That's a collective goal. These protections for individuals are a tool by which we achieve that. And in the U.S. for a real long time, they were limited term, tools by which we achieve that. And they've expanded partly because of international influence, partly because of corporate influence and goals and guidance. International corporations, too. So it's not just the U.S. But it's real interesting to see how those things have developed. It's also really interesting to see where like people do bring up the rhetoric of like, this is about

economic incentives and where they don't even pretend. They're just like, it's because we want more money. Yeah. And I think a lot of people, particularly even leftists, have, a very great connection between intellectual property and labor. And that if I create this, I labor into it, I should control the fruits of my labor. And that's absolutely not the way we conceptualize copyright, really. It doesn't come from this natural right. It actually comes from this limited monopoly. Everything about, like, when I tell people I hate copyright, it's not because, like, I think

it's just bad, although I think that, too. It is just weird. It is like ghost. like telepathy levels of just like weird strange rules of like this is some idea that means something for some reason. Maybe that's why I like it. It's a cult shit. Like, maybe that's why I like it so much.

It just makes all these weird assumptions. It does. It's, it has, you know, when you can see things that cast light on how weird copyright is, those often stick out for me. The XKCD cartoon, I don't read it religiously anymore, but very popular for a long time. an online cartoon. It's like stick figures. There's one, and this is one of the great things about copyright is like, I can tell you what was in this cartoon. And under certain legal systems, that's not an infringement and on others, it could be and all those kinds of things,

doesn't matter because Randall Monroe, the creator of this comic strip, CC licenses all of it. So you can make copies of all of it. And I have embroidered them for crafts a million times and carved them on pumpkins and all kinds of things. All that aside, he did a comic that is for me one of the great, like, illuminators of how weird copyright is, is a person in a bookstore. It's just a three-panel strip, I think, reading a book and then going through one of those sensors at the doors like we have in libraries, and the sensor going, beep, beep, beep, and the last panel is somebody else saying to him, hold on a minute, you have a book in your brain, don't you? And it's like. Yeah, it's like they have chairs in Barnes & Noble. There's a cafe in there.

Like that's a thing that you can one to avoid getting into the ridiculously technical terms for all of this like when you are a creator right yes you do have a natural connection to your artwork or whatever but it's not quite like other physical property because somebody else can read your book and depending on how their brain works they could even remember it word for word in their own head and doing thought crimes and and that is definitely not something that somebody else should get to control. And if you like, even if, I don't know, I haven't thought about this super heavily in terms of sort of leftist political theory, but like if we're thinking about things that are communal and shared, right? Like, creativity is almost never an individual act. There's always communal elements to it. And also the idea, yes, I made that and it's mine to some degree, but also like, so I had

influences, but also like, you know, the ice cream, you scream for ice cream. Like, there's a bunch of songs like that. I think songs are probably one of the easiest examples where like give it 50 years, almost nobody knows where it came from anymore. If it's that easy and compelling for other people to keep in their heads, they're going to have it there. They're going to base other things on it. It's absolutely unconscious. It's a natural process. And the idea that we have all these laws that are like, no, you can't do that because that that is copying well those they all get very weird very quickly i just that's copying and it's like we're pattern matching you know we're absolutely bug-fuck pattern matching creatures so it's like at what point is that copying yeah it's like

if you create something like if you paint a painting it's like someone had to make the paint brush someone had to make the canvas unless you did it yourself but then like all of the materials that have existed since the dawn of time and matter that came together to, like, create everything that led up to that paintbrush being created. It's Vanta Black all over again. Yeah. Oh, Vanta Black. I have a beloved artist friend who has a solid, or had a solid black cat.

This is an artist friend who works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He's one of my favorite people to talk to about copyright because he has many of the I Should Control It impulses of artists. who make a living off of their art, but he also works with people who are advocating for not less protection, but different approaches to copyright. Sorry, he had a beloved all-black cat named Vantablack, named that in offense at the idea of Vantablack and all of those kinds of things.

I get pissed off any time I go to like a botanical garden and like plants are copyrighted. Because I know it's about like the genes and like someone to develop the whatever, but I'm like there shouldn't be a fucking copyright symbol next to a plant. There's probably patents, maybe trademarks. I've seen multiples. There's all sorts of shit on them. They shouldn't be copyrightable. This is a, you guys mentioned me being Twitter known.

My account's locked right now because classicists quote, the white supremacists who are interested in classical history for various reasons got interested in me earlier this week. So my account's locked right now. But if you go looking in my account for mentions of the word apples, you will find a touchpoint of mine, which is I am extremely, extremely ticked off that the University of Minnesota, for whom I work is on the forefront of intellectual property commercializing apple varietals and plant patents and trademarked names and the sweet tango, the honey crisp, there's a whole bunch of apples you've heard of because they're branded that are, you. University of Minnesota apples. And it's great. There's this whole theory that that's the important way to get them out there to the public. This is how we get university research out to the public. And yet, there are also plant varietals that the University of Minnesota developed before they went down the restrictive commercialization path. Harrelson apples are my

favorite example of those. Also developed at the University of Minnesota, not under proprietary control. Anybody can grow Harrelson's if they want to, and they're very tasty. You should grow them. I don't know. I get really frustrated at how accepted it is that commercialization is the best way for things like public research to be shared with the public. Yay, yeah, capitalism. There we go. I just have to say, as somebody from Washington, for whom apples are like our state symbol, I'm offended at Minnesota. Hey, but what we're doing, some of the research we do is cold-hearted varieties. Yeah, but believe me, the University of Washington is far ahead of us on commercializing apple varieties.

Is that where Cosmic Crisp comes from? Like half of our state is just apples, so. Cosmic Crisp is derived from Honey Crisp, I think. I love Cosmic Crisp. I like the old ones. Universities should start making new strains of weed and trademarking and patenting them. that's coming surely that is a real interesting avenue for just like not yet right not there yet but yeah right now obviously there's a whole bunch of minor actors moving in spaces like that branding around things like weed and and universities aren't in there yet because the laws aren't quite there yet but when when universities do get there are they going to wipe out all the other competitors I don't know yeah like are weed strains in the public domain are are like mushroom strains in the public domain?

Like, I'd bet that some independent entrepreneurs are filing patents on some of that stuff now, although until it's federally delisted, I don't think you can get plant patents around that kind of stuff. I'm literally looking it up and you can. Okay, there we go. Like, it seems like something, there's enough commercial activity in the space that it seems like something where there would probably already be extant patents. I mean, there are drug patents for all kinds of, you know, restricted substances. So, yeah. Especially since, like, Silicon Valley assholes are, like, into microdosing.

And so they're getting into the, like, we got to max out our productivity, whatever, by microdosing LSD and shrooms and weed and going on, like, ayahuasca trips on the weekend. Yeah, that's probably going to be surprised. of a Theranos for shrooms at some point. Evil queen. Vampire queen. Leaf Legal, the attorney. Oh, my God. I love, like, doctors and lawyers and stuff who make their whole branding, like,

around pot. Like, there was, like, I think I literally went to a doctor one time that was, like, Dr. Feel Good was, like, the name of his business. Sure. Because he was a medical marijuana, dude. I wasn't going there for that. I love all the gay doctors in L.A. Looking forward, what do you think the future of the public domain is looking like?

Is it going to be, especially when we were talking about AI and everything, are we seeing a more expansive public domain where people are going to go, okay, yeah, things just are going to fall into the public domain more? Or is it going to expand to then attract more things in copyright and therefore reduce what goes into the public domain going forward? That's like a really interesting question. So I'm going to do one thing here, which is I'm going to put the depressing thing first, right? So I used to spend a lot more time thinking about the problem of, for example, movie and TV companies not being willing to sell copies of their stuff to libraries.

Anything that's super long term, I put a little bit less mental effort into these days for a variety of reasons, among them global geopolitical instability and climate change. So I don't know. In 50 years, will there be any functioning legal systems that deal in copyright? This is an open question for me. Maybe 50 years is too short a timeline. I sure hope it is. But I hope that these are things that we are still dealing with in 50 years and 100 years. In some ways, that's a hopeful thought for me. So thinking along that line that these are things where we're going to be dealing with the repercussions for a long time to come, there's sort of two ways where copyright is, it's not just copyright, there's two things I think of as evolutionary pathways here where like overall I don't think there's going to be less control through legal systems. Both because I do think there will be some legislative type stuff kind of like what happened in Canada, right? The law was only passed a year or two ago and then now this year we've frozen the public domain in Canada. Okay, I think some of that is going to come. But one thing that's happening that's quite interesting is most of those efforts have been abandoned on like the expanding past life plus 70. I don't know too many.

I don't know. I may be being a little bit too optimistic here, but I don't think there's a lot of people putting a lot of effort into that, partly because there has been more public recognition. The copyright affects our daily lives a little bit more. And so there is more public pushback when copyright laws get produced at that higher level. There's a lot more little tinkery laws that have been passed in the last few years. There's some like the Music Modernization Act. There's like there's new things that affect small groups of rights holders.

But so I'm not so sure that legislative or even treaty type changes are going to extend copyright terms. but on terms of legal systems, contracts, service agreements, those are already a new problem, because if not new, but like a parallel problem over who gets to control and use things, because you can have contracts where if something is the sole source of materials, even if they're in the public domain, right? So like this has happened with like scanned government documents, among other places in Canada, but it sometimes happens with library collections too. like if you're the only source of the new copies of a thing that's in the public domain,

you can set your terms for how people use them. And people use contracts to set terms for how people use those. Libraries don't tend to try to like prevent much of that kind of use, but a lot of public-private partnership type things that libraries do end up where there's a commercial vendor who now has the only copy of some of our public domain materials and they are charging for use and they're producing terms of use that say, this is the only way you are allowed to use these. And then sort of parallel to that, also this,

what we already talked about, where there's more and more streaming media, where nobody except the originators ever get a copy. That's sort of like on the legal side and the system side, I don't see, I see lots of small developments that, like, I don't see there being a bigger public domain in the future. I do think there's also like some interesting sort of social, and not interpersonal, but at the personal level things.

Like, you hear people having many more people having legitimate discussions around things like, is the only ethical thing to do for streaming content that you know might be not just removed, like they might not just renew, sorry, they might not just not renew a TV show. They might remove all copies of it ever. That, like, does that mean that it's absolutely ethical to pirate things again? I lean towards yes. Not in the interdictional life necessarily, but personally, I think there's some compelling ethical arguments there, especially since often the creators of those kinds of shows don't

get, like, when the only copy disappears, they don't have a copy either. So there's more people who are aware of these kinds of things and a lot more ways people route around it too. So, like, I don't know, maybe I'm headed here towards like a cyberpunk future where like the official systems are all locked down, but then there's Max Headroom. Like, I don't know. I'm definitely dating myself by referencing Max Headroom, but I loved that show in a certain time in my life.

That was about pirate TV, among other things. Oh, yeah. And he was also in, he also played Bowser in Super Mario Bros. movie. That was Max Headroom. Same actor? VideoDrome also has pirated TV in it. I don't think it was the same actor, but it was, um, the character design was Max

Headroom. Oh, okay. I don't think I knew that. I think I actually intentionally avoided that Mario movie. I may have been old enough to be like, no. Yeah, I started watching hackers the other day and found out Johnny Lee Miller cannot do an American accent. And he never has. And he's always done it the same way, which is to yell loud.

So in elementary, the Sherlock Holmes show that he was in, when he does an American accent, he starts yelling. And that's exactly how he talks in the entire movie, Hackers, is he just yell. and that's his American accent. I haven't thought to compare those. I love hackers. Again, that's like the slice of my life when it came out. It's the first movie I owned on DVD and I owned it on DVD before I owned a DVD player because I wanted a copy of my own and it was only available in DVD at the time.

And I was like, I am buying that. And it's a terrible movie. It's a wonderful movie. And yes, Johnny Lee Miller has some limitations. as do many of the people in that movie. It's a great... Yeah, this movie everyone talks about and tricks you into watching, but it's not good. So I watched, like, Johnny Namonic.

And that's a bad movie. It's just a bad movie, but everyone's like, oh, it's so influential to cyberpunk. But it sucks. Johnny Nimonics also a weird one because I recognize that as a bad movie at the time. I only wanted to watch it because I liked looking at Giani Rives. And my father and I went to see it together. And my father doesn't like TV. or movies or anything, but he was interested in the concept.

And I think like he liked some of the ideas in the movie. Like we all recognized it was a bad movie. But I think of hackers more as like camp enjoyable. And Johnny Mnemonic is not, doesn't quite get there to me. But I can absolutely see hackers not being camp enjoyable to other people either. Is there anything with Keanu Reeves in the public domain? There, I don't think there's anything he, you know, I don't think there's any creative works in which he appears in which there's definitely no new copyrights in

them just given his age. However, one of my favorite Shakespeare adaptations is one that he's in, Much ado About Nothing from Emma Thompson. Oh yeah, that one's so good. He's so hot in it. It was her name. Actually, like- Emma Thompson. Yeah, Emma Thompson is kind of my favorite in that particular production. So, yeah, it's a good example of how the public domain can create. wonderful new artworks all the time. Everyone go watch Kenneth Braun as much to do about nothing with Emma Thompson

and Keanu Reeves and Kate Beckinsale. I was trying to come up with her last name. I like her in that one too. Dinsel Washington. Dinsel. Dinsel's in it. Densel's performance is not like it's not my favorite performance of his ever. Keanu's performance

also not my favorite performance of his ever. But he's a villain and he's sweaty and shirtless. By that point I was no longer that kind of interested in looking at to me that's the sell of point I love that movie

it's so good oh and my own private Idaho is the Henry ad it's King Henry the fourth and fifth yeah it's an adaptation of a Shakespeare as well oh I didn't know that he's out there yeah right my own private Idaho is just like

gay sex worker Henry the fourth and fifth it's incredible right it's why like the dialogue is so like strange Yeah, it's really good. There's some scenes that are almost direct quotes, and that's where you've really noticed the dialogue being. Especially the fall staff staff.

Yeah. It's so good. Yeah. Once you get towards the end, it really starts showing like, oh, okay, yeah, this goes to a fancy place. There's a conclusion happening. Like, it's, and the language gets very formal. Yeah, there was that whole, like, range of movies in the 90s and early aughts of, like, cool adaptations of classic literature, especially, like, 14s TM.

Like I just watched cruel intentions. Like I showed cruel intentions to my best friend on Sunday. And he knew nothing about it. And like I'm assuming dangerous liaisons was in the public domain. Yeah. Since it's like we get like cool fucked up shit like cruel intentions because things are in the public domain. I love.

And things I hate about you. Yeah. Oh, I love it. 10 things I hate about you. And then also clueless is kind of like a way of high example of that genre to me. That's a that. that's an adaptation of a Jane Austen book. Yeah, it's Emma.

Oh, Clueless is so good. And then, like, Kurosawa's got three Shakespeare adaptations, I believe, because he's got Throne of Blood, which is Macbeth. He's got Rahn, which is King Lear, and then he's got a Hamlet one, but I forget what it is. Yeah. So. Come for the public domain talk, stay for the Shakespearean adaption. Well, that's, I mean, it's relevant.

Where I like thinking, that's one of the things that excites me about the public domain. It also excites me about the places in copyright law where we do have some room to make new adaptations even when something is under copyright. And this may just be because I tend, I probably have ADHD. I don't know. I keep going back and forth about whether I should get myself assessed for anything. I tend to think in about five directions at once. So I like things that have lots of things to think about in them. I do like straight adaptations, like the much ado adaptation. And I like, I'm not, actually, I'm not particularly fixated on Emma Thompson, but her adaptation of sense and sensibility is a really great example of like taking an old public

domain work and using some modern techniques to do a really pretty straightforward adaptation. I love things like clueless and 10 things I hate about you, which are adaptations of public domain works. But then remixes and parodies and anything where there's like three different existing copyrighted works being invoked at once. Those are the kinds of things that get me particularly excited about people's creativity. So it's not just the public domain that can do that. There are ways that copyright law allows some of that while copyrights are extant. Or we wouldn't get remixes.

I'm a sucker for reaction videos on YouTube. Like kids react, elders react. I like those. And so I love the copyright law does still have room for those kinds of things, even when there is a copyright. But that's one of the things that's so exciting about the public domain is that there's more room for more things like that to happen with public domain works. Yeah, like with Metropolis in the 80s, Georgio Veroder, the like music composer and producer, a lot of synth stuff, worked with Donna Summer, a lot, great, greatest ever do it.

He did, like, he took Metropolis, like he didn't like remake Metropolis. he took Metropolis, what footage was there. And he color tinted it, not to look like a, like a color film. Like it wasn't colorized, but it was like everything in one scene was like tinted red or everything in one scene is tinted blue. And then he put like Adamant songs and like Queen and like Bonnie Tyler and shit in it. And instead of inner titles, it's subtitles. And so when I show people Metropolis, I show them that version because it's so bonkers. right? And I'm assuming like that's when Metropolis was still in copyright. So I'm assuming he got the rights to do that somehow. But that's just it's so like it's so fucking cool that like this one film and there's a million different cuts of it like has spawned so many different things. Like I assumed it was already in the public domain. So I saw it on the list this year. I was like, wait, really? It's Metropolis. Like I just assumed. So that kind of loops back around to the sort of the weirdness of copyright.

that we were talking about, like, the length of copyright now is so long that works are already influencing other works long before they come out of the public domain. The public domain is sometimes a problem for, like, influence and like that. It's also sometimes a problem for survival of the original work, but like, but also, like, it just sort of highlights that the way humans actually do creative stuff and the way copyright law is structured don't really have very much to do with each other at all. And so there's all these different places where the law is just like, what? What?

Why did we ever do that to ourselves? It's always fascinating. All right. So we should wrap up. Is there anything you want people to check out any upcoming work or anything like that that I can put in the notes? I don't think I have anything good that I know of as like upcoming exciting things about the public domain. Yeah, sorry. I could think about those and add them later.

Yeah, I can do that. You can just send it to me and I'll put it in the notes later. I'll see if there's anything I can think about on that front. What's your favorite thing that went into the public domain this year? This year? Yeah. I mean, I don't know the full list. That's one of those things.

So, like, just looking at things like the list that the Duke Center put out. Yeah, like the big ones. Yeah, I like the Murnau's Sunrise film. Yeah. I don't know if that's like my favorite on that list, but that's one that I know has been used. quoted since. Like, I think there's footage from Sunrat Murnau's in, there may be in the, um,

Gary Oldman, Dracula. There's some film that quotes, it's interview with the vampire. Okay, there we go. Brad Pitt. Yeah. I know that there is a later commercial film with vampires of, yeah, that has something to do with, with that. And so it made, that made, like, that one made, like, I know about it, primarily from

the interview with the vampire, in vocation of, But it's, isn't that sort of like a wonder of technology that one of the vampires encounters somewhere and they're like, we have to see the sunrise. Yeah, because they can finally see a sunrise again. Yeah. And that's a great example, both of like things being in the public domain and the fact that things can actually be used before they're out of the public domain. I doubt, I'm not sure of this, but I'd be really surprised if there were identifiable

rights holders for sunrise that could be asked when interview was filmed. Maybe there were. But like, you can, you can build an adapt. on things before copyrights are over. You should be able to do more than you can. But when they're over, you can do all kinds of cool stuff. God, I bet, again, Babylon was bad, but especially near the end and all through it, but especially near the end.

It's like getting all the rights for all the stuff they put in that movie must have been a nightmare because it goes all the way from like very early cinema history to like, God, there was a clip of the first avatar in Babylon. I know it was, I went, oh, come on. in the theater when I was there. So I bet it was a nightmare. Thanks, Nancy, for coming on. Thank you for having me.

I can talk about copyright forever, and it's always nice to talk in a context where it's not presumed that copyright should be bigger or longer or more people should have more control. So I appreciate it. Yeah. Knowing that coming in. Yeah, I think it's better to try and figure out possible alternatives.

And that's why we're, we do it, is to get library people thinking about it and what our possibilities are. Good night.