When I was five years old or so, Tom’s Silent E song came on The Electric Company. I knew the alphabet and the basic sounds the letters made, but I didn’t really read yet. Listening to the song and watching the animation, the magic power of Silent E suddenly revealed itself to me! I ran to my mother and asked if my new understanding was true. “Yes! That’s how you read!”
I started skipping around the house, thrilled in my new knowledge. “I’m so smart! I don’t have to go to school!” Unfortunately, my mother had to correct me on that last part; I did still have to go to school.
Thank you, Tom Lehrer, for teaching me the power of Silent E when I was five, for many laughs over the years, and for giving the world the gift of your wise and humorous words free of charge. You’re one of the good ones!
I’m not sure why, but this reminded me of a riddle my dad taught me as a kid but couldn’t remember the full punchline to: How is the word “ghoti” pronounced?
Answer: Use GH from “laugh”, O from “women”, and TI from “potion” and you get “fish”. (My dad couldn’t remember what word to use the O from. I finally found that bit out a couple years ago, after he had passed away.)
It’s also the reason you get remakes from Disney every few years. It’s their way of resetting the clock.
In this time of creative projects that take the work of hundreds of people to come to fruition, I think going back to the original intention of copyright law is a commendable but flawed sentiment.
Yes, something needs to change, but I don’t think there’s an easy solution to this.
And octal used to be important in programming (before mostly being replaced by hexadecimal to the level that anyone cares about non-decimal systems these days) And the upcoming holiday gives a reason to repeat an old joke: “Why can’t programmers tell Halloween apart from Christmas? Because Dec 25 = Oct 31.”
To a first approximation, the earnings of films and recordings fall off with time pretty sharply. After seven years, the interest in everything apart from a very few classics will have gone almost to zero. Long copyrights make Sir Paul Macartney slightly richer but will do bog all for the struggling artist. Fans will buy the original albums, copyright or no.
Copyright and patents are unusual legal forms: they give exclusive rights to the creator by taking it away from the rest of us. This is a good thing to do provided it means the original creator can get a just reward without being ripped off by anyone who can make an exact copy. If it goes beyond this intention, then it is no longer doing good.
7 years may be cutting it a bit fine. People may put off buying an original if they know a clone is on its way. But reducing recording and motion picture copyrights to 10 or 15 years seems sensible.
Be careful here. As of today, the release into PD only applies to his lyrics, not his music (although there are a number of pieces of sheet music attached to various songs on his new “songs” site. So while it is now (apparently) open to use any of his lyrics, if you want to use his “songs” in their entirety, you would still need permission or pay a royalty for the use of the music. That will hopefully change over time.
He might be 92 but I expect he’d prefer to be thought of as 33.333 Celsuis.
I received an email from him about two weeks ago and he didn’t mention this to me which seems a little strange. I sent him an email to ask more about this and I hope I will get a response in the next few days (typically I have gotten responses from him within a week).
The vast, vast, vast majority of creative projects, no matter how large, are expected to either pay themselves back plus profit in about 5 years or fail to do so. Of the tiny fraction that make lots of money after 5-10 years, the vast majority of them were out-sized successes during their initial release for which the creators and producers have already made enormous returns. I don’t think we should be basing our copyright laws around the 1 in a million cases.
Ending copyright on works doesn’t prevent the original creators from making new works derived from them. Take the MCU: Iron Man was released in 2008. Avengers Endgame in 2019, 11 years later. This is probably one of the longest pre-planned and continuously produced series of movies ever made. But would it really have been a problem if Iron Man was public domain when Endgame was released?
Or look in the software world: windows XP was released in 2001, and EOL for mainstream support in 2009 and free security updates ended about 13 years after release. It also received several (copyrighted) updates in the form of service packs throughout its lifetime. Later version of windows are obviously based on windows XP, but the original release of XP was effectively obsolete (and negligible market value on its own) within a decade. How would microsoft really be hurt if someone could have, in 2010 freely made an unsupported by microsoft derivative of the XP original release? How would the world be hurt if a third party could have sold 3rd party support and security updates for windows XP after microsoft was no longer doing so?
I don’t think there is a lot of reason to think that the existing creative industries would be materially impacted by a 7 year copyright as suggested by vernonbird, but I do think that is borderline. However, I think something like the former Creative Commons Founder’s Copyright based on the copyright law of 1790: 14 years, extendable to 28 is more than sufficient. Honestly I think just 14 years is sufficient, but if it is made sufficiently onerous to extend to 28 so that many works are not automatically extended that would be fine.
There is one industry I think where this change would have a large impact, but it would be a good thing: streaming services. Disney+ would not be able to use their huge back catalog of their own works and acquisitions as a sledgehammer to promote their own streaming service, nor would netflix be able to rely on their growing back catalog or exclusive licensing deals with the rapidly shrinking world of non-disney studios. Instead streaming services would be able to offer roughly similar content from pre-2006, and compete based on how good they are at providing a streaming service and what new releases they can produce. That would be a big win for customers and also encourage continued production of high quality movies and TV.
Possibly, but it’s not really safe to assume. When I read about this yesterday I took it upon myself to make sure every song page on the site, and the associated PDF files, had been crawled by the Wayback Machine. I’d estimate that about 70% of them already had been.
Maybe they would have eventually been crawled, but the PDFs were a couple of layers deep so who knows?
Change Windows XP to Windows 95 and you have ReactOS. More recent versions have become compatible with later versions of Windows.
You might want to make sure it isn’t phoning home to Russia though. It is open source but I am suspicious of any software project that sought funding from Putin and his allies.
