{"id":17988,"date":"2012-11-30T11:28:58","date_gmt":"2012-11-30T16:28:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17988"},"modified":"2012-11-30T11:29:24","modified_gmt":"2012-11-30T16:29:24","slug":"stopping-by-the-copyright-office-on-a-snowy-evening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/11\/30\/stopping-by-the-copyright-office-on-a-snowy-evening\/","title":{"rendered":"Stopping by the Copyright Office on a Snowy Evening"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/2012-11-29\/a-free-market-fix-for-the-copyright-racket.html\" target=\"_blank\">Virginia Postrel<\/a> charts the ever-expanding copyright protections under US law:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Even as digital technology has made reproducing, remixing and repurposing creative works easier &mdash; with potentially enormous benefits for consumers and producers of new works &mdash; the monopoly privileges of copyright have expanded. The result is a bizarre combination of rampant copyright violations, frequent encroachment on legitimate fair use, suppression of new technologies and business models, and the ever-present threat of draconian penalties.<\/p>\n<p>Consider how the law applies to Robert Frost\u2019s classic poem \u201cStopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,\u201d first published in 1923. Back then you only got copyright privileges for works officially registered with the copyright office, and only for a term of 28 years, which could be renewed if you filed again, as Frost did in 1951.<\/p>\n<p>Requiring such simple procedures reserved copyright privileges for creators with strong commercial or sentimental interests in limiting the publication of their works. Today, by contrast, copyright automatically applies to every eligible work, including your vacation snapshots and your 4-year-old\u2019s handmade Mother\u2019s Day card.<\/p>\n<p>Under the law when Frost wrote his poem and renewed the copyright on the volume including it, it would have presumably entered the public domain in 1979, more than a decade after its author\u2019s death in 1963. That\u2019s not what happened. Beginning in 1962, Congress gradually extended copyright terms, and in 1976 it passed a new copyright act that gives works already under copyright a new term of 75 years from their first publication. That meant \u201cStopping by Woods\u201d wouldn\u2019t go into the public domain until 1998.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s not what happened either. Just as the poem\u2019s copyright was about to expire, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which gave existing works a new copyright term of 95 years. (The 1923 Frost volume including the poem was one of the works cited in a lawsuit unsuccessfully challenging the act\u2019s constitutionality.) So Frost\u2019s poem won\u2019t enter the public domain until 2018 &mdash; assuming that Congress doesn\u2019t pass yet another extension. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Virginia Postrel charts the ever-expanding copyright protections under US law: Even as digital technology has made reproducing, remixing and repurposing creative works easier &mdash; with potentially enormous benefits for consumers and producers of new works &mdash; the monopoly privileges of copyright have expanded. The result is a bizarre combination of rampant copyright violations, frequent encroachment [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,28,13],"tags":[698,135,469,592],"class_list":["post-17988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-media","category-usa","tag-congress","tag-copyright","tag-monopolies","tag-poetry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4G8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17988"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17990,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17988\/revisions\/17990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}