Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum Here. Lots of people celebrate on January first
Speaker 1: in the standard Gregorian calendar. It's the first day of
Speaker 1: the new year, a chance for new beginnings, a new
Speaker 1: chapter in our story, if you will. But that can
Speaker 1: become quite literal for people who celebrate public Domain Day.
Speaker 1: Every year. On January first, a trove of creative works
Speaker 1: copyrighted about a century ago in America enter the public domain.
Speaker 1: That basically means that these works could now be shared, performed, reused, repurposed,
Speaker 1: or sampled without having to obtain permission from the copyright
Speaker 1: holder or pay anything for using the work. Although copyright
Speaker 1: law helps protect artists' intellectual property and that they are
Speaker 1: the only ones who can make money off of it,
Speaker 1: a public domain and that after enough time has passed,
Speaker 1: other artists are able to draw from the collective imagination
Speaker 1: of our society and build on it. Twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: is actually a banner year for public domain because it's
Speaker 1: the year that Disney's Steamboat Willie cartoon featuring the first
Speaker 1: appearances of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, became free for use.
Speaker 1: The cartoon debuted in nineteen twenty eight. That's ninety five
Speaker 1: years ago. It was originally supposed to enter the public
Speaker 1: domain in nineteen eighty four after a fifty six year
Speaker 1: copyright term, but Disney and a bunch of other large
Speaker 1: creative companies lobbied Congress to extend that term for twenty years,
Speaker 1: and Congress did twice. But its term is finally up.
Speaker 1: This doesn't mean that you can now create a new
Speaker 1: work with Mickey and try to pass it off as
Speaker 1: being from Disney, and it doesn't mean that you can
Speaker 1: use versions of these characters from later works that are
Speaker 1: still under copyright. For example, Mickey from the Sorcerer's Apprentice
Speaker 1: segment in Fantasia is still off limits until that film's
Speaker 1: turns up in another decade or so, but the steamboat
Speaker 1: designs of these buddies are now up for grabs. In
Speaker 1: addition to Steamboat Willie, lots of other films, books, plays,
Speaker 1: and musical compositions from nineteen twenty eight are now fair game,
Speaker 1: including Buster Keaton's film The Cameraman, D H. Lawrence's novel
Speaker 1: Lady Chatterley's Lover, Robert Frost's poetry collection West running Brook,
Speaker 1: A Milns House at Pooh Corner, which introduces the character Tigger,
Speaker 1: the original German version of Bertold Brex and Kurt Weile's
Speaker 1: play The Threepenny Opera, which is where the song Mac
Speaker 1: the Knife comes from, and songs like when You're Smiling
Speaker 1: and I Want to Be Loved by You. When I
Speaker 1: say songs here, I mean just the written composition. There's
Speaker 1: a different copyright law for sound recordings. As of now,
Speaker 1: those enter the public domain a full one hundred years
Speaker 1: after their publication, so in twenty twenty four we're getting
Speaker 1: recordings from nineteen twenty three. This is due to the
Speaker 1: fact that copyright law for audio recordings used to be
Speaker 1: handled on a state and local basis, leading to a
Speaker 1: lot of messy confusion, which the national government tried to
Speaker 1: correct with the Copyright Act of nineteen seventy six and
Speaker 1: the Music Modernization Act of twenty eighteen, which is when
Speaker 1: we landed on the current one hundred year term. It's
Speaker 1: going to change in twenty forty seven, but that's a
Speaker 1: different episode. To grasp what public domain means, it helps
Speaker 1: to understand what copyrights are and why they exist in
Speaker 1: the US. The public policy behind copyright and patent protection
Speaker 1: actually originates in the Article one, Section eight, Clause eight
Speaker 1: of the Constitution, commonly known as the Intellectual Property Clause,
Speaker 1: which grants Congress the power a quote to promote the
Speaker 1: progress of science and useful arts by securing, for limited
Speaker 1: times to authors and inventors the exclusive right of their
Speaker 1: respective writings and discoveries. The purpose of copyright law is
Speaker 1: to encourage and incentivize writers and inventors to keep creating
Speaker 1: new works by giving them exclusive rights to their works.
Speaker 1: This means giving them exclusive rights for a limited time
Speaker 1: and distinguishing between intellectual property and other types of property
Speaker 1: such as houses or other things that consumers can own.
Speaker 1: For the article. This episode is based on How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: Spoke with Esteon to a professor of law at West
Speaker 1: Virginia University School of Law who is taught courses in copyright,
Speaker 1: trademark and patent law. He explained about intellectual property quote
Speaker 1: with music, it's particularly easy to understand because of digital transfer.
Speaker 1: If I'm listening to a Taylor Swift song, does that
Speaker 1: stop you from listening to a Taylor Swift song? No?
Speaker 1: But if I'm enjoying my house, you can't enjoy this
Speaker 1: same house because there's only one house. We have to
Speaker 1: create a system to protect intellectual property that's different from
Speaker 1: real property and moveable personal property. Two continued. For Taylor
Speaker 1: Swift to create a song, it's very expensive, right, but
Speaker 1: she has to put in the effort and time to
Speaker 1: make the recording. But then I can make an MP
Speaker 1: three of it and send it off to the world. Similarly,
Speaker 1: it costs drug companies hundreds of millions of dollars in
Speaker 1: R and D costs, as well as going through the
Speaker 1: FDA approval process to bring a drug to market. If
Speaker 1: a second drug company could simply copy the drug, no
Speaker 1: firm would ever invest in creating a drug in the
Speaker 1: first place. Patents play a role to allow companies to
Speaker 1: recuperate their initial investments while making a profit by limiting competition.
Speaker 1: So without copyright protection to ensure that Taylor Swift gets
Speaker 1: paid for her songs, it would be harder for her
Speaker 1: to earn a living as a performer. Who knows she
Speaker 1: might even still be working at our father's Christmas tree farm. Similarly,
Speaker 1: without patent protection for drugs, which lasts for twenty years
Speaker 1: after a drugs invention in the US, a life saving
Speaker 1: and life changing medications might not be developed here. Two said,
Speaker 1: as a society, we say that we want more Taylor
Speaker 1: Swift songs. So what we're going to do is give
Speaker 1: her that protection so that she could make putting out
Speaker 1: songs her life's work. One important thing about copyrights is
Speaker 1: that they not only protect the original work, but restrict
Speaker 1: other's ability to create derivative works that are based upon it,
Speaker 1: even if they're in other media. So if you've written
Speaker 1: a book, I couldn't make a movie based on it
Speaker 1: unless you gave me permission. Also, while a copyright for
Speaker 1: a particular book or film mixpire, the creator may still
Speaker 1: hold rights to the characters, as with Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey
Speaker 1: and other exclusions of a too. Two said, there's something
Speaker 1: called the sena fair doctrine, which means that there are
Speaker 1: stock characters present in every story, like the comic relief
Speaker 1: character who's a bubbling buffoon. Right, that's fair game to
Speaker 1: use if you've got to copyright on Harry Potter. Does
Speaker 1: that mean that all boy wizards are copyrighted or all
Speaker 1: stories with a wizard in it? No, But the closer
Speaker 1: you get to a boy wizard who fights an evil
Speaker 1: wizard that has seven lives. That looks a little bit closer,
Speaker 1: and if that boy wizard goes to Hogwarts, okay, that
Speaker 1: clearly is the expression that's protected. Originally, copyrights were relatively
Speaker 1: short in duration. The Copyright Act of seventeen ninety, for example,
Speaker 1: gave copyright owners control over their works for fourteen years,
Speaker 1: with an opportunity to renew for another fourteen But over time,
Speaker 1: the number of years that the work can be protected
Speaker 1: has increased, giving creators more time to profit from having
Speaker 1: a monopoly over their work. In nineteen ninety eight, Congress
Speaker 1: passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, named after
Speaker 1: the late singer and songwriter turned politician. This allowed for
Speaker 1: an author's copyright to last for the person's lifetime plus
Speaker 1: seventy years, while copyrights held by corporations last one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty years after creation or ninety five years after publication,
Speaker 1: whichever comes sooner. Some argue that this length of time
Speaker 1: is stifling to the creativity of new artists, and point
Speaker 1: to the tendency of companies like Disney to profit vastly
Speaker 1: off of works already in the public domain, like Hans
Speaker 1: Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, published in eighteen thirty seven,
Speaker 1: or The Snow Queen, which was the inspiration for Frozen,
Speaker 1: published in eighteen forty four. Because just as copyrights encourage
Speaker 1: people to be creative, so does the public domain. An
Speaker 1: imaginative person can write a sequel or prequel to a
Speaker 1: classic novel using the same characters as the original, or
Speaker 1: they can do mashups of the classics, such as inserting
Speaker 1: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's Monster into a Jane Austen story, or
Speaker 1: put a version of Frankenstein's Monster into an original work,
Speaker 1: as happened in the recent film Poor Things. Though to note,
Speaker 1: if someone merely alters or adds to the original work,
Speaker 1: they can only seek copyright protection for the new material,
Speaker 1: not the entire piece. Once a copyright expires, that creative
Speaker 1: work is available for free to anyone who wants to perform, publish,
Speaker 1: or broadcast it. That's a big benefit to society because
Speaker 1: community theaters can show movies for free, and youth orchestras
Speaker 1: can perform music without paying licensing fees. Similarly, publishers can
Speaker 1: put out new editions of classic novels with new illustrations
Speaker 1: or annotations, and online archives can offer public domain books
Speaker 1: in their entirety for free to the public. However, all
Speaker 1: of this is assuming that a copy of the working
Speaker 1: question has survived the long waiting period for it to
Speaker 1: come into the public domain. Last year, two classic films,
Speaker 1: the vampire movie London After Midnight, which starred Lon Cheney,
Speaker 1: and The Way of All Flesh, for which Emil Jennings
Speaker 1: got the best actor Oscar both came up for free use,
Speaker 1: but as far as we know, no one will get
Speaker 1: a chance to use them or screen them because they've
Speaker 1: been lost. Only still photos shot during filming remain from
Speaker 1: London After Midnight, and just a few fragments of film
Speaker 1: remain from the Way of All Flesh. This ties into
Speaker 1: one of the arguments for shortening that copyright term. The
Speaker 1: physical media that films and music used to be recorded
Speaker 1: on are fragile, and sometimes copyright law prevents them from
Speaker 1: being restored and thus archive before they literally disintegrate. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is based on the article what does it mean
Speaker 1: when a book, movie your song enters the public Domain
Speaker 1: on HowStuffWorks dot com written by Patrick J. Kiger. Brain
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