I've always been curious about what it means for a movie to enter the public domain. A few years ago I sent a mail to Planet Money in what I thought would be an interesting hook but never got a response:
"Hi Planet Money, today is public domain day. I see that Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis is now in the "public domain." I was curious what that meant at a practical level for a German language silent film.
If Planet Money Movies wanted to release their own version of Metropolis, how would they do it? Can you just go to Amazon, buy the Blu Ray, and somehow release your own? What about the anti-piracy measures on the Blu Ray? What about the work that Transit Film did in restoring the film from the original negative? Does that count as some sort of newly original work? It's a silent film and a foreign film. How does the soundtrack and translation work?
If you have to make a new copy from the original reels, what if someone is hoarding them? Does that mean you could buy all the copies and prevent someone from releasing a public domain version?"
A work being in the public domain just means that if somebody claims that they have the copyright and sue you for distributing that work, you will prevail in court.
Restoration itself does not grant a new copyright. Other elements included in a restoration may be copyrighted e.g. new music or the graphic design of intertitles. A new translation is also copyrightable; essentially it's only the "original elements" that enter the public domain. Working around the anti-piracy measures of a blu-ray might be a crime, idk, but that's irrelevant to the copyright discussion; once you have a copy even if it came from an 'illicit' source, you're free to copy & distribute as you wish.
But yes, you need to acquire a copy first; if you can't find a work at all, how would you copy it, practically?
> If Planet Money Movies wanted to release their own version of Metropolis, how would they do it? Can you just go to Amazon, buy the Blu Ray, and somehow release your own?
Yes.
For example, wikipedia has a copy of Metrpolis and that's basically what happened
Amazon Prime Video in fact has multiple low-quality versions of some films that have accidentally found their way into the public domain due to negligence of rightsholders, like John Wayne's McLintock!
Since it is the holiday season, reminds me of "It’s a Wonderful Life", which everyone thought was in the public domain, and it became a christmas tradition because it was all over the place. Well, eventually they dug up a copyright on some of the soundtrack.
That's an interesting angle. Wonder if that part of the movie could be rescored with something in the public domain so the rescored version could be distributed freely. It also reminds of the Commodore 64 game for 'Blade Runner' which was oddly stated to have been inspired by the soundtrack rather than by the movie itself. I've seen claims that they couldn't get a license to do a video game based on the movie, so being inspired by the soundtrack was a workaround. That never seemed legally grounded to me but copyright, especially the components of musical performances, gets really strange sometimes.
Thinking about it, there's just no business model in rescoring "It's a Wonderful Life". You want to get into a pricewar with a studio?
Anyway, hollywood hated this situation and was glad to see it under control. The issue is now viewing is pretty limited. NBC made it a prime time event.
(Mentioning some commodoretard's 'theory' on copyright detracts from your post, imo. They just didn't bother going after him)
The copyright status of the original book makes that problematic. You'd have to somehow alter the recorded movie so that it doesn't reflect the creative content of the book anymore, which doesn't make much sense.
> If you have to make a new copy from the original reels, what if someone is hoarding them? Does that mean you could buy all the copies and prevent someone from releasing a public domain version?"
This part at least, yes. A work being in the public domain doesn't mean someone is obligated to help you redistribute it.
> If you have to make a new copy from the original reels, what if someone is hoarding them?
This is a legitimate problem in public domain releasing. If you're trying to release a really good public domain version then you might need access to very high quality source materials. With a movie it would obviously be nice to scan the camera negatives. If the studio has those negatives in a vault, then you're cooked.
Didn't Bill Gates or some others buy up thousands of old artworks and put them on ice so they could paywall the scans?
>What about the anti-piracy measures on the Blu Ray?
In the US, bypassing DRM is a crime even if the intended use is legal. There are exceptions for things like criticism and accessibility, but I don't believe they'd be relevant.
Maybe it'd be as simple as selling your new copies as "for review purposes" and it'd be legal, I'm not sure.
The ban on bypassing DRM only applies to copyright protection measures, and if a work is in the public domain there is no copyright protection on it. It does unambiguously affect fair use of copyrighted works, but just dumping fully-PD works that happen to reside on DRM-protected media ought to be OK.
It had been a while since I read the DMCA, and I was mistaken. It says "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under (copyright)" so it doesn't need an exemption.
Yeah I have 32k saves and hit the same problems with search being extremely unreliable. About 5 years ago quotes stopped working in search. Trying to find "The Grapes of Wrath" would return all instances of "of" and "the." You could sort of hack it by searching for the most distinct word (maybe "Grapes") if you already knew exactly what you were searching for. I long suspected there was some architectural change they made on the backend that broke this and they didn't want to admit in support articles. Perhaps the Mozilla legal department determined that having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk and they moved to just having the URL and maybe the title (this would also explain why "permanent copies" disappeared).
Anyway, as the 32k articles indicate, I was a power user of Pocket so part of me is sad it's going away. But they've really been checked out since maybe 2019 with regards to any real support for this product.
> having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk
the risk should've been the same with google's index, and yet they're dandy!
I think it's more easily explained by incompetence. Esp. when stop words like 'of' and 'the' are somehow included in the index. These are almost trivial to remove prior to indexing (any decent indexing library, such as lucene, would have a prepared list of stop words filter, and it's not like you even need to do any work to have it!).
> suspected there was some architectural change they made on the backend that broke this
I think Mozilla specialises in this. At some point, having many tabs open on the Firefox iOS app would eat all the memory and lag out the phone. This problem even came and went a couple of times over the years.
It’s an unloved child being held captive for the money it earns.
E.g. Thunderbird ignores potential matches in quoted mail text. That's utterly useless if one remembers a certain mentioning by the other side.
Plus, now and then repairing the index suddenly leads to matches -- when is the right time to repair? I don't now -> always if it's seriously important...
Thunderbird search is bad enough that I just open up the Gmail website to find an email. At this point I don't even know why I use a local email client, except maybe 25 years of muscle memory.
I kindly disagree. Yes, Thunderbird's search is not revolutionary, but when I direct it to a box containing ~20 years of e-mails, it returns instantly, searching for the words that I want.
...and I'm not even downloading the e-mails to the system to save disk space. I have explicitly disabled that.
Is something like Apache Solr (a search index) well suited for something like this?
I've deployed and used it at work for searching specific, well-specified bits of information, but I don't know how well it would work on large chunks of text like articles etc; I assume this is its real purpose and it should fit, but I'm guessing.
I tried Matter but it lacked Android support at the time so didn't go deep into it. I've been a heavy Readwise user for the last two years or so. It's better than Pocket in almost every way, although as I've moved into the 99.9th percentile of archive size I'm seeing some annoying perf issues they'll hopefully fix. At least they have a Discord and are making actual updates to the app, something that Pocket stopped doing probably five years ago.
I think doing this would expose how poorly they've actually saved their copies of articles. Pocket has always had a very funny definition of "permanent copy" which doesn't mean what you think it does! I'm a little saddened by their demise but the service has been so terrible for so long that I've long since moved to the much superior Readwise.
The latest episode of the excellent video game history podcast They Create Worlds (https://www.theycreateworlds.com/listen) does a good job debunking some of these myths.
I'm actually shocked that even before these layoffs there was anyone working on Pocket. I have not noticed a new feature in this product for maybe 3 years, with numerous things getting worse. How big is the team? What are they doing all day?
It's not just a glut of "bad games." There are a number of specific things big companies such as Atari did that made them more vulnerable to this crash than they otherwise would have been.
Eh, I think this is overstating the case for the typical user (Zoom or gaming rather than something like podcasting).
The sound quality is more than acceptable, even when placed relatively far away from the speaker, for Zoom meetings. It will be night and day compared to a laptop microphone or AirPods (although this is true even with cheaper USB headsets). Unlike the other recommended non-headset microphones, you don't need a special stand or to ensure you're very close to the microphone. In terms of aesthetics, you also don't have to have a large microphone in your face on camera. Sure, this is the norm on Twitch, but every time I've been on a Zoom call with someone with this setup it's always at least a little awkward.
I also find the speakers in a lot of USB headsets to be either not the best or uncomfortable. I use a separate output-only headset and a Yeti as my input and this works well enough for me.
I find the microphone to have one of the most convenient hardware mute buttons of similarly priced options. Of course, mics with more intelligent muting may reduce your need to mute so often, but I personally prefer to have 100% control over this and not rely on software. One of my biggest pet peeves about all teleconferencing software is they give you almost no feedback on your sound quality and what's coming through in the background. I'd rather control that than the software doing something wrong.
Big picture, though, is to use any form of external microphone and headset rather than laptops + speakers. Even a cheap $15 headset is going to be a much better experience for everyone else on the call. Better sound quality from you and less echo (yes, software tries to take care of this, but in practice I've found this highly unreliable on the other ends of Zoom, Teams, Discord, etc. calls).
VCD is a very undercovered format. Any budding media scholars out there could make a good book out of the format.
It connects to an area I'm growing increasingly interested in, the early history of the Chinese Internet and tech industry. (VCD players sold in enormous numbers there.) See for instance this fascinating piece on the Chinese Flash gaming scene: https://www.chaoyangtrap.house/flashing-for-fun-and-no-profi...
My car still has an amusing WMA logo above the CD player to advertise its support for playing CDs with WMAs burned to them. Never actually used that functionality though.
"Hi Planet Money, today is public domain day. I see that Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis is now in the "public domain." I was curious what that meant at a practical level for a German language silent film.
If Planet Money Movies wanted to release their own version of Metropolis, how would they do it? Can you just go to Amazon, buy the Blu Ray, and somehow release your own? What about the anti-piracy measures on the Blu Ray? What about the work that Transit Film did in restoring the film from the original negative? Does that count as some sort of newly original work? It's a silent film and a foreign film. How does the soundtrack and translation work?
If you have to make a new copy from the original reels, what if someone is hoarding them? Does that mean you could buy all the copies and prevent someone from releasing a public domain version?"
reply