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> It's still not public domain - but nobody knows who should be angry at you if you broadcast.

Point Break (1991) is a good example of this.

Here's an article from someone who wanted to show it at a festival and couldn't work out the rights.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/com...

> nobody knows who should be angry at you if you broadcast.

I suggest the law should say to successfully assert copyright infringement, your current contact info must be on file with the US Copyright Office, or your copyright is unenforceable.

Unfortunately in the age of international copyright agreements this would only make sense if the work originated out of the US.

Copyright applies to any work that you produce with intellectual value by default. You don't necessarily have to register it for it to be protected. The big issue for me with copyright is how long the term is and how it can be assigned and theres no details on who actually owns it.

I would say a limited time without registration would be perfect. Then an extended time period if you register it. The registration would then include all the individual parts that make it up.

> Copyright applies to any work that you produce with intellectual value by default.

I know. That was a mistake.

I think implicit copyright does have some advantages -- it means if you put up, say, a T-shirt design on the internet, because you had an idea and thought it was neat, not expecting it might be worth registering, other people can't (legally) just start selling that T-shirt without paying you. Basically I think it's not great if amateurs have to go to the trouble of always explicitly registering minor things just in case something catches on.

But obviously it has the giant problem you say, that so many works are locked behind copyright snarls. A system of mandatory explicit registration would have the huge advantage of making things much easier to track.

Here's a compromise idea I've had: Retain implicit copyright; however, unless a copyright is explicitly registered, it cannot be sold, nor exclusively licensed (i.e. if you license it to someone, but haven't registered it, you cannot legally bind yourself not to license it to anyone else). And then any sales or exclusivity agreements would be tracked by the registrar.

So, under this system, if you need to know who to talk to regarding a copyright, then for explicitly registered copyrights you can consult the registrar, while for non-registered copyrights the answer is always the original creator. This does still leave the problem of finding the original creator in the latter case, but it's still much better than it being unclear who to consult at all.

It's possible there's some big hole in this I'm missing, but I'm hoping that this compromise idea would capture much of the upsides both of requiring explicit registration and of not requiring it.

(Not that such a thing will ever be implemented anytime soon, but...)

> registering minor things just in case something catches on.

On the other hand, should minor things be copyright-able? Like this message I am writing?

If you spent a year writing a book, sure, copyright it. But if you drew a quick doodle on a napkin, scanned it and put it on a t-shirt to impress your friends, is that really worthy?

If you can't be bothered to register a copyright, which just takes a few minutes, it is not worth copyright protection.

I think there's a wide intermediate space there. What if you spent a few hours on something? Maybe on the sort of short story people post to, say, Reddit or Tumblr? That's actually a significant effort, that it would be bad if someone else tried to sell it as their own, but also not so much that you'd naturally think "oh I should register this".

> If you can't be bothered to register a copyright, which just takes a few minutes, it is not worth copyright protection.

Wait, does copyright registration take just a few minutes currently? I hadn't realized. That's good to hear.

Edit: I guess I was implicitly assuming that we'd also be adding a registration fee, which, even if small, makes registration the sort of thing you're not very likely to do for a day-or-two project.

Having a filter of you have to bother to register and bother playing a small a fee means you get to decide if it is worthwhile or not.

Another filter is you have to mark it as copyrighted in order for protection.

This system worked quite well before implicit copyright.

> Having a filter of you have to bother to register and bother playing a small a fee means you get to decide if it is worthwhile or not.

Sure, but my point is that there a number of cases where having to make that decision doesn't really have good results. When you're a professional you can make a point of explicitly copyrighting everything. When you're just some random person posting stuff on the internet because you think it's cool (like, if you write a short story in a Reddit comment), you are not realistically going to bother to copyright it all simply due to the inconvenience (and if you have to pay a fee you're certainly not going to), so I don't think requiring this has good results in this case.

> This system worked quite well before implicit copyright.

I mean, certainly it did, no question there, but I'm wondering if we can do even better by getting the advantages of both. I'm not sure your replies are addressing this point, really. Like, could you give an example of a case where my proposal would seriously fail at the goal of preventing a copyright snarl?

> Like, could you give an example of a case where my proposal would seriously fail at the goal of preventing a copyright snarl?

I'm not quite sure what your proposal is, but implicitly copyrighting something just because someone spent several hours on it isn't an improvement. Everyone who suddenly smells $$$ is going to retroactively claim that.

I think the biggest problem with copyright is the length of time it's enforced for.

I'm happy enough with implicit copyright - though the argument about what should be inherently copyrightable does need to be fleshed out.

However, the current system generally works out to about seventy years after the death of the last person involved. (There are a lot of exceptions and nuances to this - it's a generalisation). Which can mean that a work is protected for nearly two hundred years. That is insane.

If we were to tame it back to two decades after last development, and make it so that only people, and not companies, can own copyright, then we might be in for a reasonable shot. (Companies can license copyright, and employ trademarks to protect themselves.)

As it is, the current copyright laws stifle creativity, and hand over power of most mainstream ideas to a corporation that can use things like DMCA and Content ID as hammers against any little players in the field. You can't create anything similar to what exists or has existed.

And yes, I do believe there is a 0% chance that this will ever happen anywhere.

A reasonable compromise copyright scheme is to simply require a registration for it to last beyond 20 years, along with a fee.

That'll filter out the vast bulk of the garbage copyrights, as well as the stuff nobody knows who owns (likely including the owner).

Tack onto that a fee that increases by a multiple for every 10 year extension or so, so that the older the work the more commercially successful it needs to be worth paying for ongoing protection of.

Idle curiosity: what are some of the "films that are public domain in Australia, that won't reach public domain in America for another fifty-seventy years, and vice versa"?

Nosferatu is the first that comes to mind that can illustrate the differences.

It was considered to be in the public domain by 1930 in most countries, but thanks to Florence Stoker who attempted to hunt down and eradicate the film at every turn, it becomes public domain in the US probably in 2041. It could be even later, depending on a few small things.

Is there an easy way to donate money toward this work? I would do that in a heartbeat.

There's only really two organisations I know of who actively try and dig down into this stuff and give it back to the public. (There are a lot who just accept the legal risks and ignore what rules there may be.)

The Internet Archive [0], and TorrentFreak[1], with the former being the more active in the area.

My own knowledge comes from more selfish, commercial, reasons, in that I've tried to use PD content to kickstart my site's collection. (To be clear: Not affiliated with the parent of this thread in any way shape or form.)

If you want to donate - I'd highly recommend the Internet Archive, but they do have an American slant to what they attempt to give back. That is, if it isn't PD in America, then it might not be the best fit for them.

[0] https://archive.org/

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/