mod50ack

> Sure, not at first. But how long has it been since most people interacted with a CD player now? Most teenagers haven't, ever.

Yeah, but it's a lot harder to switch from a DRM-less digital download format to a DRMed one. Who in their right mind would choose the DRM store, then?

Oh, but this is also sort of what they did, because Spotify and Apple Music and whatnot have DRM. Not that it's unbreakable or anything. But they have it — for streaming.

> DVD quality is not really of sufficient quality for most consumers today, though. Meanwhile, CD quality continues to match or exceed modern streaming services.

Yes, but I was talking about 20 years ago. DeCSS had come out in 1999, but libdvdcss was released in 2004. It has been pretty easy to rip a DVD for someone in the know since then.

Much like CDs, Blu-rays (especially 4K Blu-rays) are of better quality than you'll find on most streaming platforms. Blu-rays are pretty much rippable, too, but far fewer people have a Blu-ray drive, and most people don't care.

> There has been plenty of attempts at copy protection on CDs. Some more successful than others.

Yes, but they're fundamentally incompatible with the CD standard.

I'm not denying that digital downloads for music were the first big use of DRM. But in that case, it was perhaps even more futile than in other applications.

The explanation is that CDs came along before DRM was a thing. The industry could not break compatibility with over a 15 years' worth of CD players, especially since people had them in their cars, etc. The home playing software always had the ability to rip CDs; you could do that long before iTunes was a thing. It was only a matter of time before record labels gave up on DRM.

Now, since CSS was cracked, DVDs are, in practice, no harder to rip. But a company like Apple can't ship a DVD ripper in iTunes.

Correct.

No, they're talking about the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (1994), which is 100% about foreign works and formalities (copyright notice and renewal requirements). Disney was ''against'' that change because they benefited from foreign works (such as Prokofiev's ''Peter and the Wolf'') which were in the public domain in the US due to national ineligibility at the time.

> What would your ideal copyright regime look like?

I would have to actually write something blog-length about this.

Much like Wikimedia Commons, Archive.org and other open-content sites, we don't have a general global block for our content.

But country-level IP geolocation is trivial.

Yes, I'm the one who uploaded it. Right now I'm busy as I have a huge pile of things to process and upload...

There's no Russian server. The broader IMSLP network has: - Main server: for files thar are PD in the US and Canada - IMSLP-EU: PD-EU and PD-CA, but not PD-US - PML-CA: PD-CA, but not PD-EU or PD-US - PML-US: PD-US, but not PD-CA

Anyway, there's stuff we're working on in any case... some infrastructure improvements.

Well, to be clear, I am mainly a public domain and copyright theory guy. I do keep up to date with everything here. But I also don't write laws; if I did, they would look different.

Companies are allowed to train on copyrighted works - or, to be more precise, there is no prohibition in copyright law on them doing so. On the other hand, there are no particular protections.

The real question is to what extent an AI generator can return its copyrighted training data as a non-de minimis output. In other words, can I get one of the existing copyrighted works by putting in a prompt? This is something that AI developers are trying to avoid, but it's actuallg a pretty tricky problem.

Allowing AI output to be copyrighted is one of the worst ideas in copyright. Thankfully, the US Constitution as interpreted by the courts only allows for copyright to inhere in works of human creativity.

By the way, while I'm very excited about certain "AI" things, I have a very poor opinion of the merit of generative AI — and I mean in theory we well as how it stands today.

The problem is not resources. It is an ideological choice. Wikimedia Commons only supports non-proprietary file formats. That means either open formats or formats whose patents have expired. (MPEG-4 Part 2 patents only expired in the US a few weeks ago.)

> Before people cheer too much, surprisingly works can retroactively be snatched back from the public domain and go back into copyrighted state.

The United States is decidedly not going to extend copyright terms. The US only very reluctantly pulled works out of the public domain after it joined the Berne Convention in 1989. The reason ''Metropolis'' was in the public domain was because it failed to comply with renewal formalities, which are prohibited by Berne. Essentially, other countries threatened trade deals if the US made terms dependent on formalities for non-US works. So the law was changed and copyrights were restored.

As someone who works in the field (and who isn't a fan of the URAA), I can tell you that isn't going to happen again.

Manual coloring is creative. "Restoring" is a bit of an ambiguous term, but generally, it would not be original expression either. Remember, the test for originality has nothing to do with effort. Restoring something to its original state is not new creative expression, but presenting the existing creative expression.

It is actually possible. It is possible to transmit information by moving a thing (which is sensed by the optical sensor, as shown here). So we can transmit information by moving spaghetti. It is not a particularly efficient method, though.

Yes. They have every reason to want it. The more raw material isn't covered by copyright, the more they can feed into anything.

And that's not even counting the relevance of organizations like the Internet Archive, which was not nearly as meaningful in 1998.

> The public domain and copyright expiry is one more set of requirements for SV code to have to implement and support. It's way easier if the owner stays for ever, and that there is a single owner

And this makes no sense. Applications are not required to recognize public domain content and make it unrestricted when copyright expires. Having it remain under ownership forever doesn't make anything easier. And, in fact, copyrights having a single, simple owner is just... not the case. So to whatever extent there is a need to keep track of owners, copyright expiration only makes things easier (because if a work is in the public domain, you can no longer screw it up).

> Reducing the length of existing copyright terms might be considered an ex post facto law. Those are explicitly prohibited by the Constitution.

No, that is definitely not an ex post facto law. That's not even close to what the ex post facto law clause covers (dealing with punishments for actions that were kosher at the time they took place).

There is an argument that shortening copyrights is prohibited by the takings clause. But I think there is a very good argument that shortening them isn't prohibited by the takings clause (for the same public-private interest balance reason that led to the first amendment arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft and Golan v. Holder failing).

Pre-rewrite FF for Android supported about:config. Actually, Fennec F-Droid and the Beta version of Firefox support it just fine, too. It exists in stable FF but is cordoned off for some reason.

Firefox for Android had add-ons before, and even during the past few years, they're fully supported the collection of recommended add-ons, including uBlock Origin from day one. So I don't see how it could be about preventing ad blocking.

Historically, yes. Apple used to be a lot stricter about these things. But they have loosened up over the years.

Back in the day, they were removing stuff like scripting apps. They sent warnings to the devs of Pythonista, forcing them to do things like [remove file-opening support](https://mygeekdaddy.net/2014/06/17/working-around-apple/). And they infamously removed iDOS (a DOSBOX port).

Now they're much more loose and allow things like iSH and so on. It is still a little bit of a gray area for arbitrary decisions by Apple, though.

Historically, it's gotten much further behind, but they've gotten better recently.

Orion is built on webkit, both on desktop and mobile. It's possible to build WebExt support into a WebKit browser, as they've done.

While I definitely prefer FF and Android, I can support the notion of Mozilla integrating extension support into WebKit on their iOS version of FF. But it would take a lot of effort to do that, and Firefox for iOS is ultimately just totally separate from any other Firefox (whereas Android and Desktop Firefox share the same innards).

While I respect Kiwi for implementing extension support, they've often fell far behind the upstream Chromium codebase and they're significantly smaller than even Firefox for Android. So I don't think they'd really be a "major" Android browser.

Then again, Firefox could easily be said to not be a major Android browser either!

This is good. Now, all extensions marked by the developer as being compatible with Android are shown on AMO. (If you toggle to Desktop mode, you can actually install any other extension on AMO, too.)

The baffling thing is why this took so damn long. FF for Android supported add-ons from the beginning. That's the best thing about Firefox for Android! They decided to rewrite the UI in 2020, and there were fair reasons to do that. Obviously this required some reimplementation time for extension support.

But they then launched the rewrite of FF for Android with extension support... but hidden. Only a small set of recommended extensions were enabled, and a few were drip-fed over time (that is, added to the list). Thankfully, this included the single most important extension, uBlock Origin, from the very beginning. (The lack of uBO why Chrome for Android is borderline unusable for me!)

But from almost the very beginning, we've also had the ability to activate custom extension collections in Nightly (and in Fennec F-Droid, which is a rebuild of stable Firefox). The vast majority of extensions worked fine for... well, years now.

So why in the world was this delayed the whole time?

Yes, of course, the added content would not be in the public domain. Although it should be note that certain changes such as fixing grammatical errors/proofreading would not be considered copyrightable.

No, there is no requirement under US law to preemptively block non-US users, or under NZ law to block non-NZ users. German courts held that there was jurisdiction over PG because they had content in German, and PG decided to comply. But you can, in fact, pick a server location with lax laws. But you may be susceptible to get sued elsewhere (in some cases), and the local country can force ISPs to block your site, too, if you don't respond.

The 25-year rule is part of an EU copyright directive (which Iceland, as an EEA country, has adopted as well). Also, this isn't technically a copyright, but an equivalent right. (And the right is not 4000 years old.) The EU directive says (in English):

> Any person who, after the expiry of copyright protection, for the first time lawfully publishes or lawfully communicates to the public a previously unpublished work, shall benefit from a protection equivalent to the economic rights of the author. The term of protection of such rights shall be 25 years from the time when the work was first lawfully published or lawfully communicated to the public.

The KJV is protected in the UK by Royal Prerogative rather than by copyright law. The KJV rights are actually older than copyright in the UK.

A number of countries have copyright restrictions on things of national significance, etc., however, and then there's the concept of domaine public payant.

There's none. But the validity of a copyright of a work is dependent on the place in which you're applying the law, not on the place where the author is from (except when applying the rule of the shorter term).

Tons of works are in the public domain in one country, but not another.

There's a distinction between trademark and copyright, and the ability to imply a Disney source and to include Mickey in your work are not controlled in the same way. Using the 1928 Mouse in your work while making it clear your work doesn't originate with Disney wouldn't violate trademark law.

In Life+50 countries, they'll enter the public domain. In the UK and other Life+70 countries, they won't.