Ditto for Sir. A.C. Doyle. He died in 1926 and under CTEA,that's 1996 and come to think of it....some of his last Sherlock Holmes stores were published in the 1920s I believe. Have they come back out of the public Domain? So in all cases does the retroactive extension apply to Kipling?, Doyle?, F.Scott Fitzgerald? Hemingway? This is one reason that my bet on the Supremes ruling in Eldred will be that they will allow life+70 for works that are created in the future but strike down the retroactive extension on existing works.
Too bad some ancestor of Kiplings can't come out of the woodwork and sue Disney for infringement. Even before the CTEA, they could with Life+50 (does anybody else find it odd that we talk about "life + 50" or "Life +75" and it sounds like a sentence in a criminal trial)
BTW here's another monkey wrench into the machinery of copyright. The holder of a copyright holds that for their life+70 yrs of decendants. While noone can take away a right (without due process), under certain circumstances one can give it up (e.g., as part of a settlement of a court case, one agrees not to give out the details. One is giving up a FA right for consideration.). If so, then the holder of a copyright can give up that right or any part of it. So suppose upon their death an author puts in his will "upon my death".." all copyrights enter the public domain" or "my heirs may have 20 yrs of copyright after that works enter the public domain" or "all derivative rights to my works are now in the public domain and ONLY works published during my lifetime have copyright for my heirs". If you allow this then it gets even worse because now not only must one track down the death certificate of the author but his will and even what the heirs did with it.
"D. C. Sessions" <dvd@lumbercartel.com> Sent by: owner-dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu
12/09/2002 07:29 PM
Please respond to dvd-discuss
To: DVD-Discuss <dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu>
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Subject: Re: [dvd-discuss] Specific ironies of the CTEA
On Mon, 2002-12-09 at 16:02, John Zulauf wrote:
> I just stumbled over a specific irony of the CTEA. The 1951 Disney
> adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (it's beloved, but IMHO a hatchet job,
> no flames please... it's just my opinion) would have not be possible
> without Charles Dodgson's estates approval. Given the general
> unfaithfulness of the screen adaptation vs. the book this permission
> might have been difficult.
>
> Are there any other specific ironies like that? Anybody done a survey?
As long as you're Disneying, consider The Jungle Book:
Kipling wrote it in 1894, but lived to 1936. Therefore
under CTEA, Disney *still* couldn't make the movie for
another four years. As it was, they made it in 1967,
a mere 31 years after the death of the author (but
73 years after it was written.)
--
| It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance |
| It's the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance |
| It's the one who won't be taken who cannot seem to give |
| and the soul afraid of dyin' that never learns to live |
+------------- D. C. Sessions <dcs@lumbercartel.com> -----------+