Amazon's CodeWhisperer

Posted Jul 6, 2022 7:18 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958)
In reply to: Amazon's CodeWhisperer by rgmoore
Parent article: Amazon's CodeWhisperer

Hollywood constantly rips off old sci-fi stories passing them off as original. I guess since most of the original authors are dead they don't fear repercussions.

Amazon's CodeWhisperer

Posted Jul 6, 2022 11:37 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (7 responses)

Depends when the original author died, and whether the new work is similar enough to the old work to qualify as a derived work.

For the death date side, if the original author died before 1950, then copyright term is over anyway, and no protection applies.

The "is it similar enough" side is more complex - the rules on whether a work is actually derived from another are complex and require a degree of human judgement - and this is the bit that Copilot and Hollywood both depend upon, in that something may be a copy, but not rise to the level of infringing copyright.

Amazon's CodeWhisperer

Posted Jul 6, 2022 17:08 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

> For the death date side, if the original author died before 1950, then copyright term is over anyway, and no protection applies.

This is true, but there are a rather surprisingly large number of additional "outs" in US copyright law (and generally *not* in the copyright law of any other country, because the US is weird):

* Published (only) outside the US: It's complicated, but probably not copyrighted if it was out of copyright in its home country on January 1, 1996.
* Published (in the US) more than 95 years ago, and before 1978 (i.e. 1927 and earlier): Out of copyright per https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/304
* Published (in the US) before 1964, and copyright not manually renewed: Out of copyright (renewal is now automatic). Many older works fall under this exception, particularly anything that was seen as ephemeral or low-value. This includes quite a few pulp magazines, which you can now read on the Internet Archive for free.
* Published (in the US) before March 1, 1989, and no copyright notice or registration: Never copyrighted.
* Sound recording, published (in the US) before February 15, 1972: This used to be a complicated morass of state laws, but Congress fixed it in 2018, see https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1401

Amazon's CodeWhisperer

Posted Jul 7, 2022 2:27 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (5 responses)

> For the death date side, if the original author died before 1950, then copyright term is over anyway, and no protection applies.

Life + 70 is only true in part of the world, mainly Europe. The US copyright laws are very hairy, but anything published more than 95 years ago is in the public domain, and anything published since then may not be, with author death dates only mattering right now for works first published after 2002. Lots of the rest of the world is life+50 (e.g. China) and only a couple of nations are life+60, but that includes India, which has more people than the EU.

Amazon's CodeWhisperer

Posted Jul 7, 2022 7:54 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

Note that you're talking about a whole load of ways in which, depending on where you are, something is out of copyright at life + 70 but also out of copyright before that. Hollywood tries to sell its movies globally, and thus wants to be on the upper limit of copyright - and even in the US, a story is out of copyright by that point.

Amazon's CodeWhisperer

Posted Jul 7, 2022 22:46 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

Yes, Hollywood has to worry about more or less global copyright. However, just being life+70 does not make a work PD in the US, and there's a lot of authors, like George Orwell, whose works are in the public domain in the EU, but won't be PD in the US until 95 years from publication, or 2044 for _1948_.

Amazon's CodeWhisperer

Posted Jul 8, 2022 12:23 UTC (Fri) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't follow what you are saying about 2002. The US definitely also follows the life + 70 rule (they are constantly encouraging other countries to do so as well).

This treatment in the US goes back to everything published in 1978 or later by individuals (not corporations), so it is definitely relevant and can very easily extend the term beyond 95 years. It will extend the duration of copyright for most works which would otherwise expire starting in 2048.

Amazon's CodeWhisperer

Posted Jul 8, 2022 13:38 UTC (Fri) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain . The US copyright law shows where it's been patched over and over to bring conformity with new standards while being mostly bug compatible with the way things were. The US only went life plus 70 for works made since 1978 or published since 2002. Since US law is a mess and other countries don't need bug compatibility with US law, US copyright maximalists are pushing for life+70.

Amazon's CodeWhisperer

Posted Jul 8, 2022 13:47 UTC (Fri) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

Sorry, I didn't read carefully enough. Works first published between 1978 and 2001 are treated as if the author died in 1978 if the author died earlier. So 2002 is the first year that any work first published in that year is life+70. For example, all of Mark Twain's unpublished works were "published" in 2001, so the copyright owners are claiming copyright through 2048.

Amazon's CodeWhisperer

Posted Jul 6, 2022 11:52 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not unusual for a movie to credit (not always very prominently if the author and work are obscure) works from which a script was historically derived. Hollywood would much rather have a sign-off and give away points on the net (which are often close to worthless) than risk a lawsuit with unknowable damages some day in the future.

However of course if the scriptwriter is dishonest they might not tell anybody where the original idea came from.

Realistically it's only going to be short works anyway. Condensing a novel into a movie loses almost everything except the outline plot - and even then it might take two or three movies to get it on film. There are a lot of old SF shorts with interesting ideas in them, but many would need a lot of work to sell a movie in the 21st century. It's notable how many of the original "Dangerous Visions" seem pretty tame now, or are outrageous for very different reasons. "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" is the sort of thing you could probably do (but Hollywood wouldn't give you money for it) but it would go unnoticed, who cares? Likewise "Eutopia" in which the big deal is homosexuality. Or e.g. the mediocre Dick short "Faith of Our Fathers" which I'm sure modern people would guess is Phil Dick because of all the hallucinogenics, but is no "The Man in the High Castle".

I'd like it if the average "Sci Fi" movie I saw was as clever as "Raft of the Titanic" (what if the Titanic doesn't quite sink and many aboard survive...), never mind "Golem XIV" (instead of taking ages to discover that optimal play in Tic-tac-toe is a draw like in "Wargames", what if the machine the Americans built to plan World War III is categorically smarter than us) or "Orphanogenesis" (if we are just software, what happens if you just randomize the parameters and execute the resulting software in a virtual machine?).

Amazon's CodeWhisperer

Posted Jul 7, 2022 2:31 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

I'm still confused with the new Top Gun; the original licensed a magazine article. The remake apparently failed to relicense it, so they're in court. How that was wise or profitable, I don't know; they may have a good case it's not legally derivative, but having licensed it for the first movie isn't going to help their case.