Let's create derivative works!

Hey, has this ever happened to you? You're eulogizing someone and start quoting Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. You're almost up to miles to go before I sleep when out of nowhere armed copyright enforcement officers break down the door, kick over grandma's casket and serve you a cease and desist order?

"Freeze! One more stanza and I will blow your fucking head off!"

-Some Copyright Enforcement agent

And since when has general terribleness
ever been a barrier to musicians?

Well good news, because Frost's classic poem about the conflict between beauty and obligation has now, along with fifty thousand other works of literature, art and film just slipped into the public domain meaning they're up for grabs. You can now screen Cecil B. DeMille's silent movie The Ten Commandments, stage George Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan, or record any piece of music written in 1923. You know that song Yes! We Have No Bananas? It's yours to cover as you please. The only thing stopping you is its general terribleness as a song. All without paying the original artist's grandkids a dime thanks to the expiration of their copyrights. Go nuts.

"I've got a million layers and own
Florida, so bring it asshole! Ho-ho!"

-Mickey  Mouse

Works published before 1978 were originally protected for seventy five years, but the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act-yes, that Sonny Bono-added another twenty years to that. Anything published after 1978 is protected for the life of the author plus seventy years (one hundred and twenty if the author is a corporation), meaning that assuming George Lucas lives to be say, a hundred, you won't be able to film your own Star Wars Episode 1 remake until the year 2114. And that's assuming Disney doesn't manage to get the copyright extended even further. Disney was hugely influential in getting the Bono act passed in the first place in order to keep Mickey Mouse from slipping into public domain, so I'm sure they'll work something out before the twenty-second century. But for now we can content ourselves with stealing from the fifty-thousand other works just freed from copyright.

Cool, right? So I was never really a Napster person, I mean, the whole rationale with that was basically 'music should be free, man...' And that sounds pretty bullshit to me. Of course an artist should be able to control and reap the benefit of their work. 

Ok, I may have done a little rom emulating back
in college, but in many ways I was the victim. A
victim of wanting to play video games...for free.

Yeah, I know he he'd it first, but Hitler.
Hitler. There's just no going back.

Just because some DJ wants to sample something for their EMD track without paying the artist doesn't mean they should be able to. But these artists are long, long dead, so you don't even have to feel weird about it. Agatha Christie: totally dead. M. C. Escher: also dead. G. B. Shaw: he be dead. Charlie Chaplin: dead and had a Hitler 'stache. Whose afraid of Virginia Woolf? No one, because she's dead. Felix the Cat? Ok, he's not dead because he's a cartoon cat, but he's rights free now. So are a couple of H.P. Lovecraft's stories and an Agatha Christie novel called The Murder on the Links.

Up until now the people collecting the royalties are these artists grandkids or whatever. And what have they ever done? Nothing that's what. Well, ok, they've probably done something with their lives, but none of them wrote The Charleston. And I'm just not sure being Todd Hemingway or Diane Lovecraft should really entitle someone to a century's worth of checks for creating exactly nothing.

Huh? Yeah, my attitude would probably be different if I were Robert
 Frost's great, great grandnephew. I didn't say I wasn't a hypocrite.