I cannot put into words how much I Fucking Loathe the fact that when you search something on youtube now it will randomly intersperse blocks of “people also watched” and “for you” into the results. That’s not what I searched for, youtube. I typed in a search query because I wanted to see search results, not random unrelated garbage you have placed in my way apparently to either inconvenience me or force me to scroll further for actual results. I despise your wretched little games and every time I see it I can only instantly close the tab as I am overcome with the urge to burn something down.
“I despise your wretched little games” perfectly conveys how I feel about the entire algorithm/attention economy
Leftism teaches you that the most annoying people in the world can have the exact same opinions as you. And they’ll still get on your nerves
Other leftists will say some shit you fundamentally agree with but phrased in a way designed in a lab specifically to piss you off. Like you’re right but shut the fuck up
Anyway I saw a TERF blog say “there are hardly any gay men on Tumblr, probably because men don’t use the internet except to talk about video games and spread misogyny” djshdjdjdjddn
Disney going around buying everything is definitely terrible, but there totally needs to be more awareness that the biggest damage Disney has done to the American media landscape happened twenty years ago, and ended up warping a whole generation’s notion of how media is fundamentally supposed to work in the process.
Basically, you can’t “renew” a copyright in order to extend it. “Copyright renewal” used to be a thing, but the purpose of doing so was to prevent the copyright from expiring early, not to extend it beyond the normal statutory limit – and in any event, all that was abolished decades ago, and everybody’s copyrights now last for the full term without the need for renewals.
When most people think of copyright “renewal”, they’re really thinking of copyright extension, which is some legislative fuckery that happened back in the 1990s, and is 100% Disney’s fault.
In a nutshell, Disney didn’t want Mickey Mouse entering the public domain, but there was no formal mechanism for preventing it, and obviously they couldn’t have a legal exception made just for Mickey Mouse; even if they’d bribed enough lawmakers to make it happen, that sort of blatant legislative favouritism would have caused a big hairy scandal.
So what they did instead was lobby for a global copyright extension, applying to all works that were still under copyright at the time – and they succeeded. The Copyright Extension Act of 1998 – sometimes known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, because they weren’t fooling anybody! – tacked an extra twenty years onto the term of all outstanding copyrights, ensuring that Mickey Mouse would be safe until at least 2024.
So here’s the trick: what happened to all the works that would have entered the public domain in 1999? Well, they’d now enter the public domain in 2019 – effectively “freezing” the public domain America for the next two decades. Thanks to Disney’s lobbying, there was a twenty-year span in which no works at all entered the public domain in the United States, apart from the tiny handful that were explicitly released to the public domain by a living author.
If you’re American and under the age of 30, last year is probably the first year in your memory that new works entered the public domain; if you’re under 20, it was the first year in your lifetime that new works entered the public domain. There’s an entire generation of Americans who grew up with a static public domain, thinking that was a normal state of affairs.
Like, I’m not saying that’s 100% responsible for American popular culture being in the condition it’s in, but it’s undeniably a pretty big contributing factor!
I wonder what’s entering the public domain now.
The Catalog of Copyright Entries provides a set of historical databases listing all US copyrights registered from 1891 through 1949 (inclusive). For reference, works registered in 1923 entered the public domain last year, and works registered in 1924 entered the public domain this year; on January 1st, 2021, works registered in 1925 will enter the public domain.
However, if you’re only concerned about notable works (as you likely are!), you might instead consult the relevant Wikipedia articles, which provide year-by-year breakdowns of notable works in art, literature and film. Be sure to double-check the US publication dates of any given work before concluding that it’s in the clear; the fact that it was first published in a particular year doesn’t guarantee that it was first published in the US in that year.
Note that I’ve deliberately excluded music; owing to the disorganised state of copyright law in the United States, new US audio recordings won’t begin to enter the public domain until 2024.
(And yes, you do see The Great Gatsby on the list of notable works of literature published in 1925. I’m not saying you have a moral obligation to commercially release that extremely gay reimagining you’ve been working on, but I’m not not saying that, either.)
I… hadn’t realized that Art Capitalism wasn’t the normal way of things and now I’m… really really angry about it?? I’ve somehow come to associate registered trademarks and whatnot with things being Just How It’s Done and knowing that public domain was a real thing that actually existed in a very tangible way before Mickey Mouse… I am having Feelings.
