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This is a terrific resource for copyright information, thank you for sharing. I’ve been reading a lot about Sherlock Holmes entering public domain and the associated court battles being waged by the Conan Doyle Estate. This has led me to discover that Lord of the Rings will be entering public domain in Canada next year! Does anyone know how that works? Will Canadian companies be able to adapt the Lord of the Rings into movies, shows, etc? Will those movies and shows be allowed to screen the US? Very curious how this will play out, as the Tolkien estate is also notoriously litigious and protective of their LOTR treasure.

According to the linked site:

"While the US finally turned on the public domain spigot in 2019, after a 20-year drought, Canada’s government has now decided to turn its spigot off. On December 30, 2022, Canada is freezing its public domain for the next 20 years with its C-19 copyright law."

Tolkien was going to enter the Canadian public domain in 2024 and, yes, that would have legally allowed Canadian companies to produce their own adaptations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, for release and consumption in Canada and other countries with life + 50 copyright only (though, realistically, it's very unlikely that any Canadian studio would try to make a fantasy TV show or feature film with no help from Hollywood and no hope of release in America or China, so at best you would get a few books, the commercial equivalent of fanfic, like the James Bond anthology License Expired).

Last year, though, Canada extended its copyright term to life + 70, effective retroactively for authors who have yet to enter the Canadian public domain (though not, thankfully, for authors who are already there) in order to meet its obligations under the USMCA. This is a textbook example of how the US uses trade deals to demand that other countries go along with America's outrageous and oppressive copyright laws. So now Tolkien will not enter the Canadian public domain until 2044.

See previous discussion on /r/slatestarcodex.

Cheers, thanks for this info.

Even if copyright in Canada hadn't gone from life plus 50 years to life plus 70, properties that are still valuable tend to use trademark law to keep derivative works from being made. Anne of Green Gables has been in the public domain for a while in Canada. You can download the books off Project Gutenberg with no problems, but if you want to make your Anne of Green Gables Meets Winnie The Pooh crossover comic, Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority Inc. is going to come after you.

That seems like it might be Disney's strategy as well. Winnie The Pooh is public domain, but not the Disney cartoon. Disney's version has the red shirt, so if you want to make a horror version of Winnie The Pooh, he can't wear a red shirt.

Anne of Green Gables has been in the public domain for a while in Canada. You can download the books off Project Gutenberg with no problems, but if you want to make your Anne of Green Gables Meets Winnie The Pooh crossover comic, Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority Inc. is going to come after you.

That's a pretty limited protection though. All you have to do is not include the trademarked phrase "Anne of Green Gables" in your title or marketing. You could still have a trailer where Winnie the Pooh looks over and goes, "Anne, is that you?" and a recognizable version of Anne comes from the shadows or something.

Finally we can enjoy even more remakes and reboots!!!!

I do think it's best for very old works to be in the public domain just because the marginal impact on incentive to create of the hundredth year if royalties is virtually nil, but I've always kind of rolled my eyes at claims that inability to crib famous character designs is holding back a tsunami of creativity. Who are these people who are so creative but can't come up with their own characters?

They are Homer, they are Vergil, they are the authors of the holy bible. It's just how people do.

Who are these people who are so creative but can't come up with their own characters?

I view it a different way. What's so important about pointless innovation?

Right after Star Wars, there were a bunch of follow-the-leader movies in the 70's and 80's that had their own laser-sword wielding heroes that couldn't be called "lightsabers", and I just wonder what that added to our culture? Does us calling them "laser swords" or "plasma swords" instead of "lightsabers" really add anything of value to our culture, or is it pointless innovation for innovations sake? Effectively, we have one highly iconic and recognizable object - so recognizable everyone knows they're looking at a lightsaber, but copyright law forces us to call it something different. (Or at least creates enough of a chilling effect that most people aren't willing to risk calling their laser swords "lightsabers.")

When the ancients wanted to use an iconic character or object to tell a new story, they just told it. Instead, we have to pointlessly scratch the serial numbers off of anything to tell the stories we want to tell.

Is Cuphead better for the fact that the main characters aren't just Mickey Mouse and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit? Is Invincible better for the fact that "Superman" becomes "Omni-man", and the "Justice League" become the "Guardians of the Globe", etc.?

Imagine if Shakespeare had to rename the well-known stories he was retelling. Instead of recognizable anglicized characters like "Romeo and Juliet", what if he had to call them "Giovanni and Gianna" or something. One, he'd have to spend pointless time at the beginning telling an audience that this is basically just a retelling of the story of Romeus and Juliet, and then he could actually tell the story he wanted to tell. It just seems like we've replaced evocation of the muses with a few minutes where we just tell the audience in as many ways as possible: "This is basically Superman, go it?" and I just don't see what that adds to our culture. Why can't we just have a bunch of stories about Superman?

If copyright protected fixed works, like it used to, and not derivative works, then I think that would be a better system. (Especially with goofy interpretations we end up getting. Winnie the Pooh is in the public domain, but if you even think about giving him a red shirt Disney's lawyers will breathe down your back. Is the creative addition of a red shirt so important that it's worth having legal protections for it?)

Face it, remixing is the natural state of human culture. All works that you know and love are remakes of other older works on some level. Narrative innovation insofar as it even exists is only incremental.

Just think of tropes like Hero's Journey. That's been repeated for at least three thousand years in various permutations.

Endless rehashes and reboots from potential randos and weirdos > endless rehashes and reboots from the same 3 multibillion dollar multinational media conglomerates.