It is Section 506(c), not 506(a) as originally
stated.

Sorry.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<[email protected]>

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.

You wondered if your franchise will crumble when
you forget to register your postcard for copyright.
The answer is probably no. I checked Attorney
Stephen Fishman’s book titled _The Public Domain:
How to Find & Use Copyright-Free Writings, Music,
Art & More_. Chapter 19, Part C, Section 6 focuses
only on copyright notice (not registration) and
it said several courts disagreed on the effect of
lack of copyright notice in a derivative work
on the original work. It is a grey area. That
was under old copyright law where registration
and notice were required.

Although you can use your creation as a trademark,
others can use your creation for any noncommercial
use and for some commercial uses.

Design patent lasts only 14 years, if you really
want the protection to last that long.

Regarding making false claims on copyright, Section
506(a) in the U.S. copyright law already covers
that but it is never enforced by the Department of
Justice.

(What does TP&Vs stand for?)

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<[email protected]>

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.

A problem related to this is that a third party could be induced to infringing on the author’s copyrights by licensing a work from the fraud.

Currently, many book publishers claim full copyright in the TP&Vs of the books they publish. Many record companies claim all rights on the CDs they publish. Assuming they are not always speaking the truth when doing so, why would they be allowed to make false claims in and on the works themselves, but not in a copyright register?

What about derivative works? What if I control the copyrights to a superhero from a comic strip, but forget to register a postcard that an intern once drew for a charity; only one in a sea of drawings of my hero. One small mistake, and my complete franchise is shot to pieces.

I could probably use trademark law “and/or a ‘design patent'”, as someone on Slashdot tells me to ‘protect’ my creation, but would that be permissable in the US? I seem to have read somewhere that for instance E.U. courts won’t allow double ‘protection’ of the instance of an idea.

Better would be to place no renewal limits on the holder but to make it expire within a sane amount of time as was originally done at America’s beginning.

You still infringe patent owner’s rights even if you
uses it for your own personal use. Don’t even think
about posting instructions on web because it is
still patent infringement. There is no exception
for personal use.

Now, if I want to be a “bad” guy, I would do it
secretly in the basement of my house and divulge
the information to those who agree to Mafia-style
code of silence. 🙂

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<[email protected]>

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.

Thanks for the explanation of the law’s differing treatment of parody and satire.

“Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” was released in 1948 — only 17 years after “Dracula.” Regardless of your personal reaction to viewing the original after seeing the satire, the Abbott and Costello film is considered a classic — one of the top satires of all time.

Today, despite our sped-up culture, you would need to wait 95 years before doing the same without the copyright holders’ permission (or worrying about a lawsuit).

That’s a travesty.

I don’t think this is necessarily the case at all.

There are already numerous outfits that are making good scratch digitizing, systematically, old court decisions, old newspapers, old research tools, and soon, entire libraries. That kind of purse-seining of the public domain will try and capture as much material as possible.

In addition, in the historical business, you never know what work is going to catch your eye, to be reused substantially as part of your own follow-own synthetic publication, or as a stand-alone revival of a forgotten work. Think Dover, or in the Canadian context, Coles Canadian collection.

I’ve been doing some research in to how long books stay in print, and it’s amazing the variety of things that don’t stay in print tht should; that do stay in print that shouldn’t; and for what reasons, and by whom, an old work is revived.

You would be amazed, for instance, at the seemingly insatiable appetite by the blind and visually impaired for early western novels (1910s through 1940s)… yet there’s none for Harlequins! Or the obscure mid-century novel that ends up appearing, in translation, in the 1990s.

Yes, that one or two percent of works of enduring public appeal and commercial value, with a non-absentee landlord, will likely not fall into that public domain where follow-on creators would want to, and could, make wierd uses of it… but don’t write off the other 98-99 percent just yet!