Welcome to the public domain
On the Marx Brothers, the Constitution, and the case for putting content into the public domain for the benefit of real human beings
Protections on intellectual property (primarily patent and copyright law) are valuable means of encouraging people to generate original thoughts in a world where copies, rehashes, and knockoffs can be profitable. Originality still matters, whether it's in the development of new technological advances or the production of new works of culture.
■ But especially as the artificial intelligence "learning" models have been set loose to gather data on almost everything that has ever been published online, it's good to see that intellectual property ultimately enters the public domain, just like several items have just done with the turn of the new year. "All Quiet on the Western Front" and the Marx Brothers film "The Cocoanuts" have both entered the public domain with the turn of the calendar page.
■ There's going to be a lot of tension for the foreseeable future, between those humans who create novel ideas and those humans who corral computers into generating new material of their own. Public-domain content is especially important under those conditions.
■ We probably privilege intellectual property too much; copyright doesn't really do much economic good to most copyright owners beyond the first couple of decades, and it's hard to believe that copyright terms of nearly a century really reflect the Constitutional intent "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
■ If life expectancy is around 80 years, then a 95-year protection term isn't effectively "limited". The 14-year, once-renewable terms of 1790 probably had the right general idea. AI models are getting away with effectively converting everything to public-domain work (but keeping the value to themselves), while real people are kept from using material that by any reasonable estimation ought to have entered the actual public domain long ago.
■ Anything that connects new thinking to old works -- including putting old human-made content to renewed work in the hands of new humans -- is a way to extend the threads that remind us of the continuity of the human condition. The more that people feel atomized and isolated by cultural and social conditions, the more important it is to be reminded that we're all part of a vast chain extending back through the millennia.
