Public Domain Day 2023

I still find it hilarious that the bulk of Disney’s empire was built on long-public-domain properties and they have still fought rational IP freedoms for so long. Must be some kind of cognitive dissonance (oops, I mean legal fees)

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I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. If I understand correctly, trademark has to do with identifying the source of a product, so you can write your own Sherlock Holmes story as long as you don’t title it or promote it in a way that would make someone think it was one of the original stories or is put out by the Doyle estate. I’m open to being corrected, of course.

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There’s a Mickey cartoon already in the public domain, The Mad Doctor, but I got blocked from using it in a project anyway,.

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I think Disney has reached the point of being diversified enough that they no longer feel threatened by letting some ancient cartoons fall into the public domain… as long as they keep control of the character trademarks. It’s no longer worth all the bribes lobbying expenses to try and push the expiration limit forward any more.

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I think you’re right. Tarzan is public domain, but the character’s name is trademarked. So Dynamite could publish Tarzan comics, but they had to title them “Lord of the Jungle” (or something like that).

They could still call him Tarzan inside the comic, though. Just like DC could have a comic called SHAZAM, but could still call the character Captain Marvel inside the book.

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Will vouch for the greatness of Sunrise and The Lodger. Must see flicks.

The Jazz Singer is technically important, but holy crap that movie is a chore.

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You’ll also see this with a lot of the Golden Age superheroes who have fallen into the Public Domain but whose names have later been used (and trademarked) by Marvel or DC- Daredevil, Hydro-Man, Catman, Black Cat, Blue Beetle. Though in many of those cases, they’ll just try to change the name so they can put their own trademark on it; this gets especially funny with Daredevil, as there are some really out-there names they’ve tried that still FEEL like the name “Daredevil”, like “Death-Defying 'Devil”, which is quite the mouthful.

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HELL YES.

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Wings, on the other hand, is pretty dull, setting the standard for Best Picture winners from then on.

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Which is interesting, because at that 1st Academy Awards ceremony, you had TWO top prizes: Outstanding Picture as well as Best Unique and Artistic Picture. Wings won the former; Sunrise won the latter.

Best Unique and Artistic Picture would be disbanded the following year, and the Academy reconfigured history to say that Wings was the big winner that night.

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Wings is at least interesting in terms of filmmaking techniques.

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My thing with Wings is that the main focus of the two dudes being rivals turned friends is not very interesting, and Clara Bow might as well not be in that movie at all because she feels shoehorned in. That said, the action in that movie is pretty great. It was almost the Top Gun of the silent era, so I mostly give it a pass. Out of its competition at the Academy Awards, I like 7th Heaven a little more, if only because of Janet Gaynor, but will concede that 7th Heaven gets weaker as it goes while Wings gets more exciting. However, Wings is a far better movie than The Racket, which I just finished yesterday

But Sunrise is just an all around great movie and an outstanding achievement in expressionist cinema. Now that it’s public domain, every film lover out there has no excuse to not check it out.

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Apparently “Puttin’ On the Ritz” also hits PD this year. It wasn’t published or performed until 1930, but Irving Berlin registered the copyright in 1927.

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Thus the disappearance of Godzilla from MST3k

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I absolutely refuse to believe Asylum asked anybody for permission when they did this.

Sherlock_holmes_by_asylum_film_poster

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With the original lyrics, presumably, which are not the ones most people are familiar with.

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And definitely not the Peter Boyle Young Frankenstein arrangement.

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There’s a LOT of books out there that use Holmes and Watson and Mrs. Hudson as characters - I’m sure that the Conan Doyle estate has not approved most of them.

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This is probably the most significant play among those listed. It’s no understatement to say it was the Hamilton of its day. It is still regularly revived in productions around the world, so does this mean it can now be produced without having to secure theatrical rights?

It’s also probably not a good sign that I am more familiar with the songs of 1927 than I am with those of 2022.

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