Do you use Public Domain characters? (Sherlock, Frankenstein, Abraham Lincoln...)

iddqd 2016-05-01 18:26:45 UTC #28

Honestly, copyright law is probably a real quagmire. Not sure if you're a law student, but thanks for explanation, it makes a ton of sense. Wait till Tolkien becomes public domain, I suppose, for a real cluster... something!

bakasama25 2016-05-01 22:21:15 UTC #29

Think Disney, any one can use "Pinocchio", original erotic version of the "Beauty and Beast", the oldest version of "Cinderella", "Talia, Sun, Moon", or even the first 12 books of the Land of Oz. It's just the Disney owns/copyrights their version of the stories and characters based on PD works.

iddqd 2016-05-02 02:25:55 UTC #30

So long as Ari... the Little Mermaid turns into sea foam, I suppose.

bakasama25 2016-05-02 03:00:39 UTC #31

Not really, you can just do things that Disney didn't do such as making a Hans Christen Anderson "universe" where the characters from different books go an adventure putting your own spin and maybe with your own characters.

There is a webcomic does something like that with characters from the Oz books, Alice in Wonderland, and few other books. It's called Namesake.

Another thing one can do is make a version of The Sleeping Beauty that takes parts from the from the original Italian version of it, Talia, Sun, Moon. I'll say one thing about that one, "WHAT THE HELL HERO!" That said, one could make a more feminist version that empowers Sleeping Beauty character and makes the queen of that story more likeable.

hushicho 2016-05-02 08:36:00 UTC #32

Honestly there are far more versions of stories like Sleeping Beauty than are popularized -- even the sensationalized one that gets tossed around as "the original" isn't, because these stories had as many different versions as they did storytellers. That's the great thing about stories like that: there are so many different ways to tell the story, and a lot of them depended heavily on the time, the place, the person, and the audience!

But it's so true that there is so much potential with these characters. And it's true that while Disney can do these stories (and likely did many of them because of not only their public domain status, but also the fact that they're so well known as stories most children learn), they are firmly public domain characters and anyone can do anything with them now. That's why whenever there's a release of a Disney animated film, there are usually countless other versions by other studios trying to cash in on it with their own takes on it. There's nothing Disney can really do about that unless the others try to imitate their cover art or logo, or intentionally try to misrepresent their take as the Disney version; that perhaps illustrates the "copyrighted work including public domain character versus just the public domain work" thing best of all.

SamNoir 2016-05-03 05:43:28 UTC #33

I really dig the art in this!

SamNoir 2016-05-03 05:59:47 UTC #34

Public Domain relates directly to copyright. they are not separate nor comparable, they are linked periods of time. Copyright was/is/always in fact not only supposed to encompass the author's lifespan (so if they were successful, YES they could sit on their laurels for the rest of their life) plus an ever expanding number of years following their death where it benefits the author's heirs (in Canada, it remains at fifty years, US is 75 I believe). Once copyright ends, it enters public domain and is fair use for anyone to use.

Now... here's the thing. Once a CORPORATION gains the same rights of ownership as a human being, and the concept of Work For Hire is invented (where a creator essentially cedes his authorship to the corporate entity, in exchange for salary or other forms of payment), things take a rather interesting turn.

hushicho 2016-05-03 07:42:22 UTC #35

Actually you're not accurate there and you seem to have missed a lot of what I said. Copyright was never supposed to encompass the author's lifespan plus years -- you may need to do some re-reading. It originally did not encompass the author's lifespan, and conceptually was nowhere near that extremely unpredictable figure. Your phrasing also could use some work, as it seems self-contradictory and I frankly don't know what you're trying to say at numerous points.

"Corporations as people" wasn't even a thing until much more recently -- copyright's existence goes back far, far before that ever came about, and is still being argued -- and work for hire has existed pretty much forever. The points of contention these days, such as with Superman and other comic book heroes, comes as a reexamination of the scruples (or lack thereof) of the American companies engaged in the superhero genre and how they comported themselves professionally in the past.

SamNoir 2016-05-03 21:11:19 UTC #36

Wow. that got weirdly personal. Without going that route, I'll simply say, we are obviously not speaking the same language here.

"Honestly, the public domain today is what copyright was supposed to be, really."
In the simplest of terms. "Public Domain today" is NOT what "copyright was supposed to be, really"
The are not comparable entities as you suggest, but representative of an "on/off" state.
It's either in Public Doman for everyone to freely ues, or it is copyright and not accessible to anyone but the author/owner/heirs.
Copyright is an "on" state, Public Domain is an "off" state if we are talking binary.

These separate states exist in a continuum of measured time.

Copyright is the period of time where the author/owner/heirs has exclusive rights to the material.
We'll use Sherlock Holmes as an example. Created in 1886. Doyle died in 1930. Canadian copyright expires fifty years after the author's death. Study in the Scarlet was protected by Copyright from 1886 to 1980 in Canada. (in the US it's 75 years as of the 76' copyright extension act, which put Study in Scarlet into the public domain there in 2005).

Public Domain describes the period of time where the material can be published and used by anyone freely.
Thus Study in Scarlet has been in Public Domain since 1980 to the present in Canada (2005 to the present in the US).

"work for hire" was only established in 1976 as a copyright concept. Which is why it's notoriously difficult to defend the numerous claimants against Marvel and DC in recent years as creators sought to reclaim copyrights on Golden and Silver Age characters. Most of them went to hush-hush cash settlement. (i.e. the case of Joe Simon, and the Jack Kirby's estate in recent years).

and YES, Corporations were given the same rights as people in more recent years... which results in the amendments of "lifetimes" to the addition of set number of years from point of creation, given that Corporations are potentially immortal. These corporate entities notoriously have been extending copyrights to keep Mickey Mouse and Superman out of the public domain (keeping the switch set to "on" long after it was meant to). Sonny Bono was the eponymous culprit in that particular act.

Ironically it was these same copyrights extensions that kept Superman in the hands of DC for example, which allowed his original creators' heirs to stake their claim. Their original contracts with DC comics did not extend past the concept of copyright of the period of time when they signed their original deals. Thus, if the Public Domain does not get to claim Superman for public use, Seigel & Shuster, or in this case their heirs, have the right to reclaim their original copyrights, OVER DC's claim to the character. We're not privy to the details of private settlement, but hopefully the Seigel and Shuster families are FINALLY well compensated, even if Joe and Jerry themselves are not alive to reap the benefits.

eagle1 2016-05-04 23:43:18 UTC #37

The current formula for figuring copyright is this: (Current year - X) + 20 years))

In this formula, X is the year that Steamboat Willie was released. Disney will do whatever they have to to get new legislation passed to keep that from ever having Micky Mouse moved into the PD.

Eagle
(And that's just the way it is)

SamNoir 2016-05-06 07:14:06 UTC #38

I'm afraid you are probably right. True dat.

maelstrom51210 2016-05-08 15:43:13 UTC #39

Demon King uses demons from the Ars Goetia, a famous grimoire. I guess that counts as public domain.

Also, the main character is, design wise, based on a character from a public domain horror film.

scythe 2016-05-08 23:51:34 UTC #40

In which year did the copyright expire on Abraham Lincoln?

bakasama25 2016-05-09 00:23:22 UTC #41

I think somebody confused "historical person" with "fictional character"

SamNoir 2016-05-09 02:01:02 UTC #42

didn't say either historic or fictional. said Public Domain. Who says Historical figures can't be fictionalized?

SamNoir 2016-05-09 02:02:17 UTC #43

1865... Oh. Wait... my bad.

bakasama25 2016-05-09 05:55:00 UTC #44

Well, there IS a difference. A character based on historical figure is not bound by copyright. Why one can have a movie with JFK and Elvis fighting zombies in a nursing home. JFK was altered to look like black man to cover up the his assassination by the US government.

or to have recent like having Prince as Dante and Micheal Jackson as Vergil in some weird, weird version of the Inferno.

SamNoir 2016-05-11 02:27:03 UTC #45

No one here is claiming that historical figures are bound by copyright.

MK_Wizard 2024-05-08 13:09:08 UTC #46

I've done one adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde and one of Frankenstein!

Leyelle 2024-05-08 14:45:10 UTC #47

Okay wait, but Abe Lincoln isn't a character tho, he was a real person.

I do reference real people like Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra in my novel, especially in this chapter where my leads argue about MCR versus Frankie Valley and the Four Seasons: