Public Domain Superheroes? 251
SerpicoWasTaken writes "Here is an interesting article about a group of comic book heroes from the golden age that are in the public domain. Apparently, a bunch of golden age heroes were never copyrighted and just faded into obscurity. The article also contains a long discussion of copyright and the public domain. It is an interesting read for all those interested in the public domain." Update: 09/25 17:51 GMT by M : Link removed at the request of the site maintainers because it's killing their server. Update: 09/25 19:02 GMT by M : They've put the document on a static page instead of a cgi script. :)
This raises an interesting question.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that the characters in the article are public domain, is there any way to preserve the original intent of the character? I mean since they are public domain, one person could create a Black Terror that reinstates Nazi Germany. Another person create a Black Terror porno. If someone truly loved the character, how can the spirit of that character be preserved amid a landfill of junk?
Look at Batman. 60's TV show Batman is an abomination to me. Batman to me is supposed to be dark and gritty. The guy watched his parents gunned down as a child. That has to have some serious psychological effects. To see Adam West's gut hanging out over his utility belt while he, supposedly someone that had honed his body to the limits of human ability, punched out the joker's cronies with splahses of POW! and BLAMM!... Awful. But that was what the company was pushing at the time. Since then, DC has brought Batman back to what he should be. If Batman became public domain though, there could be a deluge of 60's Batman stories written by anybody and the original nature of the character would be completely lost. How do you preserve it?
psxndc
Free Steamboat Willie! (Score:5, Insightful)
The first Mickey Mouse cartoons would have eventually lapsed into the public domain if it weren't for the Sonny Bono law.
And if you want a 'real' superheroes in the PD: the 1940s Superman cartoon shorts (produced by Max and Dave Fleischer, the guys who make the old time popeye cartoons) are also (apparently) in the public domain.
The most disconcerting thing about the old Superman cartoons is that one of the villians had the same voice as Popeye! Gave me the willies.
Re:"Never copyrighted"? I don't think so. (Score:4, Insightful)
AT THE TIME, there was no automatic copyright.
Soon people will believe that it was always as it
is under the DMCA.
Re:This raises an interesting question.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not let culture change and grow so that it can be understood and appreciated by a the new society that's really its audience?
It's not a simple questions, though the overwhelmingly popular answer these days is that everything cultural, from languages, to buildings, to superheroes needs to be preserved for all infinity. This certainly wasn't always the case! I think the very copyright laws that we love to hate here on Slashdot have done a lot to foster this notion (though it's a bit of a chicken & egg situation - the laws might just be in reaction to the attitudes already present).
In any case, I think more people should really consider what's more important: preserving history, or actually building new culture, and letting the past influence the present (and thus the future) on its own terms, without being stuck on a pedestal of historicity.
This might sound like hypocrisy, coming from a harpsichord player like myself, but it's an issue that I wrestle with every day, and have yet to come to a real conclusion.
Culture used to be so fluid (Score:5, Insightful)
For thousands of years of human history, culture was fluid and the past was history. Art is always something different in its own time from what it becomes once its time has passed. One might say the primary purpose of art is to influence the present to become the future, but once the present has passed it becomes the past. Any art you look at contains within it some hope for the future, even if only because its creator hoped that someone would experience it after it was created, but once created, art exists as something from the past, already created, immutable.
But art is not always immutable - our perceptions of it change, and if we are discussing it, our discussion will change. Art influences us, and we influence all the art yet to come. The past exists as our soil, and we are the plants growing from it, but very soon we will wilt and decay into the soil, to become part of the history out of which the next generation grows. We, the past, will be incorporated into the structure of the future, but only if we allow what is created to decay into the natural "cultural soil" from which great things are born. If we hold our creations steadfast and immutable, never to change, then the only hope we are expressing is that the future is the same as the present and the past.
Now that everything seems to be recorded for posterity, people are obsessed with obtaining the "definitive edition" or the "original version" of books, films, albums, etc. If anything this stifles creativity - One imagines that the definitive version of all these stories has been cast in stone, and one wants to own it. Perhaps we then lose our ability to imagine something different, something new. Why not take elements of what has been created, and reconfigure it to your own imagination?
Re:How long... (Score:3, Insightful)