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YouTube Blocks 31st Ig Nobel Awards Ceremony, Citing Copyright on a Recording from 1914 (improbable.com) 130

The 31st annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at a special ceremony on September 9th, announced the magazine responsible for the event, the Annals of Improbable Research.

But this week they made another announcement. "YouTube's notorious takedown algorithms are blocking the video of the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony." We have so far been unable to find a human at YouTube who can fix that. We recommend that you watch the identical recording on Vimeo.

Here's what triggered this: The ceremony includes bits of a recording (of tenor John McCormack singing "Funiculi, Funicula") made in the year 1914.

YouTube's takedown algorithm claims that the following corporations all own the copyright to that audio recording that was MADE IN THE YEAR 1914: "SME, INgrooves (on behalf of Emerald); Wise Music Group, BMG Rights Management (US), LLC, UMPG Publishing, PEDL, Kobalt Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, Sony ATV Publishing, and 1 Music Rights Societies"

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YouTube Blocks 31st Ig Nobel Awards Ceremony, Citing Copyright on a Recording from 1914

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  • Fraud? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @10:37AM (#61810493)
    Aren't those companies committing fraud by claiming they own the copyright to that song?
    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      They're probably claiming copyright to the performance rather than to the song. But isn't 1914 old enough to be out of copyright anyway?

      • Silly, they made a "Greatest hits of the 19th century!" album and included the audio!

        They say you cannot prove that you did not rip their "slightly massaged" arhm "Remastered" yes, that's it, REMASTERED track from that greatest hits CD, and so you are probably in violation.

        You know, since nobody can distrubute old waveforms other than them. Wouldn't matter if you peeled it off a wax cylinder yourself.

        • by r1348 ( 2567295 )

          Too bad 1914 happens to be in the 20th century...

        • Maybe signal analysis could show that you didn't rip their remastered version, in which case this sounds like a good chance for a class action suit for fraud - with demonstrable damages. All the money would go to the attorneys of course, but it would be taken from the companies committing this fraud.
          • by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

            All the money would go to the attorneys of course, but it would be taken from the companies committing this fraud.

            They would just back charge it against the royalties of some band working on an album today. Hollywood accounting isn't just for movies.

      • They're probably claiming copyright to the performance rather than to the song. But isn't 1914 old enough to be out of copyright anyway?

        It makes no difference when they have more lawyers than you can possibly afford.

        • by lsllll ( 830002 )
          If I had a 78 of the said recording in my hand dates 1914, I'd go head-to-head with their lawyers all day long. You can't back off when you know you're right because they have an army of lawyers.
          • If I had a 78 of the said recording in my hand dates 1914, I'd go head-to-head with their lawyers all day long. You can't back off when you know you're right because they have an army of lawyers.

            Remember that you're not going to get your legal expenses paid if you win. Have you got the budget for a long court battle, responding to months and months of daily subpoenas? They have.

      • Re:Fraud? (Score:5, Informative)

        by fermion ( 181285 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @12:32PM (#61810835) Homepage Journal
        The Sonny Bono act, which was paid for by Disney to protect Mickey Mouse, protects work for hire up to 120 years. Mickey Mouse was created in 1928 and should have become public domain in the 1980s if not for the 1978 change in copyright law, then the 1998 change in copyright law that also conveniently pushed the date back. In this case the music is before 1928 so it should be public domain, but lawyers can do interesting things
        • The Sonny Bono act, which was paid for by Disney to protect Mickey Mouse, protects work for hire up to 120 years. Mickey Mouse was created in 1928 and should have become public domain in the 1980s if not for the 1978 change in copyright law, then the 1998 change in copyright law that also conveniently pushed the date back...

          That fucking mouse needs to DIAF, and take Disney with it. Copyright law since 1978, especially the DMCA, needs to die in screaming agony in that same fire. And I'd pay for a ringside seat and a big bag of popcorn.

    • You write that as if you believe it was relevant...

    • Re:Fraud? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dwedit ( 232252 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @11:18AM (#61810595) Homepage

      The "perjury" bit about DMCA claims is misunderstood.

      It's not about whether the creative work is what they claim it is.
      It's not about whether the claimed rights-holder actually owns the rights to the work.

      It's exclusively about claiming that they are authorized to act on behalf of the rights holder. That's the only bit of a takedown notice that is under penalty of perjury. Not the rest.

      • I think that is what VeryFluffyBunny means: they are claiming to be authorised to act by the copyrights holder. But if it's public domain, there is not copyright holder who could have authorised it. Thus their claim is automatically fraudulent.

        • by flink ( 18449 )

          If the claimant in good faith believes they own the copyright but they don't, it's still not perjury, it's just being wrong. There might be cause for civil action though, IANAL.

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            For a work produced in 1914, any belief that there is an active copyright to be owned strains good faith to the breaking point.

            • It is quite possible that a work from 1914 is still under copyright, I believe copyright can hold up to 75 year after the artists death so if they recorded it in 1914 but the artist died say 50 years latter in 1964 still well in the realms of copyright law, I know it ridiculous. To me the whole of copyright law is ridiculous, it should be make some art, get a few years to monetize it (2-5years), then it becomes public domain, if you don't make money, too bad, there is always risk in creating art. You get to

              • It is quite possible that a work from 1914 is still under copyright,

                Not in the United States. With no exceptions whatsoever, every work published in the United States before 1926 is now in the public domain in the United States.

                • I think McCormack, was Irish, so may have be published not in the USA. I am not saying that it is under copyright I don't know, all I am saying is it is possible for a work to be published and 1914 and still be under copyright, although I think the whole scenario is insane.

                • With no exceptions whatsoever, every work published in the United States before 1926 is now in the public domain in the United States.

                  No exceptions, not even for sound recordings? If that is the case, why was the CLASSICS act needed?

                  • I have dealt with this.

                    The algorithm finds fault. You give a reply. The rights holder then needs to respond.

                    We do not know how far this went. In my case it was resolved pretty quickly.

                  • by lsllll ( 830002 )
                    As far as I can tell, based on the WIkipedia page, the CLASSICS act (which morphed into the Music Modernization Act) honors the copyright date. It says:

                    Recordings prior to 1923 will enter the public domain three years from passage (January 1, 2022, as all U.S. copyright terms end on December 31), with recordings between 1923 and 1956 being phased into the public domain over the next few decades.

                    Based on what I've been able to find out, the recordings before 1926 (as of today) are still in public domain. See this [wikipedia.org].

              • McCormack died in 1945. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
              • I don't care how long is the copyright period. What I care is, if copyright holders no longer distribute the works publicly, they (or anyone on behalf of them) should be forbidden from suing anyone piracy of such work. Copyright / patent should be about monopoly in profiting from creativity, not monopoly in deciding whether people can experience such creativity. The current law allow someone who hate a creative work buy its copyright and then remove it from the shelves everywhere. This is so wrong.
      • We've heard this claim repeatedly, but from what I can gather this is a pedantic and/or intentionally incorrect interpretation implicitly made by the lack of a judgement on that fact. Do the courts really need to enforce honesty of lawyers on whom they represent? Wouldn't fraud concerning the clients who they represent already be enforced by other laws, or perhaps the bar?

        I would say the intent of the legislature when forming that part of the DMCA is that the perjury claim applies to a lawyer who knowingl

    • Looks more like YouTube is trying to get a head start on earning a 2022 Ig Nobel Prize.
      • by dwywit ( 1109409 )

        "A method for extracting youtube copyright search algorithms from the arse-end of the publishing rights industry"

    • by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      This is Youtube's filtering thing, not a DMCA takedown notice. Youtube is simply failing to serve the video and is giving an incorrect explanation as to why. No fraud, just incompetence. The summary's mention of the video being available on more capable video hosts is, indeed, the best direction to take things. Youtube is proving to be an unreliable service, so people should shop elsewhere.

  • by The New Guy 2.0 ( 3497907 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @10:45AM (#61810515)

    The DMCA doesn't provide a penalty for a false blocking request... can you see how this can go wrong?

    • by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      DMCA is not involved in this. Nobody made a DMCA takedown notice. It's just some stupid computer at Google.

  • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @10:47AM (#61810517)

    Go ahead, try to prove me wrong by reaching ... an actual human ... at YouTube. :-D

    Even if you find a way to contact "them", it won't be a phone number, let alone a physical place to go to.
    Ever if you find a phone number, it will be a generic call center in India, handling countless firms.
    Even if you find somebody to call at YouTube's "headquarters", if they exist... It will be Google's bot.
    And even if you actually find a physical place to go to, that isn't just a mailbox, ... which no human has achieved before... you'll only find a compound full of lizards. ... ;)

    • Someone with mod points mod parent up +1 (Insightful or funny, take your pick!)

      • Insightful or funny, take your pick!

        I see fairly often comments that express a very serious point in a funny way. Maybe Slashdot should have a special "funsigthful" moderation option for those.

    • Pretty sure Youtube is in the series of business parks on, or near, Matilda Ave in Sunnyvale, CA. No one is working out of those offices right now because of covid, but eventually you'd be able to find someone who works at youtube there. Finding someone who can actually help you with your problem, however, is a whole other story. Probably 90% of the people there will be TVC employees who aren't really empowered to do anything.

      • by PsychoSlashDot ( 207849 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @12:07PM (#61810775)

        Pretty sure Youtube is in the series of business parks on, or near, Matilda Ave in Sunnyvale, CA. No one is working out of those offices right now because of covid, but eventually you'd be able to find someone who works at youtube there. Finding someone who can actually help you with your problem, however, is a whole other story. Probably 90% of the people there will be TVC employees who aren't really empowered to do anything.

        I fondly remember in 1993/1994 that I walked into a local IBM field technician office. They basically stocked repair parts for everything from AS/400 to cash registers there and techs would get dispatched from the location. Not a place the public had any business in.

        My goal was to get my hands on a copy of OS/2 Warp's beta. It was a public beta, but this was before the days when you'd just sign up on some web site and download a thing. You had to sort of "know a guy". I explained myself to some receptionist type who got a tech type who at least knew what OS/2 was. He took my contact info and said he'd look into it, try to find out how I could get a copy.

        Something like a week or two later, I got a call. He'd fed the request up the food-chain until someone knew what division to talk to, got the information, ordered a copy, got it delivered to his office... for me. Free.

        That a huge business like early '90s IBM could route a weird request like mine and get it done for no money is the way things should be. Today it should be even easier. That it's difficult to find where to click to get a human being at Amazon to explain a problem with a shipment is bizarre. That it takes any real effort to dispute a DMCA take-down is also bizarre. Customer-contact and customer good-will is part of the cost of doing business.

        • by eastjesus ( 3182503 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @01:01PM (#61810901)
          Sometime in the mid 1970's I picked up a junked Selectric I spied sitting in the trash. It didn't work. Removing the cover and looking inside I could see what was broken. I went down to the nearest IBM office where I was greeted by a receptionist. After trying to explain what I needed, the receptionist made a call and, a few minutes later, someone brought up a service manual with a parts list. After identifying the part number she made another call and shortly someone brought me the part which only cost a couple of dollars. She said that I could keep the service manual. The only issue was that she was not set up to take cash but could she just send me a bill? Hard to find service like that anymore.
        • by rworne ( 538610 )

          Something similar here. Had an installation issue with the collection of, ahem, 5.25" floppies, so I called the support line (they didn't list hours, so what the heck) - like at 11PM or some weird hour. Got a human on the line who walked me through the issue.

          I miss the OS/2 days...

        • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          That a huge business like early '90s IBM could route a weird request like mine and get it done for no money is the way things should be. Today it should be even easier. That it's difficult to find where to click to get a human being at Amazon to explain a problem with a shipment is bizarre. That it takes any real effort to dispute a DMCA take-down is also bizarre. Customer-contact and customer good-will is part of the cost of doing business.

          It wouldn't be that weird a request, actually. If it was a field te

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      I actually met a human being who worked for YouTube once. Even invited to visit his home. He was a product manager of some sort.

      But he disappeared years ago and I'm not sure he still exists.

      • by hawk ( 1151 )

        Oh, he exists, all right.

        But he was caught whistling a tune from a 19th century musical, and has been blocked!

    • by ruddk ( 5153113 )

      And I am pretty sure the people you write aren't real people. You are sitting taking to a computer, spewing out generic answers. They are pretty good at hiding it by not referring to the actual context of the messages.

  • Just fuck everything (Score:5, Informative)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @11:12AM (#61810573)
    Fuck copyright. Fuck Disney. Fuck our government for letting this happen.
  • Copyright Limit? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ytene ( 4376651 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @11:25AM (#61810619)
    McCormack, the recording artist in question here, is from the Republic of Ireland. The Copyright Law of Ireland [wikipedia.org] recognizes copyright for 70 years after the death of the artist.

    McCormack passed away on September 16, 1945 (summary at right). [wikipedia.org]

    So if standard copyright law is being recognized here, then claims to that recording would have expired in 2015.

    Is my quick summary wrong, or is someone somehow claiming that a different set of laws apply.

    Cursory look suggests that this is not a valid challenge...
    • Copyright can be bought and sold, it can also pass to different countries.

      • by ytene ( 4376651 )
        But even if it is bought or sold, does that extend the term - when the law recognizes that limit to be "death of the creator plus 75 years"?

        I can't think that it does - because if that were the case then the 75-year-limit would be a farce, simply because publishing houses would simply move the copyrights around every few years just to perpetuate ownership.
        • You are correct that you can't extend the term by any sort of legal trickery. Sometimes there's a form you can fill out, or something, but not always. And just switching ownership is not supposed to increase copyright terms.

          In Ireland Irish law applies. If she'd lived long enough that it was still in copyright in Ireland the video should be geo-blocked in Ireland. State-side has different rules, and everything prior to 1926 is public domain. So if they used a copy from 1914 it should not be geoblockable in

    • Re:Copyright Limit? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @12:22PM (#61810813) Journal

      I believe there are examples of old works that have some minor editing done to them, so that the "new" recording then has a new copyright date. Similar to how you can write your own translation of the Bible and copyright it 2021.

      With a recording from 1914, even if the wax cylinder original doesn't fall under copyright, Sony or whoever probably came through and remastered it for CD. And this new remaster falls under copyright.

      I'm guessing the copyright law doesn't get specific about which audio production techniques constitute a new recording. Recordings this old are typically unlistenable, sometimes bordering on unrecognizable. The restoration work could be quite extensive, involving a lot of producer/engineer effort. Variable speed fluctuations throughout the recording could need manual correction, and conceivably also historical research into the singer's vocal range, the musical key of the piece, the specific tuning the musicians were using (A=440hz concert pitch wasn't universally standard practice yet.) Lots and lots of tweaking of DSPs to reconstruct missing harmonics in the signal. Fine-tuning of noise reduction algorithms. It may amount to more man-hours than went into the original recording.

      Not that I think copyright should last more than 20-40 years, or that restoration work should necessarily extend the copyright date. But this would be the argument in court. A judge would be deciding it, since the law doesn't go into that level of detail about what does or doesn't constitute a new work.

      • by jaa101 ( 627731 )

        Sony or whoever probably came through and remastered it for CD. And this new remaster falls under copyright

        Only if the remastering is considered "transformative". Usually this requires some creative input; just running it through some standard de-noising software shouldn't cut it. This isn't like old music albums where the source material has original multi-track master tapes to be creatively remixed.

        Still, it's fairly likely that the company that produced the best digital copy of this 1914 recording will have made sure it did enough to argue that copyright was renewed for the full term. There's no discount f

    • Your mistake is in assuming that the recording of the ceremony was blocked because of a legitimate claim of copyright infringement, instead of YouTube's computers thinking that the music was something else that is still under copyright protection.
  • by Jiro ( 131519 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @11:28AM (#61810623)

    Under the classics protection part of the Music Modernization Act [copyright.gov], sound recordings from before 1923 are under copyright until December 31, 2021.

    People here seem to think that sound recordings fall under the 95 year limit. They do not.

    • Here you are wrong: you CAN NOT change the Copyright Law, well... you CAN NOT change ANY LAW RETROACTIVELY, meaning: you CAN NOT change the copyright duration of already published works.

      That's why you can't send to prison people that "now" is a crime but "wasn't" hen committed.

      And, as https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org] indicated, the work is already in public domain.

      Or do we need another director to push it into public domain like it happened with "Happy Birthday"?

      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @11:45AM (#61810709)

        Hm. One post with a link to a US government site explaining the relevant copyright law, or another post WITH LOTS OF CAPS.

        I wonder which is true?

      • by Jiro ( 131519 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @11:52AM (#61810727)

        1) In the case Capitol Records, Inc. v. Naxos of America, Inc. [wikipedia.org], a court ruled that even though recordings expired in their home country, they were still protected by state copyright. The Music Modernization Act, which I mentioned earlier, replaced the state copyright system for recordings (everything else is already covered under Federal copyright, state copyright for recordings is a relic of an old system).

        2) The Supreme Court case of Golan v. Holder [wikipedia.org] specifically ruled that it is legal to retroactively make something public domain copyrighted.

        • Well, you forgot the 3rd one: USA has signed the Berne Convention where in its Art. 18 clearly states that:

          "(2) If, however, through the expiry of the term of protection which was previously granted, a work has fallen into the public domain of the country where protection is claimed, that work shall not be protected anew."

          So, sorry, but those "cases" are illegal.

      • you absolutely can change the law retroactively, have people already forgotten the NSA wiretapping with AT&T and other companies and how congress passed retroactive immunity for them(of which Obama voted for too), and then SCOTUS allowed to stand? https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com] https://www.aclu.org/blog/nati... [aclu.org]
      • by Sloppy ( 14984 )

        you CAN NOT change the copyright duration of already published works

        The entire US government, under the leadership of Sonny Bono, disagrees. Congress said it could be done and passed it, the president said it could be done and signed it, and then even SCOTUS said it could be done and gave their blessing in Eldred vs Ashcroft.

  • by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @11:41AM (#61810683)

    I suggest that someone should be nominated for an igNoble for researching the wacky policies at YouTube.

  • by doug141 ( 863552 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @12:07PM (#61810773)

    Reminds me of Star Trek The Next Generation Episode "The Arsenal of Freedom." The crew, while searching for a missing ship, land on a planet with a loong dead civilization, and get fired upon by advanced weapons. They seek shelter, and are contacted by an AI salesman trying to sell them the weapon system, the omnipotence of which he is currently demonstrating to them.

  • Remember the musician who released his own music public domain, and then had it banned from YouTube because some commercial outfit used it in a copyrighted production?

    • Asshattery on the corporations part but really the musician's fault for not releasing it under a creative commons type license. Hell, that is the whole reason we have the GPL, BSD etc licenses - because just putting something in the public domain doesn't keep it Free, no matter the intent of the creator.

      • There have also been cases where NASA (federal agency) products, which are public domain, were taken down by Youtube after excerpts from them were published by a national news organization, which Youtube considered to own the copyright on the original NASA materials. Most of the time, that was fixed, but sometimes it took a few days.

        Using some kind of CC license would be far better than calling it "public domain" if you want to have the option of preventing Big Media asshattery.

  • by CrappySnackPlane ( 7852536 ) on Sunday September 19, 2021 @01:33PM (#61810977)

    Sorry, YouTube, but it's your shitty policies that enable fatcat media corporations to behave in this manner. Even suggesting that the notion of copyright verification can be handled by AI should have gotten whichever dipshits who presented the initial idea laughed the fuck out of the meeting where they presented it.

    I'm tired of the notion that poor ol' YouTube is helpless, just simply helpless, and just doin' their plucky best. YouTube, it's simple: If you can't handle human review, and you can't handle an "innocent until proven guilty" approach to DMCA notifications, and you make it absolutely impossible to reach an actual human being who can do more than copy-paste from the FAQ, then you've grown too big. That's your problem. Don't whine about the DMCA, don't whine about the bloodsucking media conglomerate ghouls which abuse it. Yes, those forces are bad too, and I'll even readily admit that they're even worse than you. They deserve - and will someday soon face - their own reckoning. But they're doing this in your house, under your watch. Are you going to make an honest dedicated effort to fix things, or are you going to rearrange the UI for the gazillionth time while ignoring the increasing anger of the growing mob?

    • Sorry, YouTube, but it's your shitty policies that enable fatcat media corporations to behave in this manner. Even suggesting that the notion of copyright verification can be handled by AI should have gotten whichever dipshits who presented the initial idea laughed the fuck out of the meeting where they presented it.

      Very well put. If they can't afford to run their business in compliance with the law, maybe their business model is unsustainable. And that's OK. They gave it a go, it didn't work out. Business is like that.

      But for a huge organisation like Alphabet to just half-ass legal compliance because doing it properly is "too hard," that is not OK.

      I admit I am biased though, see my sig :-)

      • If they can't afford to run their business in compliance with the law, maybe their business model is unsustainable.

        The law doesn't give any conditions under which they are required to leave a video up.

        YouTube became popular because people could get away with uploading entire episodes of "Welcome Back, Kotter".
        It wasn't a business model; it was a fun website.
        I'm not even sure when they added advertising to YouTube, because it was after the arrival of ad blockers.

        I've always had a hard time being sympathetic to the plight of the poor video uploader.
        You're not a YouTube customer! You haven't given them anything, and they d

        • I've always had a hard time being sympathetic to the plight of the poor video uploader.
          You're not a YouTube customer! You haven't given them anything, and they don't owe you anything.
          If you want to contract for video hosting service, that's a thing that exists.

          Agreed. Youtube is just the middle man. Nothing of value would be lost if the IgNobel people hosted their video on their own website, and the local TV new station hosted on their website, and Colin Furze put all his videos on his website. This would also have the benefit that Youtube wouldn't be able to break things so quickly with a misconfigured takedown script.

  • Song written in 1880. The pair that wrote it, the later death was in 1922.
    The version played, the singer died in 1945.
    https://www.jdsupra.com/legaln... [jdsupra.com]

    Copyright can still be valid. Sad, but true.

    • by mark-t ( 151149 )

      The singer of a song that was not written by them only holds a copyright on their performance, not on the song. Since they are not the author of the song, when the singer dies is irrelevant. Performance copyright is fixed at 50 years past the end of the year that the performance is done. There are no copyright extensions on performance copyright.

  • The copyright is 70 years +70 years after death of an author or performer on material made after 1. January 1976. John McCormack died in 1945, that is 76 years ago. The song in question (Funiculì, Funiculà) is out of copyright for a longer than that. Since it was composed in the year 1880.

    What is important here is that the recording is created before 1. January 1978 and is not subject of the 70 years +70 years rule. They are subject to copyright renewal of the author or the company that made the r

    • As explained above, other rules apply to sound recordings. And if the performance in question was ever picked up by $mediacompany and reissued in a compilation they can claim copyright based on that. I'm just waiting for somebody to claim copyright on Palestrina or Bach. For the sheet music, they already do. And also for recordings of specific performances. But on the original composition? Just wait...

  • It's astounding to me that copyrights are held in far higher regard than patent rights. I'm sorry, but this life of the author plus 70 years thing is bullshit. It should be the same as a patent or less.

    • I think the shorter term is a result of the recognition that patents are far more harmful than copyrights.

  • ... that makes me wish that corporations could be held *criminally* liable (as in that company is not allowed to do business anymore in the USA, ever again), when they submit a copyright claim against something that is in the public domain for more than an entire year. That would shut them up.
  • by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Monday September 20, 2021 @02:26AM (#61812641) Homepage
    A cultural organization here wants to use the original pictures from "The Little Prince". The author (who also did the original illustrations) died in 1944. Hence, the insanely long copyright expired in 2014. There's still almost nothing online. Why? Because the "Saint-Exupéry Estate" is still trying to make money off the works of a dead guy. Our governments have utterly failed our society, both by extending copyright to insane lengths, and by supporting stupid behavior like DMCA takedowns.

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