Add: Buyer Beward BS vs. ancient rule of quality goods for fair price, continued in Smith’s Wealth of Nation in economics being a mutual gain rather than a zero-sum game.
In the interests of full disclosure: I have a clear bias here, both as an artist and as someone who has earned a living selling public domain works.
This having been said, my thoughts on the public domain began evolving around the time I watched this video about the Amen break. Like many valuable lessons at college, credit here has to go to the excellent Professor Nathan R. , who taught both consumerism and military history and really should have colleges in a bidding war to get him, but anyway…
I’m a little late, Public Domain Day is January First of every year and celebrates the release of books into the public domain that year. This year, for instance, A Farewell to Arms, The Sound and the Fury, A Room of One’s Own, and All Quiet on the Western Front entered the public domain. From Faulkner to Woolfe, this is a pretty impressive cultural touchstone.
Life of the author plus seventy years is another standard measure, but if this information can’t be foun, then we can take as a general rule that, as of 2025, books and the like from 1929 have entered the public domain.
That’s about 96 years. See the issue here?
Look at—as much as I’m not a fan—fanfiction. I’m not going to get into that myself, but I will point to the historical parallels: Shakespeare drew a lot on old myths, particularly Ovid or Plutarch. Let’s take Ovid.
Ovid originally wrote Pyramus and Thisbe. We would more commonly recognize Shakespeare’s adaptation of this work, Romeo and Juliet. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he also has a play-within-a-play where a buffoonish group act out Pyramus and Thisbe, possibly him lampooning his own take on a tragedy in a comedy.
Many of the other changes in Shakespeare’s era and from around that time are true: they’re reimaginings or retellings of older stories, for a (then-)modern audience. Which is why Shakespeare’s so rife with toilet jokes, he has a character spell out cunt in The Twelfth Night. onstage. while proclaiming love (“Her C’s, her U’s, an’ these, her little Ts!”
As Streitberger taught us in class, the big change Shakespeare introduced for his time was going from stock-figure, cardboard cutout characters to more complex, nuanced characters who gave us a glimpse of the whole scheme of human existence rather than repeating worn-out platitudes.
Even spiritual successors—see James Joyce’s Ulysses in comparison to Homer’s The Odyssey—are abstract continuations of a theme and therefore could be classified, to an extent, as an allusion-laden and derivative works. This goes all the way back to the first known author; just last week, I finished Sophus Helle’s book on Enheduana.
The daughter of Sargon of Akkad, Enheduana was made high priestess of the goddess Nanna in the ancient city of Ur. This decision was quite possibly made in order to help consolidate his rule on power. Sargon of Akkad, for those unaware, is the first known emperor in history. One might go so far as to call him a bit of a big deal for his time.
As Helle points out, however, our understanding of authorship today is quite different from the historically understood meaning. These poems were attributed to Enheduana even though she might not have authored them all herself—they may have been changed over time as Enheduana fell out of Sumerian canon herself in terms of being taught in their schools but it’s also possible that she was credited as the author of the poems because she was the leader.
Take another example: the Pythagorean Theorem was in use over a millenium, I believe, before the birth of Pythagoras. Why is this?
Well, in part, it’s because he was the leader of a cult; it’s quite possible he learned this theorem, was one of the first to bring it to Greece, and just took credit. And then his followers decided to give Pythagoras credit for everything they thought up.
You might think I’m joking, but if memory serves: Hippasus is what you could kinda consider Pythagoras’ equivalent to Judas (a figure I find quite intriguing). Depending on your source, I believe his great since was either 1) discovering irrational numbers (let’s be fair: who enjoyed that part of math class? I’d wanna kick that fucker out, too.) or 2) refusing to give Pythagoras credit for it.
He also wss credited with having a gold, I believe, thigh and had some weird beliefs on fava beans that possibly led to his death when he refused to cut through a field of them. Homer’s identity, too, is unknown and likely a string of oral tellings at last fastened to text; Carol Thomas, an old professor, very well might be right that the original version was a grandpa telling his blind grandson hyperbolic, fantastical stories about his return home from battle during a dark age of crumbling society, changing different city’s people in monsters to keep the boy’s attention.
But why does the public domain matter much to us today?
I would return to the restriction of nearly a century of work being locked away. This might not sound big, but it is—especially when you consider the massive leaps forward of the last century.
Let’s go back to Disney, for example, and as a quick note: I would highly recommend Neal Gabler’s biography of Walt. Excellent, fascinating bit of writing. The college essay I wrote about L. Ron Hubbard, actually, leaned heavily on it, as I learned the term paracosm from Gabler’s book and when I was short on ideas for an essay, I took Gabler’s explanation of a paracosm, slapped it onto Going Clear from reading it a summer or two before, and then picked out some Freud quotes from our readings.
See? If I hadn’t explained that, it would’ve been original. Now it’s just derivative because you realize, like the public domain: I did not create any of those ideas, I drew on what made my thoughts wander.
Anyway, Disney: look at a lot of their early films. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Alice In Wonderland, Pinnochio—notice anything about some of their first big titles?
They were public domain. Walt Disney had a great idea and there are a lot of uncredited workers who turned that idea into a reality, but his stories were primarily drawing on public domain. Bambi, I believe, was the first film they had to negotiate rights for, but it’s been years since Gabler so I could be wrong there.
The public domain shows its value.
Some may also know that Steamboat Willie entered the public domain, as did that “version” of Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse’s characterization over the years has changed; one reason is that this enables Disney to renew the copyright.
Oh, they’re litigous bastards. Some daycares in the late eighties got sued because they had murals with Disney characters. Kids who spent time in daycares in the nineties might remember seeing a lot of Hanna Barbera and Universal Studios characters like Scooby Doo or Looney Tunes around. This is part of why:
Hanna Barbera and Universal Studios weren’t fucking assholes who sued daycare providers (good ones, presumably, not like my mom the daycare operator).
I can’t recall the details, but I believe a case regarding Sherlock Holmes fell into this as well, when the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle tried to claim in later stories, Holmes showed more emotion and therefore represented a different version they could still claim copyright over.
Crazy, amirite?
The Amen Break, again, comes to mind: a six second drum loop became ubiquitous in culture to the point that once you know it, you can’t miss it. How many other small pieces of media out there could spur a similar growth of culture?
I would go further and argue that the impact of public domain extends far, far beyond its impact on the arts.
Let’s talk about Monsanto.
Monsanto, the agricultural company, produced geneteically modified seeds. Thanks to the government-funded Third Agricultural Revolution, one of the great miracles of the century: greatly increased crop yields that don’t overtax the earth they grow on could help us feed so many people who need it! Without putting in any extra work!
Take that, keep going, and you get into stuff like genetically modified seeds: they built on that initial government research and development, bought it up, privatized it, and cut off the ladder for the rest of us. See, Monsanto copyrighted these seeds, which meant that to use them, you had to have a sort of ‘licensing agreement.’
Now, it’s an unfortunate fact of life that the laws of nature are often not the same as the laws of human society. As that handsome bastard Jeff Goldblum remarked in Jurassic Park, “Life, uh, finds a way.”**
Translated simpler: you can copyright seeds as much as you want, the wind is still gonna blow and some of those seeds are going to get caught up and blow into someone else’s farm. Sometimes, sure, it might be intentional. But more often, you’re talking natural results of rainflow, wind, water, etc. And it’s not like the seeds, or the produced yield, glow neon colors.
Monsanto sure as shit sued over it—and often won, which is complete horseshit no matter what way you slice it.
Something similar happens with medical companies, and they follow a similar trend: often, medical advances come from startups or research and development.
This is very important: Research and Development more often loses money than it makes it.
Why?
Similar to agriculture, a lot of this research and development is done by people who are passionate about what they do and, quite often, don’t give a shit about the money.
Do you think Jonas Salk sat around wishing he had more money when he could be proud thinking of all the people who were able to walk thanks to the polio vaccine?
I think he had an idea; when asked about patenting it, his answer was, “Could you patent the sun?”
Again, I digress: these smaller companies often go into debt with their research and development. A lot crash and fail. But the successful ones—they’re likely to end up with a scientific success and a financial burden.
Which is right when Mephistopheles comes in and offers that Faustian bargain and we have to guess: is this spirit telling the truth when it says it eternally wills evil but eternally works good?
The big conglomerates buy ‘em up and the people who researched and developed the miracle are kept on for appearances—after all, you’d rather see them than the old, greedy fucker trying to wring every penny he can out of the dying poor for his patent.
Two examples of this come to mind, and once again reinforce the importance of distinguishing a private profit from a Public Good.
Let’s get kinky and end with the Dalkon Shield and Viagra; it’ll be a bloody, putrescent good time.
The Dalkon Shield: can still dig up one of these bad boys in developing nations, where they are sold as birth control. They should not be. They should be destroyed (alright, for a museum or a documentary, keep one or two around, but not for actual use).
The Dalkon Shield was found to cause severe pain and infections. It had a painful method of insertion and removal, admittedly something I can’t speak to.
On the other hand, it didn’t take me long to figure out why sticking a wicking string that would carry bacteria into the body—where parts of it might just fall off and disintegrate. Now, as a man, we don’t have vaginas, but I still feel like someone should’ve been able to guess this was a bad idea at some point in production. We’ve got holes, too, and if my butt started going to chow town on my TP, I’d be concerned about bacteria.
Well, ultimately, lawsuits and the controversy forced the product to be removed from the market—in the developed world—and lawsuits forced the company into bankruptcy. But, as Crime Junkie noted in their episode on this one: there are still parts of the world where these are sold. And that is completely unacceptable and horrifying.
We’re a little off from public domain and generics, so I’ll return to that, but I think it’s another valuable anecdote to illustrate the way the public is deceived and abused by powerful people in positions of authority.
Now, infections gotcha all worked up?
Let’s talk some blue pills.
They’re great to poke fun at, so much so a lot of people don’t realize that what we know for boners are actually meant to be heart medicine.
But who has more money? Rich guys who want to live out their depraved fantasies, or people with congenitally weak hearts?
Yeah. My old man got real pissed, I think, at one point when I brought this up. After all, his dad died real young from a heart attack that would’ve been preventable.
I guess he didn’t view remarks about his Pfizer dividends and his dad’s death the same way as he viewed Christmas jokes with his brothers and sisters laughing about how their cigarettes were paying his Philip Morris dividends.
The first copyright laws in the United States weren’t passed by Disney, but way back in 1790. Any guesses their length?
14 years.
I’m not saying we should go all the way back to such a short length. But like Salk, I’d agree you can’t patent the sun. And, I believe it was Jefferson who argued that a patent should last long enough for an inventor to make a profit—but not so long it discourages creativity and becomes a burden to society. Stephen King once had to pay, for example, $15k to quote a song from the 50s in the 1983 book Christine.
That’s crazy. One song. Compare that to the Amen Break. Not every song would grow a culture, sure, but there’d be a helluva lot more opportunity.
Patents were not meant to create multi-generational wealth and stifle creative expression. And they certainly weren’t meant so we could watch people die when we’ve got the crops and the medicine to help them sitting at our disposal.
—
“I don’t have any ice cream.”
*Fun fact: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves also brings up the question of authorship. Sure, we attribute them to the Brothers Grimm, but they were compiling stories from other.
Per one apocryphal story, an old woman knew many fairy tales, but would only tell them to children. So, they would send children to listen, come back, and recite the story for them in exchange for sweets.
Read another way: the Brothers Grimm are not just the root for a lot of the myths we know and love, they arguably inspired the first creepy windowless van.
**Man, I could write a fun passage about Crichton. He was quite the character, went way off the fucking deep end but, then, when I reflect on Travels—let’s just say when I was dabbling with those kinds of substances and experiences, I never crossed the line into believing it. You have to have a very firm boundary and grasp on what is and isn’t real before you decide to get into some stuff. Otherwise you might, say, end up believing in a past life that you were a Roman gladiator who fought in the Coloseum or something; I can’t remember the details, but I believe one of the past lives Crichton describes is something like that. I believe I was reading it in the Ezell’s Chicken parking lot.
My personal favorite attribution to Crichton is, naturally, the small penis rule. This rule, naturally, applies to every person mentioned in this blog who I may or may not have implied to have known at some point in my life. We all got tiny ones, get lost in the bubbles at bathtime. From Wikipedia:
"For a fictional portrait to be actionable, it must be so accurate that a reader of the book would have no problem linking the two… Now no male is going to come forward and say, 'That character with a very small penis, that's me!'"
—Sheisty charity moves by companies. I used to work at Sears and definitely did not just opt out of a “charity” program for my new workplace, despite it allegedly going to charity.
Why?
Because I don’t like my charity to be used as a propaganda stunt. Charity should be something you do out of the goodness of your heart.
Let me tell you about Sears. When I worked there, we would ask people for several things upon checkout—from Shop Your Way Rewards to 5+ attempts to sign someone up for a credit card to asking people to give money to returning troops. Sounds wonderful, right?
Sears even plastered these pictures around about how wonderful they were, giving free gift cards to returning service members.
It’s all a crock of shit. Nearly half of Americans have an unused gift card and, hell, I used to have an ex whose brother would save gift cards and pass them on because they’re such impersonal gifts. Well, I don’t think that was quite his reasoning, but that guy had some good ideas, smart man.
Why is it a crock of shit?
Because it’s not charity. Gift cards mean that cash-strapped Sears took people’s donated money and IMMEDIATELY turned it into 100% percent profit because it is no longer cash that can be spent anywhere—it has been handed out as gift cards, which are locked into being used at Sears. And the money didn’t come out of company coffers—it came out of customers and employees, who are the ones who deserve the thank yous instead of the average person sitting at home and seeing an ad or a cllaim that, “"We gave [X] amount to [Y] charity this quarter!”
Frankly, I’m pretty sure if you do this on a small scale and aren’t a corporation, this sort of thing might even classify as money laundering or a con job—at least, in theory, it’s not too much different.
No. The company did jackshit. The same thing applies whenever you have an in-office competition. I’m not saying they aren’t fun, but personally I think it’s a crock of shit that companies take credit and burnishes its image this way. Not particularly related, just a real bugaboo I have because companies really put people on the spot and declining—even if it’s to give the money to charity yourself—makes you feel awkward and look bad to people around you. But you’re not doing good—you’re just paying to fund some asshole executive’s PR strategy to “give” to charity without impacting their bottom line negatively.