[HN Gopher] Popeye and Tintin enter the public domain in 2025 al...
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Popeye and Tintin enter the public domain in 2025 along with
Faulkner, Hemingway
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 155 points
Date : 2024-12-16 10:02 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| vrighter wrote:
| So now that a lot of books used for studying literature will
| become freely available, I wonder how long it's going to be
| before the syllabus "needs revising"
| bena wrote:
| High schools still teach Shakespeare and that's always been in
| the public domain. As is a lot of Mark Twain's works.
| jjulius wrote:
| Not only that, but what GP is suggesting would require
| schools to have a reasonable, sizeable budget. Schools
| provide most of that reading material, so they'd have to be
| the party responsible for buying all of the new, copyrighted
| books.
|
| A fairly laughable idea if you follow the general trend of
| school budgets...
| technothrasher wrote:
| Somewhat tangential, but it makes me nuts that my son's small
| high school, that is always struggling for money, pays stupid
| amounts for Disney scripts for the school plays instead of
| doing Shakespeare or any of the other public domain plays out
| there.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| How much do they spend?
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Arguably impoverishing the students, too. The impulse to
| pander to keep both the kids and parents interested is too
| strong, I guess.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| > pays stupid amounts for Disney scripts
|
| How much do they pay exactly? Does it come out of a
| specific program's budget, eg drama? Just curious.
|
| To play a devil's advocate:
|
| Perhaps the plays generate some money for the school or the
| drama program. Disney might draw a larger audience.
|
| Also, for better or worse (probably worse), Disney is
| "safe" and designed for mass appeal.
|
| Small schools probably have a harder time with these sorts
| of decisions. Ideally, a school might encourage adaptations
| of classics, to foster deeper understanding and creativity
| (as well as to ensure that there aren't too many "re-runs",
| furthering student and audience interest). But a larger
| student populace makes that easier via access to more
| ideas, more interest, more hands.
| technothrasher wrote:
| They pay about $1K per production. It's certainly not
| making them any money, as the ticket sales amount to
| about $500 total, and that money is coming from parents
| and family who would be paying the $5 ticket price no
| matter what is on stage. Nobody else is attending these
| plays. I think the main reason they're doing it is
| because it is what most the kids want to do, especially
| because it is a combine high school/middle school play so
| there are younger kids in it.
|
| At least this year, they let the seniors pick the play
| and completely run the show. They're still paying about a
| grand for the rights, but they did make a more
| interesting choice, "The Crucible".
| senko wrote:
| Since Disney classics often riffed off public domain
| works, the school conceivably might have gone straight to
| the source.
| oliyoung wrote:
| Maybe the argument is accessibility, Disney is much more
| approachable and likely to get the kids invested and
| involved than Shakespeare and is worth the cost?
|
| Or they could just do Hamlet with Lions
| optimalsolver wrote:
| All episodes of the 90s Tintin animated series are on
| DailyMotion:
|
| https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x749uno
| johtso wrote:
| Internet archive has it too
| https://archive.org/details/The.adventures.of.Tintin.animate...
| Funes- wrote:
| There's also the original 1957-1964 TV show, _Herge 's
| Adventures of Tintin_. Here's a fragment of its original airing
| on Catalan public television (TV3) during the 80s:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMH76zya8MQ. That's seemingly
| the only available piece of that particular translated version
| on the Internet, and its audio is damaged, at that. Makes me
| think of how much content has been completely lost through the
| years.
| agumonkey wrote:
| As a kid I found it embodied quite fittingly the naive mystery
| of the comics, the direction, pacing, music .. everything was
| on point. (Something that was lost on spielberg 3d movie
| variant imo, too much indiana jones in spirit)
| tkanarsky wrote:
| I agree. The cartoons felt literally like the comics brought
| to life.
| ustad wrote:
| I just can't get my head around that this (Tintin) is for the US.
| For the rest, including the EU, the copyright is until around
| 2050.
| soperj wrote:
| Hemingway has been in public domain for a while in Canada
| (pretty sure)
| alephnerd wrote:
| I think this will be the original black and white Tintin.
|
| The modern colored Tintin we see was made after WW2 and
| drastically rehabilitated Tintin's reputation.
|
| For example - https://sauvikbiswas.com/2014/11/18/tintin-in-
| america-the-bl...
|
| I love reading Tintin, but being honest about it's origins and
| baggage is important as well. Highly recommend reading "Tintin:
| The Complete Companion" as well.
| leoc wrote:
| IIRC there were also plenty of changes in later editions that
| didn't relate to controversies (or to colourisation): for
| example radio sets were made more up-to-date.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Yep! BW Tintin was already very dated by the 1950s.
|
| Really shows how much progress (positive and negative)
| happened in just 20-30 years.
| eesmith wrote:
| Looks like it will be "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets",
| which
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Land_of_the_Sovi...
| says "is the first volume of The Adventures of Tintin" and "it
| was the only completed Tintin story that Herge did not
| reproduce in colour" due to Hegre's "embarrassment at the
| crudeness of the work."
| grotorea wrote:
| As much as I love Tintin, gotta agree with Herge here.
| Although Congo and America aren't that much better.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Every Tintin upto "Land of Black Gold" had a black-and-
| white version written before the war. They did not age
| well, and if you read them you can understand why Herge had
| a hard time in the 1945-1950 period.
| indeed30 wrote:
| I'd also mention that Tom McCarthy's "Tintin and The Secret of
| Literature" completely changed the way in which I viewed the
| series - genuinely exciting stuff.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Never read that before! Thanks for the rec!
| johnea wrote:
| All that WWII war propaganda becoming public domain at the
| perfect time for inciting the next mass murder!
| cableshaft wrote:
| So in about a month we can expect to see a trailer for horror
| film renditions of Popeye and Tintin, (also board game
| Kickstarters that use them as a theme) like we did with Mickey
| Mouse and Winnie the Pooh?
|
| Cool. Cool cool cool.
| strictnein wrote:
| Almost a month ago the trailer for Popeye the Slayer Man was
| released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1hsxK0UMlQ
|
| Surprisingly violent trailer, fyi.
| Funes- wrote:
| Rule 34 is going to get a lot of newfound attention, I wager.
| falcor84 wrote:
| My (IANAL) understanding is that rule 34 renditions generally
| fall under the parody clause of fair-use in any case
| kadoban wrote:
| IANAL either, but that is _way_ oversold by the general
| public. It's only parody if the point of the new work is
| saying something about the original.
|
| Popeye having explicit sex with Olive Oyl isn't parody, it's
| just for people to get their rocks off. There's no commentary
| on the original work being made. Nothing wrong with that, but
| if people think they're in the clear because they shout
| "parody", they're mistaken.
| throwaway_1224 wrote:
| I'm strong to the finish 'cause I eats me <CENSORED>
| indrora wrote:
| You act like that has stopped any artist. Ned time you hear
| about a new Pokemon game releasing or any expansion to a
| franchise. New characters will have content drawn of them
| before the announcement is over.
| danjl wrote:
| See, every day we get new data to train LLMs. Just think, all of
| the current LLMs were trained without Popeye, Tintin, Faulkner
| and Hemmingway. Just imagine how much better they will be with
| all this new public domain data to use for training! /s
| srik wrote:
| I love TinTin! I feel like we're going to see a ton of AI drawn
| TinTin fan works pop up, will be interesting to see.
| dewey wrote:
| Is there a model that cares about copyrights and has incapable
| of doing that right now?
|
| Or is this sarcasm? Hard to tell!
| randylubin wrote:
| We run a public domain jam every January - come join us and make
| games with the new public domain material!
| https://itch.io/jam/gaming-like-its-1929
| strictnein wrote:
| Like was saw with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey
| (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19623240/), there's now also a
| slightly higher budget movie taking advantage of Popeye entering
| the public domain: Popeye the Slayer Man
| (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30956852/). Great line from the
| trailer: "You know why the factory closed down 20 years ago?
| There was a spinach contamination."
|
| Not be confused with Pops the Slayer Man
| (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33362807/), also coming out next
| year.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Both of the mentioned movies probably wouldn't have had any
| problem releasing while the copyright to the characters
| remained in-tact under fair use. If someone is trying to make a
| movie with existing well-known characters, people aren't too
| interested in non-transformative work, and distributors
| probably wouldn't distribute something due to the general lack
| of audience interest.
|
| The main benefit that public domain brings to a work is that
| you can make small edits or changes to a work without violating
| its copyright. Imagine if you wanted to go through all the
| episodes of Spongebob, change the colors to make it clearer to
| watch for colorblind viewers[a], and then sell those edits as a
| box set or otherwise sell access to them via some
| accessibility-focused streaming service. Under copyright this
| would probably not be seen as transformative, and something
| non-transformative then has an incredibly high bar to clear for
| fair use to apply to it.
|
| I also think that making new episodes that aren't super
| transformative would probably not have met the burden for Fair
| use: for example, making a new episode of Popeye that otherwise
| follows the same script beats as existing episodes would
| probably be seen as copyright infringement by the courts.
| However, once you get into the territory of making a
| sequel/prequel movie where you really flesh out his character,
| it starts getting into the realm of qualifying for
| transformative under fair use (depending on how the judge sees
| it).
|
| But the mentioned movies really seem like they're so different
| from the source material. For Pooh Blood and Honey, it doesn't
| affecting the market for the original, given the works are so
| different in what they do (and there is likely 0.1% or less
| overlap between the audience of the slasher genre and the
| children's programming genre cohort), it did not use almost any
| of the original copyrighted works to tell its story, just its
| characters, and the content is transformative enough to where
| it's not like it's just another episode of Winnie The Pooh.
|
| This popeye film seems to use the same approach as Blood and
| Honey: it's just Popeye killing people with stuff like "look,
| it's the Spinach from the original episodes!".
|
| a: not sure if this would actually be beneficial, but it's the
| best example I can think of for a barely-transformative work
| other than putting sunglasses on the characters' faces or
| putting Subway Surfers next to it.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| My understanding is that what counts as fair use is not well
| defined because litigation is expensive and publishers don't
| want to take a gamble, go to court, and potentially lose or
| have large legal fees to deal with.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Earlier discussion:
|
| _What will enter the public domain in 2025?_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42290448
| kristopolous wrote:
| The current popeye artist is a fairly interesting public domain
| ally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._K._Milholland ... he did a
| mickey mouse thing at the beginning of the year. I assume he's
| fine with it but I can't find any statements by him.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| related https://www.superherohype.com/comics/561991-popeye-
| artist-re...
| the_arun wrote:
| Is there a place where we could see all public characters good to
| use without payment?
| thevillagechief wrote:
| I love Tintin! People in the US grew up with Marvel comic books.
| We grew up with Tintin, as did our parents before us. Can't wait
| to see what people do with it.
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| Teesside Tintin was one of the early treasures of the internet, I
| had so much joy seeing that for the first time however crude it
| was.
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