You cannot transfer the copyright for the united states.
Sure you can. Check out 17 USC 201(d), which starts out saying "The ownership of a copyright may be transferred in whole or in part by any means of conveyance...."
That argument only makes sense if you've downed a fifth of Jack and snorted a couple of grams a coke - or if you're completely and totally ignorant of the law.
And yet it made sense to me, and I'm sober as a judge for some reason.
There is no mechanism I am aware of for a copyrighted work to become generic. It can be formally released into the public domain, but that's another issue and is not applicable here as no such formal release has been made.
Well, works can also enter the public domain through other mechanisms, such as most famously having the copyright term expire.
But the earlier poster didn't say that they might become generic, he said that they might be generic. This would be the scenes a faire doctrine. I haven't watched the show, but I recall that it's a 5-person team, so I'd bet that they fall neatly into what TV Tropes calls the Five-Man Band:
The Leader -- The leader of the group. Can be a mastermind, charismatic, levelheaded, headstrong, or some combination of the four. Often also The Hero.
The Lancer -- Usually a contrast to The Leader. If the Leader is clean-cut and/or uptight, the Lancer is a grizzled Anti-Hero or Deadpan Snarker; if the Leader is driven and somewhat amoral, the Lancer is more relaxed and level-headed.
The Smart Guy -- The physically weak, but intelligent or clever member. Often nerdy and awkwardly played for comic relief. Sometimes unconventionally young (early- to mid-teens). Sometimes a Trickster and a buddy of the Big Guy.
The Big Guy -- The strongman of the team. May be dumb. Or mute.
The Chick -- A peacekeeping role to balance out the other members' aggression, bringing them to a nice or at least manageable medium. The Chick is often considered the heart of the group. This role is played by a woman or girl. Someone female. Otherwise, it is not a Five-Man Band.
This is a stock description of characters. Anyone is entitled to use it, regardless of whether the first work to use it is still copyrighted, and regardless of whether people are copying it from other copyrighted works. It's like how everyone is entitled to use a spooky eastern european castle, with moon-baying wolves, in a movie about vampires.
Now, if the Power Rangers characters are more defined than this, and if the use involved their more defined, non-generic character traits, that could be an infringement. But if Power Rangers doesn't do much character development and is more like a modern version of commedia dell'arte, where it's just about how the lovers will enlist the help of the servants to marry despite the wishes of their parents, and so on, but with robots and karate, the characters might well be considered generic.
What makes you think fan fiction has any sort of fair use protection?
It can. That's not to say it always does, or even commonly does. But any sort of use can be a fair use, including fanfic.
If it isn't a spoof or a commentary on the original work, largely through irony and satire, it isn't parody. Changing the genre or style isn't enough.
It could be. But fair use hinges entirely on the specific facts of the use -- it would take the right example.
True, but this ignores the fact that characters themselves can be protected by copyright.
They can be, but there are limits. The key is how well-defined the character is. Also, bear in mind that really the character is not protected by copyright per se -- the character is just a part of a greater work, which is protected by copyright. Whenever a work which establishes some trait of a character falls into the public domain, so too does that part of the character. Unauthorized uses of the character are really unauthorized uses of the work, which is what can give rise to infringement. A character cannot be copyrighted separately from the work in which he appears, however.
Fan fiction sites can exist legally only to the extent that the character copyright owner grants permission
Or to the extent that the work is not protected, either because it is in the public domain, or because some exception to copyright law applies.
Why on Earth would the studio pay those fees, if they didn't have to?
Clarity; To avoid paying greater fees for litigation down the road, even if they were confident that they would win; As a favor wrapped in a plausible excuse; For good PR. There are good reasons to do so, is the point.
Copyright law holds that you can satirize or parody someone else's work without their permission; thus Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer do not have to pay licensing fees for the movies that they rip off in their awful "parodies."
No it doesn't. Copyright law in the US states that if a copyright is prima facie infringed, but constitutes fair use, then there is no infringement. Parodies and satires -- and for that matter, literally any other sort of use -- can potentially be fair uses, but are not necessarily fair uses. Certainly there have been both parodies and satires which were not fair uses.
But no English speaker would use the word "satire" or "parody" to describe Kahn's movie, precisely because of the qualities that people loved about it (dark, violent, almost completely humorless).
It can easily be seen as a satire. Whether it's a parody is a slightly more difficult question. The legal distinction, for those unfamiliar with this, is that a parody somehow makes fun of the work being used; a satire makes fun of something else, but uses the work to do so. Making fun of the trend of 'gritty reboots' in cinema by using the Power Rangers is certainly satire -- it makes fun of other gritty reboot films and shows. I'd have to have seen it, and know something about the regular Power Rangers to have an opinion as to whether it's a parody, and I frankly don't care enough to bother.
The question of whether the filmmakers meant it as a satire at the time that they made it and released it, and whether that matters, is certainly an interesting one. I can't think of caselaw that indicates that the timing matters or not, but please feel free to cite some.
since "fair use" is a catch-all for several scenarios in which you can legally use copyrighted content without the owner's permission (parody/satire, brief excerpt for the purpose of commentary/criticism, etc.), which defense applies here?
This is an incorrect view of fair use.
Fair use applies to any sort of use of a copyrighted work, which but for fair use would be infringing, and which is fair. I know this sounds like a tautology, but there it is. There is a four-factor test as to whether a use is fair or not, which we'll get into shortly. That's really what matters. True, there is a list of examples in the statute, but it's really meaningless: It's not an exhaustive list of all types of fair use, and the types of uses listed are not necessarily fair. While it was meant to provide guidance, the list of uses has turned out to only cause serious confusion. I strongly encourage you to ignore it completely.
One of the criteria for "fair use" is how much of the original work you re-used -- if your online review of The Dark Knight links to a 10-second clip that you posted to show that the fight scenes are kick-ass, that might be OK, but a 30-minute excerpt would not be. But if we apply that logic to the use of a copyrighted character, in a story you're either using someone else's copyrighted character, or you're not. Given that characters are protected by copyright at all, it doesn't make much sense to talk about "using 0.5% of a character", the way that a 30-second clip would constitute only 0.5% of a 100-minute movie. It certainly wouldn't make sense in the case of Kahn's remake, where the copyrighted Power Rangers characters are onscreen in every single scene.
For those reading along, the four factor test is:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The key thing to bear in mind is that the test is not to be applied in a strictly mathematical way; it's really just a tool to provide guidance for the ultimate question of: Is the use fair?
Fair uses have been found when most of the factors weigh against it. And the four factors are not the only factors worth considering; courts must consider them, but can also consider additional factors if they like, with no rules as to what those factors are.
In any case, you're looking at the 'amount and substantiality of the portion used' in too mechanical a fashion. Remember, the copyright for a character is really all about the details that go into describing the character. What does he look like? What clothes does he wear? What sort of method of speaking does he have? What kinds of behavior are typical for him? And so forth.
For example, if the character in question were Harry Potter, the character would be used less if, for instance, his scar did not appear, or there were no mention of his crappy home life. Those aren't the only traits that define the character, obviously, but the fewer you use, the more likely it is that you're engaged in fair use. (New traits made up by the user, which do not appear in the original work don't matter, btw; so if you add fluency in Magical Esperanto, it doesn't weigh against fair use, since it never arises in Rowling's books or in the movies)
Again, I haven't seen anything involving Power Rangers, but if it's just that the characters are dressed in similar outfits and otherwise bear no relation to the originals, this would indicate that relatively little of the characters were used.
And of course, remember that even if 100% of a work is used, it can still be fair use, under the right circumstances. Instances of time shifting and space shifting have been found to be fair uses, and they use all of the work.
The director's defenders rightly pointed out the absurdity of Vimeo removing the short film just hours after giving it a "Staff Pick" award
It doesn't sound absurd to me. Whether it has artistic merit has no connection to whether it's legal. The silent movie Nosferatu is a classic but infringed on the copyright of the novel Dracula. Luckily, while the courts ordered the film destroyed, one copy survived, and we have that to thank for the preservation of the film.
Presumably they had heard of the Power Rangers and knew that the movie was using the characters without permission.
There's no central registry of copyright registrations, assignments, and licenses. There probably should be, but there isn't. How would Vimeo know that the filmmakers didn't have permission? They could've gotten the rightsholder to grant them an oral or implied license, and there would be no way for Vimeo to distinguish that from them having no license at all. It's not Vimeo's job to know these things, and usually they're in no position to find out. Requiring rightsholders to search for infringements is the best way to go.
Moreover, there's not just a legal argument against an unauthorized "gritty reboot" of the Power Rangers, there's a moral one as well.
No there's not. There is no moral aspect to copyright; it's amoral and utilitarian. Though if pressed, I would say that it is more moral to create and publish works than it is to prohibit the creation and publication of works (particularly if it's just about money).
No, they fund things that have a military application, some of which are interesting. But it's not like the good old days, when they'd fund things that were interesting, regardless of military value.
If you're going to go around reading Wikipedia pages, you may as well finish reading them before citing them.
Here's what the very same Wikipedia page says, one paragraph after the one you quoted:
The ARPANET incorporated distributed computation (and frequent re-computation) of routing tables. This was a major contribution to the good survivability that the ARPANET had, in the face of significant destruction - even by a nuclear attack. Such auto-routing was technically quite challenging to construct at the time. The fact that it was incorporated into the early ARPANET made many believe that this had been a design goal.
The ARPANET was in fact designed to survive subordinate-network losses, but the principal reason was that the switching nodes and network links were unreliable, even without any nuclear attacks. About the resource scarcity that spurred the creation of the ARPANET, Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director (1965â"1967), said:
The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried.
Which agrees nicely with what I said in my earlier comment.
You then went on to say:
Also nobody was talking about WHY DARPA funded it.But it's good to know in your universe that's the only place with money.
No, they weren't the only place with money. But ARPA was founded in 1958, and it wasn't until 1973 that they were required to only spend money on defense-related projects. Before that, they had a habit of giving money to all sorts of interesting projects. JCR Licklider, an obscure, yet tremendously important person in computing history, wanted to build computer networks and was a higher-up at ARPA in the 60's. His successor was Ivan Sutherland, who should need no introduction, and Sutherland brought in Bob Taylor, who finally got a network funded and built. Since you like Wikipedia, here's a passage from Taylor's entry:
Among the computer projects that ARPA supported was time-sharing, in which many users could work at terminals to share a single large computer. Users could work interactively instead of using punched cards or punched tape in a batch processing style. Taylor's office in the Pentagon had a terminal connected to time-sharing at MIT, a terminal connected to the Berkeley Timesharing System at the University of California at Berkeley, and a third terminal to the System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California. He noticed each system developed a community of users, but was isolated from the other communities.
Taylor hoped to build a computer network to connect the ARPA-sponsored projects together, if nothing else to let him communicate to all of them through one terminal.
When ARPA got out of the business of spending money on interesting work, the National Science Foundation was supposed to pick up the slack, but this never happened. While I can understand how some people might cast aspersions on projects that used military funding, even if they're not meant for military applications, the money spends well enough.
The initial internet was meant to be a military communication system that could operate when large numbers of links were destroyed.
No it wasn't; that's just an urban legend. The ARPAnet was a way of allowing researchers to share resources. Thus, a user in San Francisco could use a computer in Los Angeles, and wouldn't even need a new, dedicated terminal to do it. Its resilience has more to do with the poor state of telecommunications at the time demanding it, and certain design features that allowed for a useful combination of efficiency and flexibility.
As for why it was funded by DARPA, that was where there was money.
I managed to get a GTX 750 Ti for about $80 USD (I price matched it at $120 CAD and it had a $20 MIR, so it ended up being $100 CAD plus tax).
I bought it because my old 6850 wasn't running Far Cry 4 all that well. The GTX 750 Ti runs it like a champ at 1080P with settings between medium and high. Huge performance increase over the 6850, it's much quieter, doesn't need an external power connector, and I even sold my old card to someone for $70.
If your device is not sleeping while plugged in make sure you're using the charger that came with the device. It seems like it shouldn't make any difference, but I had this problem myself and sure enough using the original charger fixed it. If it's still not sleeping while plugged in I'd probably try a factory reset. There are a few software settings such as one in the developer mode to purposely keep it on, but if you haven't messed with this stuff then it shouldn't be the problem.
The blue light decreases melatonin production. Set your device to display amber on black and dim the room's lights. If you're extra sensitive to it like me, get yourself a pair of blue-blocking glasses.
Copying was a difficult and expensive enough proposition that a natural exclusivity existed even without copyright.
No it didn't. Pirates have never had a technological edge over legitimate publishers. At best there's parity, but usually publishers have an edge over pirates.
If you wanted to pirate a book before the invention of movable type, you could copy it longhand -- just like you'd have to do if you wanted to make an authorized copy.
And people did this all the time. In fact, the only reason that any books (other than those written on clay, stone, or metal) survive from antiquity is because they were copied, the copies were copied, and the copies spread far and wide. Often only one copy survived long enough for more to be made. Paper of various kinds has been in use for a long time, but the oldest paper book is only about 1700 years old.
There was no exclusivity. Some places, like the city of Alexandria, in Egypt, had an official policy that all books that entered the city had to be made available for copying.
The very idea that authors should have exclusive rights in their works is only a few centuries old.
How many people would publish if no option to have a copyright existed at all?
Well, all the people who published works before 1710 had no copyrights. All the people who published after that, but not in England had no copyrights until various countries slowly adopted copyright (the US picked it up in 1790, the French after that, and most of Europe in the 19th century -- and they only exported it to the rest of the world by means of colonialism, not on its own actual merits).
Plus there were various limits, e.g. the US only granted copyrights to Americans until almost the end of the 19th century; British authors had no option to get an American copyright at all... unless they became American citizens.
More recently, various classes of work were ineligible. For example, architectural works (in practice, buildings) were uncopyrightable in the US until 1990. Were no buildings designed and built in this country until architects were given copyrights?
What I think you're missing here is that there are a plethora of incentives for an author to create and publish a work. Money gained by exploiting a copyright on the work is but one of those incentives, and often is not the most important one, and also often is not an essential one.
I certainly agree that it can be useful, but that doesn't mean that we ought to go hog wild with it; as with many other things, a little might be beneficial, but too much can be harmful.
And what is the point of having a copyright in the first place if the creator isn't supposed to be permitted to try and exercise control over who may copy their works?
The point is to grant authors copyrights as an additional incentive in order to entice them into creating and publishing works which they would not have created and published, but for copyright. If they would've done it anyway, the copyright is superfluous, and granting it would be wasteful. If they require more copyright than is healthy for society, all things considered, we're literally better off not granting it even though it means we'll be bereft of the work in question.
It's not intended to give authors control over works for their own sake. That's just the means by which it functions. It's intended to produce a public benefit. And while the public does benefit from having works created and published, it also benefits from not having anyone controlling works.
Care to take a guess how many people would willfully publish their stuff if everything that they published had to become public domain?
Well, that's how it operated in the US from 1790 through to the end of 1977. Turns out that relatively few published works were copyrighted. Further, since there was a renewal term (that is, the copyright would be good for an additional number of years if you re-upped in a timely fashion) we also know that most authors of copyrighted works didn't bother to get a renewal, and let their works enter the public domain sooner than they had to.
It worked fine. We got great literature and the golden age of Hollywood on both film and tv, as well as tons of great music.
And frankly, a system of strict formalities to get copyrights is a more important thing to change in the law than shortening the term length.
Why should the creator not be able to impose any restrictions they damn please?
Why should the rest of us aid them in doing so? E.g. by conferring upon them some sort of legal rights that pertain to how the work is used by others.
While I think it could potentially be beneficial for the public to grant rights to authors, it's surely not always beneficial under every circumstance, and every permutation of works and rights.
And if the author doesn't like the terms under which the public might deign to give them rights, they're free to not create the work.
Good day to avoid cops. Crawl to work.
