Best version of public domain?

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About a week from now, we can celebrate public domain day again. In USA, works (except from recorded music) published and released in 1924 will become public domain in 2020, and works from 1925 will enter public domain in 2021, and so on (thanks to Bill Clinton signing the Sonny Bono Act in 1998). Novels, paintings and movies will become available for everybody, no matter when the creators died.

In Europe and other places in the world, it is irrelevant when something was released. The only thing that matters is when the creators died. Once 70 years have passed, everything they made ends up in public domain. With a few exceptions, like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's story The Little Prince if you live in France, or J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan if you live in England (for previously unpublished material, those who publish it first will have the rights for 20 years before they enter the public domain).

For instance the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Much of what he wrote has been in public domain for years in USA, but never in Europe. In 2021, everything he wrote will become available for Europe. I assume that include making merchandise based on Tarzan and John Carter. In USA, those rights still belongs to Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate.

So there are both advantages and disadvantages.

[PaulBullion]

I know the separate systems make it tough for globally available web sites like Librivox.

[kjn]

Note that merchandise follows a different set of rules—trademarks—than those for the stories. Rather, the Tarzan and John Carter stories will enter a similar state of weirdness that is true for Conan right now. The original Conan stories are public domain, but Conan the character is trademarked out the wazoo, and so to publish new Conan stories you have to have a license.

Personally, I'd prefer to cut down copyright times a lot, like to creator's lifetime plus 20 years (at the most). One reason for that the question about who is the rights holder becomes far murkier the more time goes. As long as the immediate descendants are alive it's often relatively easy, but I've heard too many horror stories where it's impossible to publish a story because it wasn't clear who held the rights.

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The separate systems have so far not prevented for instance Project Gutenberg to be available also in countries where the material is not in public domain yet.

What is positive with the system in America is as mentioned that it includes movies and illustrators. Kenneth Graham is in public domain elsewhere, which includes The Wind in the Willows. But the illustrations by E. H. Shepard will not enter the public domain before some more decades have passed.

Disney's Snow White was made by several people, some of them still alive in this century. Steamboat Willie and the following shorts will the acid test in that regard.

Still not sure if I understand how the merchandise rights works. For me it looks like everybody are free to make and sell Cthulhu figures and paintings from Lovecraft, figures based on the work of Hieronymus Bosch, classic fairy tales or stories from for instance H.C. Andersen. But not from Robert E. Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs?

Agree that they should cut down copyright times. What happened in 1998 would probably not have been possible today, or even back then if internet had been as common then as it is today. We have material where nobody knows who owns the rights, and therefore can not publish it. And so while we wait it fades away into obscurity. That's true for a lot of the pulp stories, with genres like fantasy, weird fiction, horror, science fiction, westerns, war stories and so on. Some is probably already lost forever. (I remember discussing this on the old imdb board for Forbidden Planet, where I mentioned that it could already have been in public domain had not the copyright time been expanded. Some genius started to scold me, accusing me of being one of those who used The Pirate Bay and expecting to get everything for free. Any attempt to explain that it was actually our cultural heritage that was being made unavailable for us each time the rights were expanded failed.)

[kjn]

Still not sure if I understand how the merchandise rights works. For me it looks like everybody are free to make and sell Cthulhu figures and paintings from Lovecraft, figures based on the work of Hieronymus Bosch, classic fairy tales or stories from for instance H.C. Andersen. But not from Robert E. Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs?

My friend Will Frank wrote an excellent introduction on the various forms of intellectual property and the different types of laws applied to it: IP-rimer: A Basic Explanation of Intellectual Property.