, The Los Angeles Times; Blondie and Dagwood are entering the public domain, but Betty Boop still may be trapped in copyright jail
"Duke’s Jenkins refers to “the harm of the long term — so many works could have been rediscovered earlier.” Moreover, she says, “so many works don’t make it out of obscurity.” The long consignment to the wilderness thwarts “preservation, access, education, creative reuse, scholarship, etc., when most of the works are out of circulation and not benefiting any rights holders.”
Among other drawbacks, she notes, “films have disintegrated because preservationists can’t digitize them.” Many films from the 1930s are theoretically available to the public domain now, but not really because they’ve been lost forever.
What would be the right length of time? “We could have that same experience after a much shorter term,” Jenkins told me. “Looking back at works from the ‘70s and ‘80s has similar excitement for me.” Economic models, she adds, have placed the optimal term at about 35 years.
It’s proper to note that just because something is scheduled to enter the public domain, that doesn’t mean legal wrangling over its copyright protection is settled.
With recurring characters, for instance, only the version appearing in a given threshold year enters the public domain 95 years later; subsequent alternations or enhancements retain protection until their term is up. That has led to courthouse disputes over just what changes are significant enough to retain copyright for those changes.
“Copyrightable aspects of a character’s evolution that appear in later, still-protected works may remain off-limits until those later works themselves expire,” Los Angeles copyright lawyer Aaron Moss said."
