1998's Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended US copyrights by 20 years to life-plus-70 for human authors and 95 years total for corporate authors. The extension was retrospective, so works in the public domain went back into copyright.

1/
This was a wanton act of violence that doomed much of our culture to disappear entirely before its copyright expired, allowing it to be used and revitalized, rewoven into our cultural fabric.

2/
It was undertaken to extract extra revenues for the minuscule fraction of works by long-dead authors that were still generating revenues. It also froze the US public domain for two decades, with no work re-entering our public domain until Jan 1 2018.

3/
That day - the Grand Reopening of the Public Domain - marked the entry of the collected works of 1923 into the public domain. Last Jan saw the liberation of 1924's catalog:

blog.archive.org/2019/12/13/the…

4/
And now, it's about to happen again. Every year, Duke University's @thepublicdomain and Jennifer Jenkins document the treasures we are about to receive. 1925 is a bumper crop:

web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdom…

5/
We're getting The Great Gatsby AND Fats Waller; Woolf's Mrs Galloway and Hemingway's In Our Time; we're getting the Harlem Renaissance's peak, and the first year of The New Yorker. It's a good year!

(yeah, Mein Kampf is in there too)

6/
Here's some highlights from the list:

* John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

* Alain Locke, The New Negro (collecting works from writers including W.E.B. du Bois, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond)

7/
* Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith

* Agatha Christie, The Secret of Chimneys

* Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves

* The Merry Widow

* Buster Keaton’s Go West

* Always, by Irving Berlin

* Sweet Georgia Brown, by Ben Bernie, Maceo Pinkard & Kenneth Casey

8/
* Works by ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton, including Shreveport Stomps and Milenberg Joys (with Paul Mares, Walter Melrose, & Leon Roppolo)

* Works by Duke Ellington, including Jig Walk and With You (both with Joseph “Jo” Trent)

9/
* Works by ‘Fats’ Waller, including Anybody Here Want To Try My Cabbage (with Andrea “Andy” Razaf), Ball and Chain Blues (with Andrea “Andy” Razaf), and Campmeetin’ Stomp

10/
* Works by Bessie Smith, the “Empress of the Blues,” including Dixie Flyer Blues, Tired of Voting Blues, and Telephone Blues

* Works by Sidney Bechet, including Waltz of Love (with Spencer Williams), Naggin’ at Me (with Rousseau Simmons), and Dreams of To-morrow

11/
All these works and more will be available at the @internetarchive on Jan 1. Get ready!

eof/

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16 Dec
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16 Dec
Today's Twitter threads (a thread).

Inside: Email sabbaticals; Chaos Communications Congress; Landmark US financial transparency law; Rogues' Galleries and facial recognition; Jan 1 is Public Domain Day for 1925; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2020/12/16/fra…

#Pluralistic

1/
Email sabbaticals: I'm going offline until next year.



2/
Chaos Communications Congress: Finally a way to do CCC without making your family furious.



3/
Read 20 tweets
16 Dec
Cities - and even states - across the USA have passed laws banning the use of facial recognition technology by governments; the most-often cited concern is surveillance and its ability to chill lawful conduct like protests.

1/
But as my @eff colleague @mguariglia writes for @FutureTenseNow, the risks run deeper than that, as historic debates have shown us. The early 20th century saw debates over "rogues galleries" (police files of photos of criminals and suspects).

slate.com/technology/202…

2/
As Guariglia writes, "Suspicion is a circular process." In theory you got put into a Rogues Gallery because you were suspicious. In practice, being in a Rogues Gallery MADE YOU suspicious. A single photo taken after a single police encounter turned into an eternal accusation.

3/
Read 9 tweets
16 Dec
The Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers, Swissleaks, Lichtenstein Leaks, the Fincen Files - the past decade has been filled with financial secrecy scandals wherein we learned how the world's worst people hide the world's dirtiest money.

1/
Governments have fallen as a result of these leaks. Journalists have been murdered for reporting them, whistleblowers have been imprisoned for telling the truth. These are a high-stakes window on the corruption, self-dealing and viciousness of the 1% and their criminal pals.

2/
One critical revelation is the role that "onshort-offshore" plays in money-laundering: rich countries with a reputation for a strong rule of law and good governance are the lynchpin of global financial secrecy, thanks to lax corporate enforcement.

3/
Read 10 tweets
16 Dec
I'm about to go offline until 2021 and I had planned to do ABSOLUTELY NO WORK OF ANY SORT while on break, but I made an exception, for an exceptional opportunity: the 32nd Chaos Communications Congress, which is remote this year.

rc3.world

1/
CCC is - notoriously - held during Christmas week, which means that the attendees are limited to people who either care about tech policy and security more than their families, or people who can talk their families into coming along.

2/
It's one of the best events I've ever attended (I brought my family along). My talk at that event, "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing," has had a long afterlife, in large part because of the kind and thoughtful reactions of the attendees.



3/
Read 6 tweets

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