It was surely not a coincidence that the New York Times published its story on the trial of a certain Gadalias and Saulos this past Monday, April 14th. The defendants, as their names suggest, did not live in modernity: the papyrus documenting their legal troubles dates to the reign of Hadrian, around 130 AD. These men were charged, writes the Times’ Franz Lidz, with “the falsification of documents and the illicit sale and manumission, or freeing, of slaves — all to avoid paying duties in the far-flung Roman provinces of Judea and Arabia, a region roughly corresponding to present-day Israel and Jordan.”
In other words, Gadalias and Saulos were accused of tax evasion, a subject always on the mind of Americans under the shadow of their tax-return due date, April 15th. While the prospect of an IRS audit keeps more than a few of them awake at night, ancient Roman law went, predictably, quite a bit harsher.
“Penalties ranged from heavy fines and permanent exile to hard labor in the salt mines and, in the worst case, damnatio ad bestias, a public execution in which the condemned were devoured by wild animals,” writes Lidz. Such a fate presumably wouldn’t have been out of the question for those convicted of a crime of these proportions.
The long-misclassified document of this case was only properly deciphered, and even understood to have been written in ancient Greek, after its rediscovery in 2014. “A team of scholars was assembled to conduct a detailed physical examination and cross-reference names and locations with other historical sources,” which resulted in this paper published this past January. For any scholar of Roman law, such an opportunity to get into the minds of both that civilization’s judges and its criminals could hardly be passed up. Even out on the edge of the empire, prosecutors turn out to have employed “deft rhetorical strategies worthy of Cicero and Quintilian and displayed an excellent command of Roman legal terms and concepts in Greek.” This will no doubt get today’s law students speculating: specifically, about the existence of an ancient ChatGPT.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Each Public Domain Day seems to bring us a richer crop of copyright-liberated books, plays, films, musical compositions, sound recordings, works of art, and other pieces of intellectual property. This year happens to be an especially notable one for connoisseurs of Belgian culture. Among the characters entering the American public domain, we find a certain boy reporter named Tintin, who first appeared — along with his faithful pup Milou, or in English, Snowy — in the January 10th, 1929 issue of Le Petit Vingtième, the children’s supplement of the newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle.
Now, here in le vingt-et-unième-siècle, that first version of Tintin can be reinvented in any manner one can imagine — at least in the United States. In the European Union, as the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain directors Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle note in their Public Domain Day blog post for this year, that Tintin remains under copyright until 2054, a date based on his creator Hergé having died in 1983. The thoroughly American comic-strip hero Popeye also made his debut in 1929, but as Jenkins and Boyle hasten to add, while that “Popeye 1.0 had superhuman capabilities, he did not derive them from eating spinach until 1931.” Even so, “it appears that the copyright in this 1931 comic strip was not renewed — if this is true, Popeye’s spinach-fueled strength is already in the public domain.”
This year also brings a development in a similar matter of detail related to no less a cartoon icon than Mickey Mouse: last year freed the first version of Mickey Mouse, his river-navigating, farm-animal-bashing Steamboat Willie incarnation. “In 2025 we welcome a dozen new Mickey Mouse films from 1929,” write Jenkins and Boyle, “Mickey speaks his first words – ‘Hot dogs! Hot dogs!’ – and debuts his familiar white gloves. That version of Mickey is now officially in the public domain.”
This Public Domain Day also brings us literary works like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (as well as detective novels from Agatha Christie and the pseudonymous Ellery Queen, once the biggest mystery writer in America); the first sound films by Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and the Marx Brothers; musical compositions like “Singin’ in the Rain,” Gershwin’s An American in Paris, and Ravel’s Boléro; actual recordings of Rhapsody in Blue and “It Had To Be You”; and Surrealist works of art by Salvador Dalí and — pending further investigation into their copyright status — perhaps even René Magritte, whose L’empire des lumières just sold for a record $121 million. Who knows? 2025 could be the year we all look to Belgium for inspiration.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
“This is a work of fiction,” declares the disclaimer we’ve all noticed during the end credits of movies. “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” In most cases, this may seem so trivial that it hardly merits a mention, but the very same disclaimer also rolls up after pictures very clearly intended to represent actual events or persons, living or dead. Most of us would write it all off as one more absurdity created by the elaborate pantomime of American legal culture, but a closer look at its history reveals a much more intriguing origin.
As told in the Cheddar video above, the story begins with Rasputin and the Empress, a 1932 Hollywood movie about the titular real-life mystic and his involvement with the court of Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia. Having been killed in 1916, Rasputin himself wasn’t around to get litigious about his villainous portrayal (by no less a performer than Lionel Barrymore, incidentally, acting alongside his siblings John and Ethel as the prince and czarina). It was actually one of Rasputin’s surviving killers, an exiled aristocrat named Felix Yusupov, who sued MGM, accusing them of defaming his wife, Princess Irina Yusupov, in the form of the character Princess Natasha.
The film casts Princess Natasha as a supporter of Rasputin, writes Slate’s Duncan Fyfe, “but the mystic, wary of her husband, hypnotizes and rapes her, rendering Natasha — by his logic, with which she agrees — unfit to be a wife. Yusupov contended that as viewers would equate Chegodieff with Yusupov, so would they link Natasha with Irina,” though in reality Irina and Rasputin never even met. In an English court, “the jury found in her favor, awarding her £25,000, or about $125,000. MGM had to take the film out of circulation for decades and purge the offending scene for all time,” though a small piece of it remains in Rasputin and the Empress’ original trailer.
Things might have gone in MGM’s favor had the film not included a title card announcing that “a few of the characters are still alive — the rest met death by violence.” The studio was advised that they’d have done well to declare the exact opposite, a practice soon implemented across Hollywood. It didn’t take long for the movies to start having fun with it, introducing jokey variations on the soon-familiar boilerplate. Less than a decade after Rasputin and the Empress, one nonsensical musical comedy previously featured here on Open Culture) opened with the disclaimer that “any similarity between HELLZAPOPPIN’ and a motion picture is purely coincidental” — a tradition more recently upheld by South Park.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
More than thirty years after it was first privately published in 1928, Lady Chatterley’s Lover became the subject of the most famous obscenity trial in English history. Though the ultimate decision of R v Penguin Books Ltd in favor of the publisher opened a cultural floodgate in that country, the novel was also subject to bans elsewhere, including the United States and Japan. Nearly a century after D. H. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover — and a world apart as regards attitudes about public morality — it can be somewhat difficult to understand what all the fuss was about. But now that the book has entered the public domain in the United States, it could potentially be made artistically and socially dangerous again.
The same could be said of a number of other notable works of literature, from Virginia Woolf’s sex-switching satire Orlando to Bertolt Brecht’s piece of revolutionary theater Die Dreigroschenoper (known in translation as The Threepenny Opera) to a cultural phenomenon-spawning story like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.
These and others are named on this year’s Public Domain Day post by Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. If not for multiple extensions of copyright law, she notes, all of them would have originally gone public domain in 1984, and we would now have almost four decades’ worth of additional creations reinterpreting, re-imagining, and re-using them. Still, “better late than never!”
At this point in history, the artifacts freed for anyone’s use aren’t just written works, but also films, musical compositions, and even actual sound recordings. These include classic Disney cartoons Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy, which introduced the world to a certain Mickey Mouse; live-action movies from major filmmakers, like Charlie Chaplin’s TheCircus and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc; and such songs with broad cultural footprints as “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” “When You’re Smiling,” and “Mack the Knife” — or rather “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” in the original German from Die Dreigroschenoper. Alas, those of us who want to do our own thing with Bobby Darin’s version will have to wait until February of 2067.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
We can now “do to Disney what Disney did to the great works of the public domain before him,” according to Harvard law professor and public domain expert, Lawrence Lessig, hailed by The New Yorker as “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era.”
Disney has been notoriously protective of its control over its spokesmouse, successfully pushing Congress to adopt the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998, which kept the public’s mitts off of Steamboat Willie, and, more to the point, Mickey Mouse, for 25 years beyond the terms of the Copyright Act of 1976.
Walt Disney embraced the freedom to take, change and return ideas from our popular culture. The rip, mix and burn culture of the Internet is Disney-familiar.
Steamboat Willie wasn’t conjured from thin air either. Its plot and title character were inspired by Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, released two months before Disney’s animated short went into production.
A few caveats for those eager to take a crack at the Mouse…
Steamboat Willie’s newfound public domain status doesn’t give you carte blanche to mess around with Mickey and Minnie in all their many forms.
Stick to the music-loving black-and-white trickster with rubberhose arms, button-trimmed short-shorts, and the distinctly rodent-like tail that went by the wayside for Mickey’s appearance in 1941’s The Little Whirlwind.
Nor can Steamboat Willie-era Mickey become your new logo. Plop the character down in new narratives, yes. Use him in a recognizable way for purposes of advertising unrelated products, no.
Mislead viewers into thinking your mash up is Disney-approved at your own risk. A Disney spokesperson told CNN:
We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright, and we will work to safeguard against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of Mickey and our other iconic characters.
Don’t think they don’t mean it.
Author Robert Thompson, the founding director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culturetold The Guardian that even though “the original Mickey isn’t the one we all think of and have on our T‑shirts or pillowcases up in the attic someplace,” the company is hypervigilant about protecting its assets:
Symbolically of course, copyright is important to Disney and it has been very careful about their copyrights to the extent that laws have changed to protect them. This is the only place I know that some obscure high school in the middle of nowhere can put on The Lion King and the Disney copyright people show up.
Fumi Games is already poised to take a similar gamble with MOUSE, a blood-soaked, “gritty, jazz-fueled shooter” set to drop in 2025:
If you’re not yet ready to take the plunge, Mickey’s pals Pluto and Donald Duck will join him in the public domain later this decade, so don your thinking caps and mark your calendars.
For a more in-depth look at the ways you can — and cannot — use Steamboat Willie-era Mickey Mouse in your own work, Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain supplies a very thorough guide here.
“In the criminal justice system,” the evergreen Law & Order’s opening credits remind us, “the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important, groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders.”
They fail to mention the life-sized skeleton with ghastly glowing eyes and a camera tucked away inside its skull.
Ms. Shelby’s vision sought to transform the police interrogation room into a haunted house where the sudden appearance of the aforementioned skeleton would shock a guilty suspect into confession.
(Presumably an innocent person would have nothing to fear, other than sitting in a pitch black chamber where a truth-seeking skeleton was soon to manifest before their very eyes.)
The idea may have seemed slightly less far-fetched immediately following a decade when belief in Spiritualism flourished.
False mediums used sophisticated stagecraft to convince members of a gullible public that they were in the presence of the supernatural.
Ms. Shelby’s proposed apparatus consisted of a “structure divided into two chambers:”
…one chamber of which is darkened to provide quarters in which the suspect is confined while being subjected to examination, the other chamber being provided for the examiner, the two chambers being separated from each other by a partition which is provided with a panel upon one side of which is mounted a figure in the form of a skeleton, the said skeleton having the rear J portion of the skull removed and the recording apparatus inserted therein.
The examiner was also tasked with voicing the skeleton, using appropriately spooky tones and a well-positioned megaphone.
As silly as Ms. Shelby’s invention seems nearly a hundred years after the patent was filed, it’s impressive for its robust embrace of technology, particularly as it pertains to capturing the presumably spooked suspect’s reaction:
The rear portion of the skull of the skeleton is removed and a camera casing is mounted in the panel extending into the skull, said camera being preferable of the continuously-moving film-type an having provisions for simultaneously recording pictures and sound waves, or reproducing these, as may be desired or required, the said camera impression upon the having an objective adapted to register with the nose, or other opening, in the skull. The eye-sockets are provided with bulbs adapted to impress different light intensities on the marginsof the film, the central section of the film being arranged to receive the pictures, the variations in the light intensities of the bulbs being governed by means of the microphones, and selenium cells (not shown), which are included in the light circuit and tend to cause the fluctuations of the current to vary the intensity of the light for sound recording purposes, the density of the light film varying with the intensity of the light thus transmitted.
Ms. Shelby believed that a suspect whose confession had been recorded by the skeleton would have difficulty making a retraction stick, especially if photographs taken during the big reveal caught them with a guilty-looking countenance.
Writing on officer.com, Jonathan Kozlowski applauds Ms. Shelby’s impulse to innovate, even as he questions if “scaring a confession out of a guy by being really really creepy (should) be considered coercion:”
Shelby doesn’t seem to have gotten any credit for it and nor am I sure that Shelby was even the first to think of the idea, BUT if you remove the skeleton figure and the red lightbulbs staring into the criminal’s soul was this the inspiration of a mounted surveillance camera?
Allow me to push it even further … imagine your department’s interview room. If you’ve got the camera in the corner (or multiple) let that be. Instead of the skeleton figure just put an officer standing in the corner with a recording body camera. The officer is just standing there. Staring. Sure that’s a MASSIVE waste of time and money — of course. I may be wrong, but if I’m being honest this seems like intimidation.
It also strikes us that the element of surprise would be a challenge to keep under wraps. All it would take is one freaked-out crook (innocent or guilty) blabbing to an underworld connection, “You wouldn’t believe the crazy thing that happened when they hauled me down to the station the other night…”
What sort of horrific special effect could force a guilty party to confess in the 21st century? Something way more dreadful than a skeleton with glowing red eyes, comedian Tom Scott’s experiment below suggests.
Having enlisted creative technologist Charles Yarnold to build Ms. Shelby’s apparatus, he invited fellow YouTubers Chloe Dungate, Tom Ridgewell, and Daniel J Layton to step inside one at a time, hoping to identify which of them had nicked the cookie with which he had baited his crime-catching hook.
The participants’ reactions at the critical moment ranged from delighted giggles to a satisfying yelp, but the results were utterly inconclusive. Nobody ‘fessed up to stealing the cookies.
It doesn’t take children long to suspect that Santa Claus is actually their parents. But if Mom and Dad demonstrate sufficient commitment to the fantasy, so will the kids. This must have held even truer for the family of the 20th century’s most celebrated creator of fantasies, J. R. R. Tolkien. Before Tolkien had begun writing The Hobbit, let alone the Lord of the Rings trilogy, he was honing his signature storytelling and world-building skills by writing letters from Father Christmas. The toddler John Tolkien and his infant brother Michael received the first in 1920, just after their Great War veteran father was demobilized from the army and made the youngest professor at the University of Leeds. Another would come each and every Christmas until 1943, two more children and much of a life’s work later.
Every year, Tolkien’s Father Christmas had a great deal to report to John, Michael, and later Christopher and Priscilla. Apart from the usual hassle of assembling and delivering gifts, he had to contend with a host of other challenges including but not limited to attacks by marauding goblins and the accidental destruction of the moon.
The cast of characters also includes an unreliable polar-bear assistant and his cubs Paksu and Valkotukka, the sound of whose names hints at Tolkien’s interest in language and myth. Since the publication of the collected Letters From Father Christmas a few years after Tolkien’s death, enthusiasts have identified many traces of the qualities that would later emerge, fully developed, in his novels. The spirit of adventure is there, of course, but so is the humor.
Understanding seemingly from the first how to fire up a young reader’s imagination, the multitalented Tolkien accompanied each letter from Father Christmas with an illustration. Colorful and evocative, these works of art depict the scenes of both mishap and revelry described in the correspondence (itself stamped with a Tolkien-designed seal from the North Pole). How intensely must young John, Michael, Christopher, and Priscilla have anticipated these missives in the weeks — even months — leading up to Christmas. And how astonishing it must have been, upon much later reflection, to realize what attention their father had devoted to this family project. Growing up Tolkien no doubt had its downsides, as relation to any famous writer does, but unmemorable holidays can’t have been one of them.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Do you like being right? Of course, everyone does. Are you successful at convincing others? That’s a tougher one. We may politely disagree, avoid, or scream bloody murder at each other, but whatever our conflict style, no one is born, and few are raised, knowing how to persuade.
Persuasion does not mean coercion, deceit, or manipulation, the tactics of con artists, underhanded salespersons, or stereotypically untrustworthy lawyers….
Persuasion is about shifting others’ point of view, respectfully and charitably, through the use of evidence and argument, ethical appeals, moving stories, and “faith in the power of your ideas,” as Neal Katyal explains in his TED presentation above, “How to Win an Argument (at the U.S. Supreme Court, or anywhere).”
Katyal’s job as a Supreme Court litigator makes him an authority on this subject. It may also distract you with thoughts about the current Court power struggle. Try to put those thoughts aside. In places where reason, evidence, and ethics have purchase, Katyal’s advice can pay dividends in your quest to win others over.
In his first case before the Court a “handful of years” after the 9/11 attacks, he represented Osama bin Laden’s driver in a suit pressing to recognize Geneva Convention rules in the war on terror and to rule Guantanamo unconstitutional. His opponent, the Solicitor General of the U.S., had argued 35 cases before the court; “I wasn’t even 35 years old,” Katyal says. He won the case, and he’ll tell you how.
His most important lesson? Winning arguments isn’t about being right. It isn’t about believing really, really hard that you’re right. Persuasion is not about confidence, Katyal insists. It’s about empathy. Oral arguments in the courtroom (which judges could just as well read in transcript form) show us as much, he says.
When his legal expertise was not helping in preparation for the big trial, Katyal felt desperate and hired an acting coach, who trained him in such techniques as holding hands while making his arguments. What? Yes, that’s exactly what Katyal said. But he did it, and it worked.
Holding hands with the Justices isn’t an option in court, but Katyal found other ways to remind himself to stay close to what mattered, wearing accessories his parents had given him, for example, and writing his children’s names on a legal pad: “That’s why I’m doing this, for them. To leave the country better than I found it.”
Once he had established his private reasons for caring, he was ready to present his public reasons. As the old saying goes, “people don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” The facts absolutely matter, yet the burden of showing how and why facts matter falls to the persuader, whose own passion, integrity, commitment, etc. will go a long way toward making an audience receptive.
This advice applies in any situation, but if you’re wondering how to move Katyal’s advice online.… well, maybe the ultimate lesson here is that we’re at our most persuasive when we’re close enough—physically or virtually—to take somebody’s hand.…
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