Sherlock Holmes Is Now in the Public Domain, Declares US Judge

in Books, Law, Literature | December 27th, 2013

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Chief Judge Rubén Castil­lo of the Unit­ed States Dis­trict Court of the North­ern Dis­trict of Illi­nois has ruled that the char­ac­ters and sto­ry lines used in 50 Sher­lock Holmes texts pub­lished by Arthur Conan Doyle before Jan. 1, 1923 “are no longer cov­ered by Unit­ed States copy­right law and can be freely used by cre­ators with­out pay­ing any licens­ing fee to the Conan Doyle estate,” reports The New York Times. This gives con­tem­po­rary authors the abil­i­ty to write their own Sher­lock Holmes mys­tery sto­ries and keep con­tribut­ing to a rich tra­di­tion of detec­tive fic­tion. It would also seem­ing­ly put pre-1923 texts firm­ly in the pub­lic domain. (You can find The Adven­tures of Sher­lock Holmes and oth­er relat­ed sto­ries in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books col­lec­tions. ) Leslie S. Klinger, the edi­tor of The Com­plete Anno­tat­ed Sher­lock Holmes, who filed the civ­il suit, praised the judge’s deci­sion, say­ing “Peo­ple want to cel­e­brate Holmes and Wat­son, and now they can do that with­out fear.” Now it’s time for them to write some­thing that can hold a can­dle to what Conan Doyle cre­at­ed those many years ago.

Don’t miss any­thing from Open Cul­ture. Sign up for our Dai­ly Email or RSS Feed. And we’ll send cul­tur­al curiosi­ties your way, every day.

via Arts Beat

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arthur Conan Doyle Dis­cuss­es Sher­lock Holmes and Psy­chics in a Rare Filmed Inter­view (1927)

Arthur Conan Doyle & The Cot­tin­g­ley Fairies: How Two Young Girls Fooled Sher­lock Holmes’ Cre­ator

Arthur Conan Doyle Fills Out the Ques­tion­naire Made Famous By Mar­cel Proust (1899)

Watch John Cleese as Sher­lock Holmes in The Strange Case of the End of Civ­i­liza­tion as We Know It

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Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer Discusses His Love for Reading Proust, and Why “Literature is Crucial to Any Democracy”

in Law, Literature | October 23rd, 2013

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Worth a quick note: The New York Review of Books has post­ed an intrigu­ing inter­view with Supreme Court Jus­tice Stephen Brey­er, who reflects on an impor­tant moment in his intel­lec­tu­al life — read­ing Mar­cel Proust’s À la recherche du temps per­du (In Search of Lost Time) for the very  first time … in French. Decades ago, while “work­ing as a legal intern at an Amer­i­can law firm in Paris,” Brey­er need­ed to improve his French. Read­ing through all sev­en vol­umes of Proust’s mon­u­men­tal work seemed like a good way to do it. 3,500 pages and 1.5 mil­lion words lat­er, Brey­er fin­ished. And then he re-read them again. The first vol­ume of the long nov­el, Swann’s Way, was pub­lished 100 years ago, in 1913. Asked why he still cher­ish­es Proust’s work so much, Brey­er had this to say:

It’s all there in Proust—all mankind! Not only all the dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter types, but also every emo­tion, every imag­in­able sit­u­a­tion. Proust is a uni­ver­sal author: he can touch any­one, for dif­fer­ent rea­sons; each of us can find some piece of him­self in Proust, at dif­fer­ent ages.… What is most extra­or­di­nary about Proust is his abil­i­ty to cap­ture the sub­tlest nuances of human emo­tions, the slight­est vari­a­tions of the mind and the soul. To me, Proust is the Shake­speare of the inner world.

You can read the full inter­view at NYRB, which gets into to some fas­ci­nat­ing ques­tions, like Why is lit­er­a­ture cru­cial to a democ­ra­cy? and Does read­ing the US Con­sti­tu­tion hav­ing any­thing in com­mon with read­ing a great lit­er­ary work?

A hat tip goes to The New York­er’s Page Turn­er blog for call­ing this to our atten­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Mon­ty Python’s “Sum­ma­rize Proust Com­pe­ti­tion” on the 100th Anniver­sary of Swann’s Way

Lis­ten­ing to Proust’s Remem­brance of Things Past, (Maybe) the Longest Audio Book Ever Made

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

Find Recherche in our Free eBooks col­lec­tion

Free French Lessons in Audio & Video

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Listen to Supreme Court Arguments on Prop 8 and DOMA Online

in Current Affairs, Law | March 27th, 2013

ernieThis week, the Supreme Court is hear­ing argu­ments about gay rights in Amer­i­ca. And, no mat­ter how the court decides, these cas­es will enter the his­to­ry books. Will the court lead the nation in mak­ing equal­i­ty avail­able for all, as it did dur­ing the civ­il rights era? Or will the nation be forced to lead the court into moder­ni­ty dur­ing the years ahead? That we will soon find out.

Usu­al­ly the court delays the release of audio record­ings of oral argu­ments. But, acknowl­edg­ing the impor­tance of these par­tic­u­lar cas­es, SCOTUS is mak­ing this week’s argu­ments imme­di­ate­ly avail­able. You can lis­ten to the debates over Prop. 8 here or below. DOMA argu­ments will appear here. And it’s also now below.

Prop 8

DOMA

“.

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What Should Have Entered the Public Domain in 2013?: Philip K. Dick, James Bond, Billie Holiday, Etc

in Law | March 21st, 2013

What entered the pub­lic domain in the US in 2013? It’s not a long answer, because the answer is .… noth­ing.

Now here’s a ques­tion that yields a longer answer. What books would have entered the pub­lic domain if we were still oper­at­ing under rea­son­able, pre-1978 copy­right laws? Here’s a lit­tle list that comes from Duke Uni­ver­si­ty’s Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain:

  • Win­ston Churchill, A His­to­ry of the Eng­lish-Speak­ing Peo­ples
  • Philip K. Dick, Minor­i­ty Report
  • Ian Flem­ing, Dia­monds are For­ev­er (a James Bond nov­el)
  • Fred Gib­son, Old Yeller
  • Bil­lie Hol­i­day, Lady Sings the Blues
  • Alan Lern­er, My Fair Lady
  • Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Jour­ney into Night
  • John Osborne, Look Back in Anger
  • Dodie Smith, 101 Dal­ma­tians

You can also add films to the list, like:

  • Hitch­cock­’s The Man Who Knew Too Much
  • The Searchers (direct­ed by John Ford and star­ring John Wayne)
  • The Ten Com­mand­ments (1956 ver­sion by Cecil B. DeMille, who also direct­ed a sim­i­lar film in 1923)
  • Around the World in 80 Days
  • Godzil­la, King of the Mon­sters!
  • The Best Things in Life are Free

And we should­n’t fail to men­tion that we could have had the first issue of MAD mag­a­zine, with Alfred E. Neu­man grac­ing the cov­er.

In the mean­time, if you’re won­der­ing what will hit the pub­lic domain in 2014, the answer is “noth­ing.” And you can keep repeat­ing that answer until 2019! That’s the next time some­thing new will enter Amer­i­ca’s cre­ative com­mons. Yet one more rea­son Con­gress’ approval rat­ing deserves to sit at 15%.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lawrence Lessig’s Last Speech on Free Cul­ture. Watch it Online.

Sup­port The Pub­lic Domain Review

Cre­ative Com­mons Announces “School of Open” with Cours­es to Focus on Dig­i­tal Open­ness

 

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Creative Commons Announces “School of Open” with Courses to Focus on Digital Openness

in Education, Law, Online Courses, Wikipedia | March 15th, 2013

Just in time to cel­e­brate Open Edu­ca­tion Week, here comes a new ini­tia­tive, the School of Open, a learn­ing envi­ron­ment focused on increas­ing our under­stand­ing of “open­ness” and the ben­e­fits it brings to cre­ativ­i­ty and edu­ca­tion in the dig­i­tal age.

Devel­oped by the col­lab­o­ra­tive edu­ca­tion plat­form Peer to Peer Uni­ver­si­ty (P2PU) with orga­ni­za­tion­al sup­port from Cre­ative Com­mons, the School of Open aims to spread under­stand­ing of the pow­er of this brave new world through free online class­es.

We hear about it all the time: Uni­ver­sal access to research, edu­ca­tion and culture—all good things, with­out a doubt—made pos­si­ble by things like open source soft­ware, open edu­ca­tion­al resources and the like.

But what are these var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties and what do they mean? How can we all learn more and get involved?

School of Open has rolled the con­ver­sa­tion back to square one so that under­stand­ing the basics is easy. Through a list of new cours­es cre­at­ed by users and experts, peo­ple can learn more about what “open­ness” means and how to apply it. There are stand-alone cours­es on copy­right, writ­ing for Wikipedia, the col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment of open sci­ence, and the process behind mak­ing open video.

These free cours­es start March 18 (sign up by click­ing the “start course” but­ton by Sun­day, March 17):

These free cours­es are open for you to take at any time:

The approach at P2PU encour­ages peo­ple to work togeth­er, assess one another’s work, and pro­vide con­struc­tive feed­back. It’s a great place to learn how to design your own course, because the design process is bro­ken down step-by-step, and course con­tent is vet­ted by users and P2PU staff. The tuto­r­i­al shows you how the process works.

P2PU is also a place to learn more about what is open con­tent and what is not. Par­tic­i­pants in the ongo­ing course Open Detec­tive learn to iden­ti­fy open source media and then demon­strate mas­tery by mak­ing some­thing of their own using only open con­tent. What if you’re real­ly, real­ly proud of the resource you cre­ate in Open Detec­tive? Take it to the next lev­el and get a Cre­ative Com­mons license to make your work avail­able with­out giv­ing up full copy­right. You guessed it, there’s a course for that too.

Open Edu­ca­tion Week is in full swing (through Mon­day the 18th). There’s a full sched­ule of webi­na­rs to check out, includ­ing dis­cus­sions about the impli­ca­tions of open access for polit­i­cal struc­tures like the World Bank, and the impact of open, glob­al teach­ing in Syr­ia.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Total Noob to Learn­ing Online? P2PU’s Peer-to-Peer Cours­es Hold Your Hand

700 Free Online Cours­es

A Meta List of MOOCs

What Entered the Pub­lic Domain in 2013? Zip, Nada, Zilch!

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her web­site at .

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Michael Sandel’s Famous Harvard Course on Justice Launches as a MOOC on Tuesday

in Harvard, Law, MOOCs, Philosophy | March 10th, 2013

Back in 2009, Har­vard polit­i­cal philoso­pher Michael Sandel made his course, Jus­tice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, avail­able on the web for free (YouTube — iTunes — Web). Sud­den­ly life­long learn­ers around the world had access to a pop­u­lar course enjoyed by more than 14,000 Har­vard stu­dents over 30 years. Start­ing this Tues­day, Sandel plans to offer Jus­tice as a free course through edX, the provider of MOOCs (or Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es) cre­at­ed by Har­vard and MIT. And here’s one thing you can guar­an­tee: In a sin­gle offer­ing, Sandel will bring his course to more stu­dents world­wide than he did through his decades teach­ing at Har­vard. You can enroll and reserve your free seat here. Stu­dents who receive a pass­ing grade in the course can earn a cer­tifi­cate of mas­tery, which will bear the name Har­vardX.

Jus­tice has been added to our every grow­ing list of MOOCs from Great Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wal­ter Lewin, the Orig­i­nal Star of Open Edu­ca­tion, Returns with a Brand New Physics MOOC

Get Ready for MIT’s “Intro­duc­tion to Biol­o­gy: The Secret of Life” on edX

Har­vard and MIT Cre­ate EDX to Offer Free Online Cours­es World­wide

Learn to Code with Harvard’s Intro to Com­put­er Sci­ence Course And Oth­er Free Tech Class­es

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Kingsley Browne, Wayne State Law Prof, Embarrasses Himself Spectacularly on The Daily Show

in Comedy, Law | January 30th, 2013

Jon Stew­art and com­pa­ny can make pret­ty much any­one look like an imbe­cile. Some nights they have to put a lot of elbow grease into it. Some nights less. And, some nights, they can just leave the elbow grease on the work­room shelf. Like Mon­day night, when Kings­ley Browne, law pro­fes­sor at Wayne State, gave an inter­view to The Dai­ly Show and opined on whether women should take part in front­line com­bat. While some con­ser­v­a­tives have opposed widen­ing wom­en’s role in com­bat by point­ing to “anatom­i­cal facts,” Kings­ley pulled some pop psy­cho-biol­o­gy out of his dusty store­house of patri­cian knowl­edge. “Girls become women by get­ting old­er; boys become men by accom­plish­ing some­thing, by prov­ing some­thing.” Saman­tha Bee could have just stayed home and col­lect­ed a pay­check that night. 1950s prat­tle just sounds increas­ing­ly fool­ish and fun­ny in 2013 (even if its effects are still per­ni­cious). But, even so, Bee did add the Andy Grif­fith fade-to-black & white, and that was a pret­ty nice touch.

Note: If Mr. Browne feels like his views weren’t ade­quate­ly expressed on The Dai­ly Show, we would wel­come him to elab­o­rate on his views in the com­ments sec­tion below.

Also note, if you’re look­ing for more musty mus­ings from the liv­ing muse­um, you can catch Mr. Browne on CNN.

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What Entered the Public Domain in 2013? Zip, Nada, Zilch!

in Film, Law, Literature | January 22nd, 2013

2013whatcouldhavebeencollage2Last year, key works by James Joyce and Vir­ginia Woolf final­ly entered the pub­lic domain, at least in Europe. (Find them in our col­lec­tions of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.) This year, we got pret­ty much bup­kis, espe­cial­ly if we’re talk­ing about the Unit­ed States. Over at the web­site run by The Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, they write:

What is enter­ing the pub­lic domain in the Unit­ed States? Noth­ing. Once again, we will have noth­ing to cel­e­brate this Jan­u­ary 1st. Not a sin­gle pub­lished work is enter­ing the pub­lic domain this year. Or next year. In fact, in the Unit­ed States, no pub­li­ca­tion will enter the pub­lic domain until 2019. Even more shock­ing­ly, the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that Con­gress can take back works from the pub­lic domain. Could Shake­speare, Pla­to, or Mozart be pulled back into copy­right? The Supreme Court gave no rea­son to think that they could not be.

The Cen­ter then goes on to enu­mer­ate the works that would have entered the com­mons had we lived under the copy­right laws that pre­vailed until 1978. Under those laws, “thou­sands of works from 1956 would be enter­ing the pub­lic domain. They range from the films The Best Things in Life Are Free, Around the World in 80 Days, For­bid­den Plan­et, and The Man Who Knew Too Much, to the Phillip K. Dick’s The Minor­i­ty Report and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Jour­ney into Night, to sem­i­nal arti­cles on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.” Have a look at some of the oth­ers, sev­er­al of which appear in the mosa­ic above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lawrence Lessig’s Last Speech on Free Cul­ture. Watch it Online.

Lawrence Lessig Speaks Once Again About Copy­right and Cre­ativ­i­ty

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