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Buck Rogers and the Copyright Trolls

http://boingboing.net/2015/10/16/buck-rogers-and-the-copyright.html

Remember the Sherlock Holmes case where the Conan Doyle Estate was shaking everyone down for sub-litigation payoffs and asserting claims over Holmes (despite serious copyright scholars all saying they had no right to do so) until Les Klinger stuck to his guns?

Now it’s happening again, with some minor variations, only this time the weapon of choice is Buck Rogers. 

The character of Anthony “Buck" Rogers first appears in Philip Nowlan’s 1928 novel ARMAGEDDON 2419 A.D. (itself a combination of two novellas that appeared in the AMAZING STORIES magazine) and serves as an origin story for the character. Rogers, after a mine cave-in, falls into a state of suspended animation and wakes up in the 25th century amidst a futuristic war.

Rogers is never referred to as “Buck" in the novel, the nickname coming in 1929 when Chicago newspaperman John F. Dille hired Nowlan to create a comic strip called “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D."

The ARMAGEDDON novel is out of copyright, as under US copyright law, it was entitled to protection until 1956, at which point the copyright needed to be renewed by either the author or owner. It never was, and entered in to the public domain in the U.S. at that time. It currently can be read for free on Project Gutenberg.

Under most non-U.S. copyright laws based on the Berne Convention, a work is covered for a period of “life plus 50." Nowlan died in 1940.

There is little doubt that the character of Buck Rogers originated from the original ARMAGEDDON novel, yet that hasn’t stopped the Dille Family Trust, an entity representing the estate of the John Dille, from asserting copyright claims over him.

The Trust is represented by Louise Geer, who, along with her husband Dan Herman owns a small law practice in New Castle, Pennsylvania (Herman also runs a boutique comic book company called HERMES PRESS). They managed to continue licensing the Buck Rogers character by controlling trademarks and because many of the familiar elements of the character were introduced in the comic strip.

Enter Don Murphy, producer of NATURAL BORN KILLERS, REAL STEEL and all of the TRANSFORMERS films (also the guy who’s optioned LITTLE BROTHER for Paramount, incidentally). He is the Les Klinger of Buck Rogers.

Murphy, with his company Angryfilms, was trying to make a Buck Rogers movie, but was unable to make a deal with the Trust. He then decided to focus his attention on the public domain ARMAGEDDON novel, feeling that the Buck Rogers “brand" didn’t mean that much to today’s filmgoers and wasn’t necessary for the story. He even retained Flint Dille, a gamer, screenwriter and most interestingly, the grandson of John Dille, to co-write the screenplay.

Soon after the announcement of the ARMAGEDDON 2419 film, Geer and Herman began to barrage Murphy with threatening letters, claiming they owned the Nowlan novel, either to shut the movie down and/or extract a rights payment. They even threatened Dille, who is one of the beneficiaries of the trust itself!

Murphy responded by filing suit in court, asking for a judgment that the Nowlan novel is in the public domain. Furthermore, he asked (as Klinger did with Holmes) for a declaration stating that since the character of Buck Rogers has his origins in the public domain novel, the character itself is therefore in the public domain and all trademarks for it should be voided.

Geer and Herman, like all good copyright trolls, have attempted to get the suit tossed out of California on venue issues and moved to New Castle. They are being represented by David Aronoff, who regularly takes on these types of cases and boasts on his website about his attempt to assert a claim for a Zorro copyright, despite that work having entered the public domain.

The copyright troll business-model is to make claims to stuff you don't own and then demand sums that, while appreciable, are below the threshold at which litigation is economically rational, so creators just pay you rent on something you don't own, filling your war-chest with money you can use to attack other creators.

Hermes Press, the comics publisher run by Buck Rogers' jailers, also buys up a lot of young creators' work for small money on terms that are very favorable to the business. Anyone contemplating selling their work to a press associated with the kind of outrageous legal shenanigans Hermes's owners get up to should tread very carefully indeed. After all, if this is their idea of a fair deal, how will things go when you have a dispute with them?

Our beloved characters and stories are being used as magic money-spinners by copyright trolls, who act as toll-collectors and gate-keepers to the public domain, ripping off creators who want to tell stories and audiences who’d enjoy them.

For now, we have two ways of felling trolls: the Happy Birthday way, which is to make a movie about a legal battle with the copyright troll, and use the film’s budget to fund the litigation (sadly, this was a one-off); and stubborn people who won’t be pushed around going to court and refusing to back down.

Luckily for Buck Rogers, there’s a stubborn person who’s willing to fight on all our behalf to smite Buck’s copyright jailers.

Why Pianos Can't Be Perfectly Tuned

Technically speaking, pianos tuned to coventional 12-tone equal temperament aren’t actually in perfect tune. A new video from MinutePhysics explains the math behind this musical oddity, and why in the case of pianos, close enough is good enough.

To Scale: The Solar System

Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet have created a model of our Solar System and they explain that using representations of the planets above a microscopic level requires your model to be rather huge. "To create a scale model with an Earth only as big as [a] marble you need seven miles [11 kilometers] of empty space," explains Overstreet in the video. So, to do just that, the team ventured out to Black Rock Desert in Nevada. They marked out the orbits of the eight major planets around the Sun, and then created a time-lapse by driving lights around the orbits.

Ira Glass on the Creative Process

Crowdsourcing Project Predicts Progression of ALS

Using data from old clinical trials, two groups of researchers have found a better way to predict how amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) progresses in different patients. The winning algorithms—designed by non-ALS experts—outperformed the judgments of a group of ALS clinicians given the same data. The advances could make it easier to test whether new drugs can slow the fatal neurodegenerative disease. For the competition, participants were given just a slice of this data set, collected over 3 months, and asked to design an algorithm to predict how patients would fare in the subsequent 9 months, according to a standard functional scale that measures their ability to move and care for themselves. When predictions from the two winning algorithms were combined, they outperformed estimates solicited from a dozen ALS clinicians who pored over the same data, the authors report. They estimate that using these algorithms to predict outcomes could allow a drug sponsor to reduce the size of the trial by at least 20% and save as much as $6 million in a large phase III trial.

TEDx: 10 Places Where Anyone Can Learn To Code by Jessica Gross

http://blog.ted.com/2013/01/29/10-places-where-anyone-can-learn-to-code/

1. At Codecademy, you can take lessons on writing simple commands in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, Python and Ruby. (See this New York Times piece from last March, on Codecademy and other code-teaching sites, for a sense of the landscape.)
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2. One of many programs geared toward females who want to code, Girl Develop It is an international nonprofit that provides mentorship and instruction. “We are committed to making sure women of all ages, races, education levels, income, and upbringing can build confidence in their skill set to develop web and mobile applications,” their website reads. “By teaching women around the world from diverse backgrounds to learn software development, we can help women improve their careers and confidence in their everyday lives.”
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3. Stanford University’s Udacity is one of many sites that make college courses—includingIntroduction to Computer Science—available online for free. (See our post on free online courses for more ideas.)
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4. If college courses seem a little slow, consider Code Racer, a “multi-player live coding game.” Newbies can learn to build a website using HTML and CSS, while the more experienced can test their adeptness at coding.
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5. The Computer Clubhouse, which Resnick co-founded, works to “help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies,” as he describes. According to Clubhouse estimates, more than 25,000 kids work with mentors through the program every year.
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6. Through CoderDojo’s volunteer-led sessions, young people can learn to code, go on tours of tech companies and hear guest speakers. (Know how to code? You can set up your own CoderDojo!)
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7. Code School offers online courses in a wide range of programming languages, design and web tools.
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8. Similarly, Treehouse (the parent site of Code Racer) provides online video courses and exercises to help you learn technology skills.
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9. Girls Who Code, geared specifically toward 13- to 17-year-old girls, pairs instruction and mentorship to “educate, inspire and equip” students to pursue their engineering and tech dreams. “Today, just 3.6% of Fortune 500 companies are led by women, and less than 10% of venture capital-backed companies have female founders. Yet females use the internet 17% more than their male counterparts,” the website notes.
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10. Through workshops for young girls of color, Black Girls Code aims to help address the “dearth of African-American women in science, technology, engineering and math professions,” founder Kimberly Bryant writes, and build “a new generation of coders, coders who will become builders of technological innovation and of their own futures.”