According to the Public Domain list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_in_public_domain James Blish's Star Trek novelisations enter Public Domain in 2026, but do they if Star Trek is still copyrighted?
Star Trek Public Domain??
- Thread starter Ogrebear
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Perhaps it means that anything unique to the novelizations is public domain, though I doubt it.
It could be a case, where the author didn't renew the copyright depending when it was published.
Public Domain Overview
copyright.byu.edu
I would think the It's a Wonderful Life precedent would hold here -- while the film itself is public domain, the underlying story is not, and the musical score is copyrighted separately, so the film isn't free to use.
Personally, I think copyright terms are too long. A return to a maximum of 56 years seems appropriate to me. And work for hire should not exist.
Personally, I think copyright terms are too long. A return to a maximum of 56 years seems appropriate to me. And work for hire should not exist.
U.S. law gives published works from 1964–1977 a copyright term of 95 years from the year of publication. This assumes the copyrights were filed correctly in those pre-registration days. You can see the 1967 copyright in the first volume (link).
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The Wikipedia article is referring to countries where the copyright term is life of the author + 50 years (Blish died in 1975). In some contexts the lifespan of the author still determines the copyright term even when the author is not the copyright holder, so there may possibly be countries where the Blish novelizations are theoretically public domain. On a practical level I doubt it matters much.
A lot of Blish's unique spins on Trek were from or inspired by his original works, like the transporter using DIRAC technology. What's the copyright status of his original writings?
All of Blish’s Trek work was work for hire, with copyrights by Bantam, Desilu, Paramount, or some combination.
Blish never had any ownership of his Trek works.
It’s his original work that has fallen out of copyright in some countries.
Blish never had any ownership of his Trek works.
It’s his original work that has fallen out of copyright in some countries.
Star Trek is not going into public domain in our lifetimes.
And even if Blish invented stuff in his Trek tie-ins, he would not have any rights to those. They belong to Star Trek.
As Daddy Todd points out, we're talking work-for-hire projects here. The books belong to the IP holder, not the authors.
If I create a new planet in a Trek novel, I don't retain any rights to that planet. It belongs to CBS, period. And if my original works go into public domain, that planet still belongs to CBS.
Not complaining here. Just stressing what "work-for-hire" means. And this applies to pretty much any franchise, not just Star Trek.
It's just the nature of the beast.
And even if Blish invented stuff in his Trek tie-ins, he would not have any rights to those. They belong to Star Trek.
As Daddy Todd points out, we're talking work-for-hire projects here. The books belong to the IP holder, not the authors.
If I create a new planet in a Trek novel, I don't retain any rights to that planet. It belongs to CBS, period. And if my original works go into public domain, that planet still belongs to CBS.
Not complaining here. Just stressing what "work-for-hire" means. And this applies to pretty much any franchise, not just Star Trek.
It's just the nature of the beast.
Some of the younger crowd here will live to see the 1966 episodes become public domain thirty-six years from now, but I don't believe I will.
I was going to say that hopefully by then, the urge to make horror movies about every work with a lapsed copyright will have dissipated, but after all, "The Man Trap" is something of a horror movie already.
I might add that there are three distinct areas of intellectual property law: patent law, trademark law, and copyright law.
Two of the three (patent law and copyright law) exist to promote creative endeavors. Patents give inventors exclusive rights to a novel idea, i.e., an idea that they can prove they originated. If I were to invent an entirely new tool, unlike any that previously existed, I could claim exclusive ownership of the idea of that tool, and collect royalties from anybody who wants to manufacture it. Copyrights give authors exclusive rights to and expression of an idea. Just because I've spent close to thirty years writing (almost entirely unpublished) fiction about a child-prodigy organist doesn't mean that I can claim exclusive ownership of the idea of fiction about a child-prodigy organist, only of the stories and characters I created, any more than Matt Groening, simply because he observed that "Springfield" is one of the most generic place-names in the United States, has any right to stop me from using Springfield as the name of my protagonist's home town (and I doubt that my Springfield is anything like his Springfield).
Trademark law came into existence with the Industrial Revolution. Consider sausages. Until meat-packing became industrialized, the local butcher made sausages, typically from the meat of local animals, raised by local farmers. Every aspect of the provenance of a given sausage was known. And if the local butcher used meat from diseased animals, or processed it under unsanitary conditions, and people got sick, he didn't stay in business (or out of prison) very long. But once sausages came from factories that could be thousands of miles away, you had no idea where your sausages came from. So industrial butchers started putting their names and logos on the sausages. Signing their work, as it were. If you bought Oscar Meyer sausages, or Hormel, or Farmer John, you knew where they came from, and who would stand behind their wholesomeness. But somebody forging a trademark would pose danger both to the public health, and to the financial health of the rightful owner of the trademark.
Patents are pretty much healthy, these days. Copyrights and trademarks, perhaps less so: copyright terms have been extended to a point where they allow authors to "rest on their laurels,' and retire on the continued royalties from a work they'd published decades ago, without ever actually creating anything new, while trademarks are often protected to the point of extortion, e.g., with railroads demanding exorbitant royalties from model train manufacturers (many of which have historically been cottage industries, run part-time out of their owners' garages), even though the very idea of somebody confusing an HO scale model of a BNSF boxcar with an actual BNSF boxcar is an absurdity.
Two of the three (patent law and copyright law) exist to promote creative endeavors. Patents give inventors exclusive rights to a novel idea, i.e., an idea that they can prove they originated. If I were to invent an entirely new tool, unlike any that previously existed, I could claim exclusive ownership of the idea of that tool, and collect royalties from anybody who wants to manufacture it. Copyrights give authors exclusive rights to and expression of an idea. Just because I've spent close to thirty years writing (almost entirely unpublished) fiction about a child-prodigy organist doesn't mean that I can claim exclusive ownership of the idea of fiction about a child-prodigy organist, only of the stories and characters I created, any more than Matt Groening, simply because he observed that "Springfield" is one of the most generic place-names in the United States, has any right to stop me from using Springfield as the name of my protagonist's home town (and I doubt that my Springfield is anything like his Springfield).
Trademark law came into existence with the Industrial Revolution. Consider sausages. Until meat-packing became industrialized, the local butcher made sausages, typically from the meat of local animals, raised by local farmers. Every aspect of the provenance of a given sausage was known. And if the local butcher used meat from diseased animals, or processed it under unsanitary conditions, and people got sick, he didn't stay in business (or out of prison) very long. But once sausages came from factories that could be thousands of miles away, you had no idea where your sausages came from. So industrial butchers started putting their names and logos on the sausages. Signing their work, as it were. If you bought Oscar Meyer sausages, or Hormel, or Farmer John, you knew where they came from, and who would stand behind their wholesomeness. But somebody forging a trademark would pose danger both to the public health, and to the financial health of the rightful owner of the trademark.
Patents are pretty much healthy, these days. Copyrights and trademarks, perhaps less so: copyright terms have been extended to a point where they allow authors to "rest on their laurels,' and retire on the continued royalties from a work they'd published decades ago, without ever actually creating anything new, while trademarks are often protected to the point of extortion, e.g., with railroads demanding exorbitant royalties from model train manufacturers (many of which have historically been cottage industries, run part-time out of their owners' garages), even though the very idea of somebody confusing an HO scale model of a BNSF boxcar with an actual BNSF boxcar is an absurdity.
Spoken like someone who doesn't actually make a living as a writer/creator of intellectual property. You think authors have it too easy in this marketplace? Give it a try. Show us how easy it is before you denigrate the one thing that makes our careers even remotely feasible.
Actually, I make my living with intellectual property as well: I'm a programmer by trade. And if it weren't for our customers wanting interface code written, which usually involves figuring out ways to make the theoretically impossible not only possible but practical, I'd be out of a job.
And the "resting on laurels" part is quite a bit more true of corporations (which frequently had no hand in actually creating a given piece of IP, having bought it outright, for quite possibly far less than it was actually worth) than of individuals.
Which is not to say that publishers don't get placed in a position of having to make a proverbial silk purse out of a proverbial sow's ear, when the original creator of the sow's ear refuses to acknowledge its flaws; I've seen that, too, and sometimes that turns out to be impossible (and I walked away from that particular job, over three and a half decades ago, when the employer refused to believe my assessment of that particular sow's ear, i.e., that it had more bugs than a bait shop, and was more likely to earn the company a class-action lawsuit and a ruined reputation, than any net revenue).
And the "resting on laurels" part is quite a bit more true of corporations (which frequently had no hand in actually creating a given piece of IP, having bought it outright, for quite possibly far less than it was actually worth) than of individuals.
Which is not to say that publishers don't get placed in a position of having to make a proverbial silk purse out of a proverbial sow's ear, when the original creator of the sow's ear refuses to acknowledge its flaws; I've seen that, too, and sometimes that turns out to be impossible (and I walked away from that particular job, over three and a half decades ago, when the employer refused to believe my assessment of that particular sow's ear, i.e., that it had more bugs than a bait shop, and was more likely to earn the company a class-action lawsuit and a ruined reputation, than any net revenue).
Nice job moving those goalposts.
I believe Jean Lorrah said it best, when she first penned this saying, which she attributed to Surak, "There is no offense where none is taken."
I'll be in my mid-seventies by then. And I'll probably still be posting here, bitching about how insane it is that Amazomni Corp or whoever owns Trek at that point is trying to argue that you can't publish a story about other Vulcans yet because the idea of Vulcans other than Spock wasn't introduced until season two, so it's still under copyright. I'm sure they'll go full Doyle Estate, arguing every comma and capital letter remotely related to Star Trek is intrinsic and invented by the most recent episode or movie they put out.
The Doyle estate did sue the company that produced the Enola Holmes movie, but I don't remember them ever going after novel writers. There are so many Sherlock Holmes novels, with more being released every month, that it would be impossible to keep track of them all.
At this point, the Doyle estate can do nothing; the Canon is all public domain at this point. Which has resulted in an absolute crapton of Sherlock Holmes slop to which Sturgeon's Law absolutely applies for sale on Amazon.
Also, the "Doyle estate" in later years was nothing of the sort. It was a legal entity created by Jon Lellenberg who claimed the rights to the stories through dubious means.
There was the Les Klinger lawsuit, which established the general principle that if one sticks to what's the public domain, they can exploit it even though other material remains under copyright.
Still, it was easier for various productions, like Netflix with Enola Holmes and CBS with Elementary, to just pay the Doyle estate money to go away than have a court fight to establish that they were playing within the bounds of the public domain.
The thing that makes me think they won't go "full Doyle" is that there will have been nearly forty years of exploitation of public domain elements of characters still largely under copyright and the experience of that to draw upon. People are already discussing what's going to happen when Superman begins to hit the public domain eight years from now and if other publishers, like Marvel, will introduce their own Superman based on the public domain stories. Will DC retcon a Golden Age Captain America into their history two years after that? Hell, by the time we're approaching 2060, will planets like Krypton and Oa and Thanagar have been incorporated into the Star Trek universe because they've entered the public domain? I'd be interested to see what @Christopher might do with the public domain elements of Krypton in a Star Trek novel a decade from now. Point is, the copyright landscape and the customs around the public domain will be very different forty years from now.
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