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January 2018
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Hopefully For The Last Time: The US Has Zero New Works Enter The Public Domain On January 1st

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For many years now, during the first week of January, we write a post about Public Domain Day. That's the day -- January 1st -- where works that have reached the statutory limit reach the public domain. The Public Domain Review has an excellent collection of the Class of 2018 -- showing what works entered the public domain this week in the "life plus 50" copyright countries (Canada, New Zealand, and many countries in Asia and Africa) and the "life plus 70" copyright countries (most of the EU, Brazil, Israel, Russia, Turkey, Nigeria). For life plus 70 countries, the works of Aleister Crowley and Winston Churchill are now in the public domain. For the life plus 50 countries, Rene Magritte's paintings, the song compositions of Woody Guthrie and Otis Redding, and the writings of Jean Toomer are now in the public domain -- among many others.Except, as we note each and every year, there is no such "graduating class" in the US. Because, thanks to Disney's heavy lobbying, copyright keeps getting extended and extended and extended. If you're interested, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University has also put together its depressing annual "What Could Have Entered the Public Domain..." list for the US, if the law had remained as it was prior to 1978, when the maximum length of copyright was 56 years. Under that setup, Josepher Heller's Catch-22, Salinger's Franny & Zooey and Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land all would have entered the public domain. Grok that. Movies including Breakfast at Tiffany's, West Side Story, and The Guns of Navarone all would have entered the public domain as well. And, of course, a ton of music:

What 1961 music could you have used without fear of a lawsuit? If you wanted to find guitar tabs or sheet music and freely use some of the influential music from 1961, January 1 2018 would have been a rocking day for you under earlier copyright laws. Patsy Cline's classic Crazy (Willie Nelson) would be available. So would Stand By Me (Ben E. King, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller), Runaway (Del Shannon, Max Crook), and Let's Twist Again (Kal Mann, Dave Appell). You could publicly perform or set short films to Surfin' (Brian Wilson, Mike Love) or Crying (Roy Orbison, Joe Melson), all without permission or fee. Today these musical works remain copyrighted until 2057
There's much more as well. As the Center notes in a companion post, this should be seen as highly problematic. Locking up our culture like this does no one any good -- except for a very, very, very, very small number of copyright holders on the few works that are still economically viable. Even worse, because things are locked up for so long, so much of our culture becomes orphan works -- which tend to disappear entirely, as no one can even figure out who holds the copyright in question, should they even want to make use of it. And, without the public domain, we lose access to potentially wonderful aspects of culture:
What happens when works enter the public domain? Sometimes, wonderful things. The 1947 filmIt's A Wonderful Life entered the public domain in 1975 because its copyright was not properly renewed after the first 28-year term. The film had been a flop on release, but thanks to its public domain status, it became a holiday classic. Why? Because TV networks were free to show it over and over again during the holidays, making the film immensely popular. But then copyright law reentered the picture. In 1993, the film's original copyright holder, capitalizing on a recent Supreme Court case, reasserted copyright based on its ownership of the film's musical score and the short story on which the film was based (the film itself is still in the public domain). Ironically, a film that only became a success because of its public domain status was pulled back into copyright.
The one bit of good news, hopefully on the horizon is that this should be the last year that nothing enters the public domain on Public Domain Day. While Disney and other big copyright holders have been able to continually push out the eventual entrance of new works into the public domain in the US, if nothing changes, next January we will finally have works published in 1923 enter the public domain in the US. There had been rumblings about another attempt at copyright term extension in the US a few years back, but it's been much quieter in the past few years, as I think even the lobbying powerhouses in the music and movie industries have realized this isn't a fight they could win, or one really worth having. That doesn't mean someone won't try to extend the term again, but I hope most people now recognize what a bad idea it would be.Of course, it's still ridiculous that it's only now that those works from the 1920s are entering the public domain -- while other countries are at least getting works from the 1940s or 1960s. Rather than worrying about copyright term extension, it seems we should really be exploring ways to bring copyright term back down to a much more reasonable time frame.

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Police Training Firm Dumps Interrogation Technique Linked To Multiple False Confessions

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There may be a significant shift in police interrogation methods over the next several years. The Marshall Project reports one of the nation's largest police consulting firms is abandoning a technique that has been used by a majority of law enforcement agencies over the last six decades. It's called the Reid Technique, and it's been linked to a large number of false confessions. But after fifty-plus years of religious reliance on the technique, the consulting firm says it's no longer going to be training officers to deploy it.

Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, a consulting group that says it has worked with a majority of U.S. police departments, said Monday it will stop training detectives in the method it has taught since 1984."Confrontation is not an effective way of getting truthful information," said Shane Sturman, the company's president and CEO. “This was a big move for us, but it's a decision that's been coming for quite some time. More and more of our law enforcement clients have asked us to remove it from their training based on all the academic research showing other interrogation styles to be much less risky."
It should have been viewed as risky from the beginning. The technique, first deployed in 1955 by a police polygraph expert named John Reid, uses nine steps to push arrestees towards confessions. It relies in part on officers making judgment calls on body language, when not encouraging them to directly lie to arrested subjects. The thing about the Reid Technique is that the first deployment in 1955, by Reid himself, secured a false confession. This resulted in a state supreme court decision tossing out the suspect's conviction on the basis the false confession had been coerced.Despite this inauspicious start, the Reid Technique has remained popular pretty much everywhere, even as confessions secured with the technique are frequently proven to be false. Given its creator was deeply fond of polygraph testing, it should come as no surprise the confessions elicited by the technique would be dubious at best.The company behind the technique claims it's still as useful as ever, if not even better given recent, unspecified "updates."
Joseph P. Buckley, the president of John E. Reid & Associates, which licenses the Reid method, said Wednesday that Wicklander-Zulawski’s announcement was “very misleading and disingenuous.” He said the technique has consistently held up in court and that it is not “confrontational” except when evidence already suggests the suspect’s guilt.
The technique relies on confrontation. It relies on officers lying about the amount of evidence they've gathered, making false claims about admissions from conspirators, or simply refusing to believe anything an arrestee says unless it agrees with their predetermined conclusions. It's a terrible system but it's been in use for years and no one's in a hurry to let it go -- especially when convictions and plea deals go on the immediate bottom line. Exonerations -- if and when they happen -- are years or decades down the road. They're someone else's problem on someone else's criminal justice ledger.The sad thing is the Reid Technique was better than the interrogation technique it replaced: violent beatings. But all it did was shift the violence from the front of the house to back of the house, replacing beatings with a large number of easily-avoidable false confessions. After decades of ruined lives, a major player in law enforcement training has decided it's no longer interested in making police officers worse. That's a huge step forward.

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