Happy Public Domain Day! Every piece of American art made in 1925 is now free from copyright.

Here's a 5GB torrent I made of the Harold Lloyd silent classic The Freshman for you to download and do whatever you like with: http://charlie.film/freshman.torrent

I chose The Freshman because Lloyd’s granddaughter sued the makers of The Waterboy for violation of the film's copyright in 2000, apparently feeling her family wasn’t benefiting *enough* from a film made 75 years earlier (and three decades before she was born).

What’s more, The Freshman itself was sued for copyright violation in 1929, with the writer H. C. Witwer alleging that the film infringed on his short story The Emancipation of Rodney. He won the case, and the judge ordered all prints of The Freshman destroyed.

Luckily the filmmakers held off on destroying all trace of what is now considered one of the most significant films of the silent era, and then managed to overturn the judgement on appeal.

My point being: if you support our insane copyright regime, you are campaigning to live in a world where The Freshman and The Waterboy do not exist, but The Emancipation of Rodney does.

If we let them, our corporate overlords will keep lobbying to extend copyright terms into the hundreds of years and keep pretending their cultural fiefdom is some sort of sensible compromise to which any rational person would assent.

But it's them who keep moving the goalposts!

If the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act hadn't been passed, American art published in 1945 would be entering the public domain today.

If the 1976 Copyright Act hadn't been passed, American art published in 1964 would be entering the public domain today.