Talk:Terra Obscura

Copyrights v. Trademarks

The original comics that Terra Obscura is based on came out in the 1940's. The copyright law of the day was the Copyright Act of 1909. It had a 28 year term, renewable once, for a maximum total of 56 years. Apparently, the copyrights were not renewed in the 60's and 70's, and so lapsed into the public domain.

Trademarks do not have terms, really. A common law trademark simply exists so long as someone is using the mark on goods. When Nestor stopped publishing these comic books, their relevant trademarks would have lapsed then, because they would have stopped using the mark. If it had been federally registered, then the registration might have lasted a bit longer (though probably been susceptible to challenges), but trademarks do not have 28 year renewal periods like copyrights used to.

In any event, when the copyright expired, the works hit the public domain. The trademarks were already pretty certainly dead, but in any event this would have killed them too, since the public domain status of the work would make the trademarkable characters, et al, generic. Something along these lines happened with Amos 'n' Andy, and there's a good case about it: Silverman v. CBS, 870 F.2d 40 (2d Cir. 1989).

Now, the characters might be trademarkable yet, in a different context (see e.g. Peter Pan, a public domain character, used as a trademark for peanut butter and for a bus line), but any sort of trademark couldn't be used to bar republishing the old comics or making new comics based on the old. Trademarks can't override copyrights.

I'm not sure you are correct - there are a number of Superman cartoons that no longer have copyright protection - but the Superman character still has the protection of trademark - thus I can legally copy and distribute those cartoons, but I cannot make derrivative works of those cartoons and infringe on the Superman trademark. j-beda 20:11, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

The Air Pirates case had the same sorts of facts as you describe, copyright-wise. The key is which works have fallen out of copyright. Let's imagine that Action Comics #1, the work in which the Superman character first appears, entered the public domain. This would mean that it would be okay to make works that are derivative of it. However, if everything else with Superman in it was still copyrighted, then you could not make use of any elements that were introduced in those works. So, for example, Superman's strength might be up for grabs, but not the later-introduced Fortress of Solitude. This is what we get from Silverman v. CBS (which involved something similar with the Amos 'n' Andy characters).

Likewise, when the original work is still copyrighted, that copyright may be dominant over later works that have entered the public domain. One of the leading cases in this would be Russell v. Price, in which there was a copyrighted play, and a public domain movie that was based on the play. The court there found that the movie could not be publicly performed because it included portions of the still copyrighted play, even though the new material in the movie (and only the new material added by the movie) was in the public domain. Now, I think that Russell was poorly decided given the precise language of the copyright statute of the time (and the language in the new statute we have today, which is functionally the same for our purposes here). But basically this means that a character isn't in the public domain until his original appearance is.

As for the trademark, two cases are key. First, the Shredded Wheat case dealt with a patent and a trademark, but the reasoning still holds up regardless of whether it's a patent or a copyright that is involved. Basically, the patent expired, and it was argued that the Shredded Wheat trademark must expire because now everyone was free to make exactly the same product, and that 'shredded wheat' was the generic name of the product. A name is not trademarkable if it is generic in connection to the good or service being marked. For example, the trademark APPLE for apples (the fruit) is generic. OTOH, the trademark APPLE for computers is not generic. Just as COMPUTER for computers would be generic, and COMPUTER for fruit would not be. In any case, the Supreme Court agreed that while the trademark might have been valid when the patent provided a monopoly over the making of shredded wheat, the trademark died at the same time the patent did.

The other key trademark case is Dastar v. 20th Century Fox. Fox had made a series of documentaries in the 40's about WW2. They didn't preserve the copyright, and so the documentaries hit the public domain in the 70's. Dastar came along later and started making copies of the public domain videos, and selling them. Fox argued that Dastar was basically engaged in unfair competition (n.b. trademark is a kind of unfair competition), mainly revolving around attribution. The Supreme Court felt there was a significant conflict going on because of the copyright issues. They found that copyright considerations would prevail, and found in favor of Dastar. They said: "To hold otherwise would be akin to finding that §43(a) created a species of perpetual patent and copyright, which Congress may not do."

Thus, there is no validity to the idea that a trademark on Superman would prevent people from making derivative works involving Superman, once the copyright on the Superman character has expired. However, we must wait until the appropriate copyright has expired, rather than just any copyright on just any work that happens to have Superman in it. And even then, since it is unlikely that all the relevant copyrights will have expired, the version of Superman that is in the public domain may differ quite a lot from the version that DC still has a copyright to. Of course, by the same token, third-party Superman authors can alter the public domain Superman character as they see fit (provided they don't copy from copyrighted works) and prevent DC from copying from them.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that even if trademark law did apply, it would apply evenly. That is, it would apply just as much to making copies, or distributing copies of the unchanged public domain works as it would to making derivatives. This is because trademark law is interested in how goods are marked so as to indicate their origins: if a DVD has the Superman name or logo on it, and people would associate that with DC, then trademark law wouldn't care whether the work was original or derivative. (Although it might not particularly apply either, as per above) It's only copyright law that is interested in such distinctions.

Nice discussion, maybe next time sign your work? Roygbiv666 02:30, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

A quick comment (and IANAL)--I believe the main reason these characters are public domain is that the original copyholder has been out of business for 50 years, and no one has renewed the rights in that time. This goes a long way explaining why the Nedor characters are being used simultaneously by America's Best Comics and AC Comics.

Oh, and I'm the person that did the complete re-org of this article. It still needs some work, like more details on the actual TI stories (and less on the Tom Strong story that started it all). I've just finished two days work writing articles on most of the Nedor characters used by Alan Moore, so I trimmed off all the descriptions in the character listing and just put in wikilinks.Konczewski 23:01, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

You know, now that I think about it, shouldn't all the backstory info get cut out and pasted in the SMASH (comics) article, leaving behind the relevant Terra Obscura info (like short summaries of the stories)? If nobody objects, I'm going to do that real soon now.Konczewski 23:05, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Good work on the clean up. That looks a lot tighter and makes much more sense. (Emperor 17:24, 16 February 2007 (UTC))

Context?

When I created this entry, I was thinking of the fictional world of Terra OBscura, not the comic series. Now it's like a cross between the two. As two entries is redundant, should we split the entry up into sections, one for publication history, the other for fictional history? Roygbiv666 13:03, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

I think so. The important thing is that it is a comic titled after the fictional world, which should be the focus. That said I think there does need to be a section on the world (major cities, etc.) would help flesh the entry out. (Emperor 14:07, 29 March 2007 (UTC))

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