Are questions about copyright law on-topic?

Question

We've had several questions about copyright law, specifically when certain properties and concepts will be outside of copyright.

• When will copyright restrictions expire on Tolkien's works?

• When does the copyright on Isaac Asimov's works expire?

• When will Harry Potter enter the public domain?

And most recently

• When will copyright on Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson book series expire?

These questions seem well-received by the community but I'm struggling to see why they're on-topic when they essentially boil down to "When is a book written in xxxx out of copyright?", which doesn't really having any bearing on Sci-fi or Fantasy.

Should we just continue to allow these questions willy-nilly or should we put a stop to them entirely, perhaps by historically-locking the questions above and declaring future questions of this sort to be off-topic?

Answer 1

No, they are not on-topic

I'm not 100% convinced myself they should be considered off-topic, but it seems to me that a more critical point of view should be available related to this question:

• While these questions are not science questions, they are real-world.
• They are not relevant to how fantasy or science fiction stories are told or interpreted.
• They don't add anything valuable to the understanding or appreciation of science fiction or fantasy as genres or works of literature.
• They are somewhere between difficult and impossible to answer accurately or confidently, and it's possible the actual answer is "never".
• No answers of such questions from this site should be used by any askers in any meaningful way, because this is not an appropriate place or way to obtain information that a person will act on with legal consequences.
• Only one of the askers of the four example questions is an active contributing member of the site.
• Similarly to how questions about creating science fiction or fantasy stories are a better fit at World Building or Writing, these questions are clearly a better fit at Law.
• All four example questions are arguably too broad, and it seems likely that most questions of this nature could be described as too broad (i.e., there is not a clear, verifiable answer available).
• More nebulously, it's hard to see how such questions add value to the site. These questions stand apart from the other questions and are really about law and/or business, not science fiction or fantasy.

Also, per page zero of the Tour.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about science fiction or fantasy.

(This link and quote copied from another meta post by Valorum)

Answer 2

One possibility: host a single, generic "how can I figure out when a given work passes out of copyright?" question which covers the standard cases. Then VTC as duplicate any question about a specific author/work which is already satisfactorily covered by taking that generic question and plugging in easily-available author/publication dates etc.

Some questions will not be covered by a generic answer. For instance, for a book published between [95 years before the present] and 1978, its current US copyright status will depend on whether its copyright was registered and maintained. It seems reasonable to allow that kind of question, where it pertains to a SF/F work and isn't easily searchable, and those cases seem unlikely to come up often enough to be annoying.

Answer 3

No

It might seem a bit ruthless, but it's trivial to search Google for how to determine if a book is in the public domain. Even if the question is about copyright in a country other than the U.S., it's a question that's been asked a thousand times and answered almost as many times on the Internet. For the question to be valid here, IMO, it would need to demonstrate that a satisfactory search had been made to answer the question (downvote rollover: "this question does not show any research effort...").

Without some evidence of an attempt to answer the question themselves, the OP is simply using Stack Exchange as a free research service, which might be the practical truth but really isn't what SE intended.

If that seems too ruthless...

Then I would propose a question with a community wiki answer that lists each book queried on the Stack and the date it entered or will enter the public domain in each country, with the original question not just closed as a duplicate but deleted after directing the OP to the answer on the community wiki.

If the size of that wiki makes you queasy (it does me... worst case, eventually every SciFi/Fantasy book in every country...) it's a bit of evidence that the question should be off-topic.

Answer 4

Yes, they're on-topic because sometimes copyright is very specific to the work or country

For instance, see how complicated the answer is for When will copyright restrictions expire on Tolkien's works?? A legal expert would need to know the ins and outs of the Tolkien Estate and who owns what.

There's no guarantee that there won't be some other work that's similar in this way.

So I feel like these questions can stay.