#for the gold diggers

[writingjourney]

You have to respect that they put as many little freaks as possible into Act 2 of BG3. Like, they really catered to the crazy bitches and added multiple flavors to choose from.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/17/dastar-dly-deeds/#roast-in-piss-sonny-bono

In 1976, Congress set fire to the country's libraries; in 1998, they did it again. Today, in 2024, the flames have died down, and out of the ashes a new public domain is growing. Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate!

For most of US history, copyright was something you had to ask for. To copyright a work, you'd send a copy to the Library of Congress and they'd issue you a copyright. Not only did that let you display a copyright mark on your work – so people would know they weren't allowed to copy it without your permission – but if anyone wanted to figure out who to ask in order to get permission to copy or adapt a work, they could just go look up the paperwork at the LoC.

In 1976, Congress amended the Copyright Act to eliminate the "formality" of copyright registration. Now, all creative works of human authorship were copyrighted "at the moment of fixation" – the instant you drew, typed, wrote, filmed, or recorded them. From a toddler's nursery-school finger-painting to a graffiti mural on a subway car, every creative act suddenly became an article of property.

But whose property? That was on you to figure out, before you could copy, publish, perform, or preserve the work, because without registration, permissions had to start with a scavenger hunt for the person who could grant it. Congress simultaneously enacted a massive expansion of property rights, while abolishing the title registry that spelled out who owned what. As though this wasn't enough, Congress reached back in time and plopped an extra 20 years' onto the copyrights of existing works, even ones whose authors were unknown and unlocatable.

For the next 20 years, creative workers, archivists, educators and fans struggled in the face of this regime of unknowable property rights. After decades of well-documented problems, Congress acted again: they made it worse.

In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, AKA the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act, AKA the Copyright Term Extension Act. The 1998 Act tacked another 20 years onto copyright terms, but not just for works that were still in copyright. At the insistence of Disney, Congress actually yanked works out of the public domain – works that had been anthologized, adapted and re-issued – and put them back into copyright for two more decades. Copyright stretched to the century-plus "life plus 70 years" term. Nothing entered the public domain for the next 20 years.

So many of my comrades in the fight for the public domain were certain that this would happen again in 2018. In 2010, e-book inventor and Project Gutenberg founder Michael S Hart and I got into a friendly email argument because he was positive that in 2018, Congress would set fire to the public domain again. When I insisted that there was no way this could happen given the public bitterness over the 1998 Act, he told me I was being naive, but said he hoped that I was right.

Michael didn't live to see it, but in 2019, the public domain opened again. It was an incredible day:

https://archive.org/details/ClosingKeynoteForGrandReopeningOfThePublicDomainCoryDoctorowAtInternetArchive

No one has done a better job of chronicling the fortunes of our fragile, beautiful, bounteous public domain than Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Every year from 2010-2019, Boyle and Jenkins chronicled the works that weren't entering the public domain because of the 1998 Act, making sure we knew what had been stolen from our cultural commons. In so many cases, these works disappeared before their copyrights expired, for example, the majority of silent films are lost forever.

Then, in 2019, Jenkins and Boyle got to start cataloging the works that were entering the public domain, most of them from 1923 (copyright is complicated, so not everything that entered the public domain in 2019 was from that year):

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2019/

Every year since, they've celebrated a new bumper crop. Last year, we got Mickey Mouse!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/15/mouse-liberation-front/#free-mickey

In addition to numerous other works – by Woolf, Hemingway, Doyle, Christie, Proust, Hesse, Milne, DuBois, Frost, Chaplin, Escher, and more:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytimes

Now, 2024 was a fantastic year for the public domain, but – as you'll see in the 2025 edition of the Public Domain Day post – 2025 is even better:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/

So what's entering the public domain this year? Well, for one thing, there's more of the stuff from last year, which makes sense: if Hemingway's first books entered the PD last year, then this year, we'll the books he wrote next (and this will continue every year until we catch up with Hemingway's tragic death).

There are some big hits from our returning champions, like Woolf's To the Lighthouse and A Farewell to Arms from Hemingway. Jenkins and Boyle call particular attention to one book: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, its title taken from a public domain work by Shakespeare. As they write, Faulkner spoke eloquently about the nature of posterity and culture:

[Humanity] is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance…The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

The main attraction on last year's Public Domain Day was the entry of Steamboat Willie – the first Mickey Mouse cartoon – into the public domain. This year, we're getting a dozen new Mickey cartoons, including the first Mickey talkie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse_(film_series)#1929

Those 12 shorts represent a kind of creative explosion for the Disney Studios. Those early Mickey cartoons were, each and every one, a hybrid of new copyrighted works and the public domain. The backbone of each Mickey short was a beloved, public domain song, with Mickey's motion synched to the beat (animators came to call this "mickey mousing"). In 1929, there was a huge crop of public domain music that anyone could use this way:

Blue Danube, Pop Goes the Weasel, Yankee Doodle, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, Ach Du Lieber Augustin, Listen to the Mocking Bird, A-Hunting We Will Go, Dixie, The Girl I Left Behind Me, a tune known as the snake charmer song, Coming Thru the Rye, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Auld Lang Syne, Aloha ‘Oe, Turkey in the Straw, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, Habanera and Toreador Song from Carmen, Lizst’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and Goodnight, Ladies.

These were recent compositions, songs that were written and popularized in the lifetimes of the parents and grandparents who took their kids to the movies to see Mickey shorts like "The Barn Dance," "The Opry House" and "The Jazz Fool." The ability to plunder this music at will was key to the success of Mickey Mouse and Disney. Think of all the Mickeys and Disneys we've lost by locking up the public domain for the past half-century!

This year, we're getting some outstanding new old music for our public domain. The complexities of copyright terms mean that compositions from 1929 are entering the public domain, but we're only getting recordings from 1924. 1924's outstanding recordings include:

George Gershwin performing Rhapsody in Blue, Jelly Roll Morton playing Shreveport Stomp, and an early recording from contralto and civil rights icon Marian Anderson, who is famous for her 1939 performance to an integrated audience of over 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson’s 1924 recording is of the spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.

While the compositions include Singin' in the Rain, Ain't Misbehavin', An American in Paris, Bolero, (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue, Tiptoe Through the Tulips, Happy Days Are Here Again, What Is This Thing Called, Love?, Am I Blue? and many, many more.

On the art front, we're getting Salvador Dali's earliest surrealist masterpieces, like Illumined Pleasures, The Accommodations of Desire, and The Great Masturbator. Dali's contemporaries are not so lucky: after a century, the early history of the works of Magritte are so muddy that it's impossible to say whether they are in or out of copyright.

But there's plenty of art with clearer provenance that we can welcome into the public domain this year, most notably, Popeye and Tintin. As the first Popeye and Tintin comics go PD, so too do those characters.

The idea that a fictional character can have a copyright separate from the stories they appear in is relatively new, and it's weird and very stupid. Courts have found that the Batmobile is a copyrightable character (Batman won't enter the public domain until 2035).

Copyright for characters is such a muddy, gross, weird idea. The clearest example of how stupid this gets comes from Sherlock Holmes, whose canon spans many years. The Doyle estate – a rent-seeking copyright troll – claimed that Holmes wouldn't enter the public domain until every Holmes story was in the public domain (that's this year, incidentally!).

This didn't fly, so their next gambit was to claim copyright over those aspects of Holmes's character that were developed later in the stories. For example, they claimed that Holmes didn't show compassion until the later stories, and, on that basis, sued the creators of the Enola Holmes TV show for depicting a gender-swapped Sherlock who wasn't a total dick:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/22/lawsuit-copyright-warmer-sherlock-holmes-dismissed-enola-holmes

As the Enola lawyers pointed out in their briefs, this was tantamount to a copyright over emotions: "Copyright law does not allow the ownership of generic concepts like warmth, kindness, empathy, or respect, even as expressed by a public domain character – which, of course, belongs to the public, not plaintiff."

When Mickey entered the public domain last year, Jenkins did an excellent deep dive into which aspects of Mickey's character and design emerged when:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/

Jenkins uses this year's entry of Tintin and Popeye into the public domain to further explore the subject of proprietary characters.

Even though copyright extends to characters, it only covers the "copyrightable" parts of those characters. As the Enola lawyers wrote, the generic character traits (their age, emotional vibe, etc) are not protected. Neither is anything "trivial" or "minuscule" – for example, if a cartoonist makes a minor alteration to the way a character's pupils or eyes are drawn, that's a minor detail, not a copyrightable element.

The biggest impediment to using public domain characters isn't copyright, it's trademark. Trademark is very different from copyright: foundationally, trademark is the right to protect your customers from being deceived by your competitors. Coke can use trademark to stop Pepsi from selling its sugary drinks in Coke cans – not because it owns the word "Coke" or the Coke logo, but because it has been deputized to protect Coke drinkers from being tricked into buying not-Coke, thinking that they're getting the true Black Waters of American Imperialism.

Companies claim trademarks over cartoon characters all the time, and license those trademarks on food, clothing, toys, and more (remember Popeye candy cigarettes?).

Indeed, Hearst Holdings claims a trademark over Popeye in many traditional categories, like cartoons, amusement parks, ads and clothes. They're also in the midst of applying for a Popeye NFT trademark (lol).

Does that mean you can't use Popeye in any of those ways? Nope! All you need to do is prominently mention that your use of Popeye is unofficial, not associated with Hearst, and dispel any chance of confusion. A unanimous Supreme Court decision (in Dastar) affirm your right to do so. You can also use Popeye in the title of your unauthorized Popeye comic, thanks to a case called Rogers v Grimaldi.

This all applies to Tintin, too – a big deal, given that Tintin is managed by a notorious copyright bully who delights in cruelly terrorizing fan artists. Tintin is joined in the public domain by Buck Rogers, another old-timey character whose owners are scumbag rent-seekers.

Congress buried the public domain alive in 1976, and dumped a load of gravel over its grave in 1998, but miraculously, we've managed to exhume the PD, and it has been revived and is showing signs of rude health.

2024 saw the blockbuster film adaptation of Wicked, based on the public domain Oz books. It also saw the publication of James, a celebrated retelling of Twain's Huck Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved sidekick.

This is completely normal. It's how art was made since time immemorial. The 40 year experiment in life without a public domain is at an end, and not a minute too soon.

You can piece together a complete-as-possible list of 2025's public domain (including the Marx Brothers' Cocoanuts, Disney's Skeleton Dance, and Del Ruth's Gold Diggers of Broadway) here:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/

[summertimenoir]

Joan Blondell in Gold Diggers Of 1933 (1933)

[femininedating]

Dating a man with money or resources doesn't make you bad.

Women are supposed to choose the winners.

It's literally nature.

Even the female birds in the animal kingdom know better...

[misandresther]

"Women are easily impressed by money"

Have you seen how you and your fellow males act around richer men?!

[heich0e]

22 year old atsumu loudly talking about how he doesn't want someone who's "only after his money" to 22 year old osamu who knows his brother has racked a tab so high at his restaurant that if he came to collect on it he would bankrupt him

[nymphaearie]

[succulentsiren]

(access to 20+ more Dark Feminine Affirmations in Archetype booklets)

[whyamihereat4am]

one of the many fun things about lawlightmane is that L and misa are both famous and (presumably) rich and light is just some guy. he's living every bisexual's dream of having both an emo twink sugar daddy and a hot goth sugar mommy and he doesn't even appreciate it smh

[sexiibunni]

Just take me shopping and tell me that I’m pretty🎀🫧

[spoiledbratblog]

Money on my mind

[beyondthefold]

BEN BARNES as BENJAMIN GREENE Gold Digger S01E01 "Her Boy"

[republikkkanorcs]

It’s no secret she’s a paid actress and not a real wife. Melanoma signed a very wordy contract just like everyone In Drumpf’s life including his children, in-laws, and other relatives. To keep getting paid by the family trust he controls they must abide by the contract they signed. Melanoma has duties and obligations for which she is paid for. If she fails to show up for an event she is docked pay.

There was no courtship, romance, or love between these two. He found a down and out Eastern European nude model and soft-core porn actress and lifted her out of poverty by paying her to be his pretend wife. Everyone in the Northeast, and the press, has known this since day one.

[femininedating]

How to receive Princess Treatment from men:

Raise your standards. Never settle for the bare minimum or less.

Expect the best. Have high expectations.

Act like a princess. Take being called "boujee", "high maintainence" or "gold digger" as a compliment. Not everyone can have access to you or afford you. You are a luxury.

Look the part. Looks matter. You have to look good. The reality is men will treat you better if you look good

Have a PRIZE mindset. Know that you're the prize.

Be Feminine. Feminine Energy is a valuable asset to have. Heal your wounded feminine energy and embody your divine feminine self. (My How to be more Feminine playlist)

Learn how to RECEIVE. Get comfortable with receiving. Say "Thank You" & express gratitude. (Learn to receive)

[demonic0angel]

Prompt: Tim and Dani have a very good vacation in Norway alone

(I got way too into this lmaooo)

Tim looked down at the girl who tried to mug him. “So this is where you recommend going to eat?”

The girl, Dani, looked up at him and raised a hand. He sighed, shook his head a little, and handed her another crisp bill. She smiled and pocketed the cash. Although she was a money-hungry, greedy little thief, she was so ridiculously cute that Tim couldn’t help but forgive her.

Lord help him, his brothers would absolutely tease him ruthlessly for this.

“Yep,” she answered. “The food’s good and the staff here are nice.”

Tim looked at her again. She was wearing worn clothes, and she didn’t look warm enough as she stood there and stared back him, a hint of defiance in her gaze. Tim then turned back to the restaurant and said, “Alright then. You should come with me and recommend some dishes.”

Dani looked befuddled and she glared at him. “Why would I do that?”

“I’ll pay for whatever you want to eat too.”

She relented with only a little hesitation. Tim smirked in victory and followed her inside. As they sat down, Dani ordered everything. He was pleasantly surprised to see her speak such fluent Norwegian despite being American. He had thought she was someone stranded in Norway with no money and had resorted to stealing to get back to US soil, but perhaps it was something else?

He stopped thinking though, as she finished up their order and turned to him.

They stared at each other. He looked at her cat-like eyes, her icy blue irises, her pink lips, her strangely delicate features tinted with a hint of wildness and sharpness like a tiger, her raven hair.

Stephanie would probably laugh at him right now for being down bad. In fact, he had already crossed the line and was already well on his way to being down atrocious.

They observed each other in silence for a long, long moment until Dani eventually frowned, her eyebrows dipping before she snapped, “Why do you keep staring at me!”

“You’re pretty to look at,” Tim said, leaning on his fist.

She blushed bright red. “W-What?!”

Tim smiled. “You’re cute. Did anybody ever tell you that?”

“Screw you!” She hissed like a disgruntled cat. Then she stiffened and said, “I want another twenty dollars!”

Tim smoothly handed her another bill and she turned crimson, but didn’t take it. Tim folded it and put it on the table for her. Dani glared at him and the bill with alternative glances, looking more and more flustered by the second, not knowing what to do with his advances.

Tim felt like he wanted to buy them both tickets back to the US.

Actually, screw it.

“Should I buy you plane tickets so we could go back to the US together?”

Dani hissed with pink cheeks. “Fuck you.”

Tim smirked. “I wish.”

Dani didn’t say anything else until the food arrived. Seafood plates with soup and bread covered the table and filled the air with a delicious aroma, and Dani gave him another light scowl as Tim leaned on his hand and raised an eyebrow.

She pouted at the table before she then mumbled, “I don’t even know you.”

“Then let’s get to know each other,” Tim said. “I’ll pay for the expenses and by the end of it, you’d decide whether or not you want to go back to the US with me.”

Dani grimaced at him, although her face was still pink. Then she finally nodded slowly.

Score! Hah! Who said he couldn’t get a date?!

Tim smiled at her reassuringly as he picked up his spoon. “It’s a deal.”