Orphans in Space: Forgotten Films from the Final Frontier
special edition for Roger That! 2021
The orphan film movement, like preservation consciousness generally, has derived energy from public debates about copyright in the twenty-first century. However, concerns about the complexities and expansiveness of copyright are hardly new. Media archaeologist Rick Prelinger keenly pointed us to this pioneering but farsighted essay that, sixty years ago, connected IP and PD issues to life throughout the Milky Way.
— Walter Forsberg
“The Shape of Copyright to Come,” Donald F. Reines, 1952.
in Library of Congress Information Bulletin 2, no. 33 (Aug. 11, 1952), reprinted 1970 “for a new generation of readers.”
Reprinted as “Interplanetary Copyright,” ALA Bulletin* 47 (Jan. 1953).
Reprinted as “The Shape of Copyright to Come,” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Apr. 1953).
Reprinted again as “Interplanetary Copyright,” in Coming Attractions, ed. Martin Greenberg (Gnome Press, 1957).
Reprinted again as “The Shape of Copyright to Come,” Appendix to the Library of Congress Information Bulletin (Jan. 29, 1970).
*Reines told the ALA Bulletin he “spent three years in the Air Force and several more traveling as a hobo.”
Despite the modest bio, his space-age short essay touched upon an absurd truth and had near cult following in his professional circles. It got picked up by a syndicated newspaper column (with illustrations about “Space Libraries”) and was republished four times. Shortly before writing this piece he was promoted from clerk-typist to legal examiner in the Library’s Copyright Office. One thinks of LOC copyright clerk Howard Walls who was promoted to curator of the paper print collection of motion pictures — and coincidentally was relieved of that duty soon after Reines’ promotion. Reines continued as a copyright specialist in the Reference Division for three decades. He helped mount the 1970 Library exhibit “A Century of Copyright,” which featured paper prints of Edison films, most prominently the 45-frames of the oldest surviving copyrighted motion picture, Fred Ott’s Sneeze, aka Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (1894). But it was this interplanetary satire that brought him visibility.
“The Shape of Copyright to Come”
by Donald F. Reines
Recently the Examining Division of the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress of the United States has observed the large number of publications of all sorts dealing, either factually or fictionally, with the conquest of space, and has come to believe that the concept which H. G. Wells called “the leap in the air” is entering the consciousness of modern man. This new facet of the mind, plus the rapid growth of modern technology, have led the Examining Division to the inescapable conclusion that human beings, most probably Americans, will land on the Moon before 1960, and on Mars and Venus before 1975. In its usual forward-looking manner, the Examining Division has considered the implications of these acts insofar as they relate to the Copyright Office and Copyright Law.
The very first question to be considered is the applicability of the Copyright Law to the Moon. Most astronomers believe the moon is uninhabited, so it will be claimed in much the way Antarctica is now, by the various nations sending expeditions there. It will most likely be used only as a way station for trips farther out in space, but assuming some poet stationed there prints and distributes a book throughout the American colony, the question arises as to whether it can be registered, and in what class. The majority feels that it should be accepted under the conditions which apply to the territories and possessions of the United States, but the minority holds that only an ad interim registration is possible, since the Moon is most certainly outside the United States. Several have expressed merely their hopes of retiring before the first landing is made.
Mars and Venus present much more difficult questions, for on these planets we may encounter strange forms of intelligent life, speaking and writing in many different languages. If they are friendly and produce objects similar to the present classes of registrable articles, will we establish copyright relations with them and register these items? If we do, the recruitment of native personnel of these planets to handle the applications in the Copyright Office becomes a necessity, at least until the languages are well known on Earth. While it is highly desirable to bring all of this new material into the collections of the Library of Congress, some present members of the staff have gone on record to the effect that they will not work with anything green in color, scaly in texture, or over fifteen feet tall. As segregation has never been sanctioned here, it is felt that this problem should be brought to the attention of the Employee Relations Officer.
Two Heads: Two Authors?
Moreover, it is possible some Martians or Venusians may have several heads. In this case, would we register the work of one of these creatures as that of a single author, or would the name of each head be set down as co-author? It is important that this matter be straightened out, for more reasons than one.
Farther out in space we encounter problems of a different nature. It is apparent that the 28-year-term of copyright will cause great hardship to those authors domiciled at the other end of the Galaxy, for in many cases it takes more than 28 years to reach Earth from those areas. A book published on Aldebaran and dispatched immediately to the Copyright Office would reach here in its 36th year, too late to register. The rule deduced from this is that the term of copyright must be increased in proportion to the distance we move from the Copyright Office. If this is not done there may be retaliatory measures and the breaking off of copyright relations, resulting in the works of American authors being unregistrable on Sirius, Canis Major, 23 Cygni, and other far-flung places. It will not sit well with the American publishing industry to know that its best sellers are in the public domain throughout the Milky Way.
We may have to leave these matters to the deliberations of the first Intergalactic Copyright Convention, but we can pass on to the reorganization of the Office necessitated by the tremendous amount of new material these planets and stars will furnish. Since the present system of examining is considered inadequate for such a workload, it has been suggested that we install a giant thinking machine, possibly occupying the entire Annex, into whose circuits we build the Copyright Law and all decisions made in the courts and in the Office. (It is estimated that 20,000,000,000,000,000,000 vacuum tubes should suffice.) Applications will be submitted on punched cards which will be fed into the machine and either accepted or rejected immediately. Doubtful cases which now require five or six weeks of deliberation can be cleared in one-millionth of a second, thus eliminating our backlog and our Friday afternoon reports concerning them. This alone will save 27,375,549 man-hours per year.
Since persons having a knowledge of cybernetics, nuclear physics, general semantics, non-Euclidean geometry, and electronics are not usually available in the labor market, it is expected that we will use the present staff. Mistakes will be made at first, but this is not unusual in any large-scale changeover.
One suggestion for handling the mass of statistics produced by these operations is that we hire “calculating wizards,” those strange persons who can perform tremendous mathematical calculations in their heads. It is felt that the fact these wizards are usually idiots outside their ability to calculate should not be grounds for barring them from employment, since the Examining Division has never discriminated this way in the past.
We feel that, in keeping with the glorious traditions of the Copyright Office, we should make every effort to solve most of these problems now, so that the pilot of the first rocket to the moon can make his flight with a mind free of anxiety, and with the knowledge that the Service Division, and the Reference Division, are all solidly behind him. And we do mean behind.
The editors of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction added this post-script in 1953..
Upon its fifth publication the editor of the Library of Congress Information Bulletin added this headnote. 
If the 2012 Orphans in Space booklet’s reprint of “The Shape of Copyright to Come” was the sixth version to be published, then this webpage must be the seventh? Nay, eighth. In between, the Library again to it again via its blog Copyright Lore.
Wendi A. Maloney, “Extraterrestrial Copyright: It’s Complicated,” Copyright Lore (May/June, 2016): 16-17.
Maloney begins:
When Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded a remake of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” aboard the International Space Station in 2013 and posted the music video on YouTube, bloggers and journalists raised the seemingly novel question, How does copyright work in space? As it turns out, Hadfield had obtained permission from Bowie to record and distribute the 1969 song, and production and distribution were entirely terrestrial.
Still, the question of copyright protection for works created beyond Earth was not new to the Copyright Office. Donald Reines, a prescient staffer from the old Reference Division, explored it in a 1952 satire, “The Shape of Copyright to Come.” His essay was first published in the Library of Congress Information Bulletin and reprinted elsewhere under the title “Interplanetary Copyright.” Here are some excerpts.
After reprinting the piece, Maloney concludes with:
Regarding Chris Hadfield’s music video of “Space Oddity,” it was taken down from YouTube a year after its initial posting in 2013 based on a one-year licensing agreement with David Bowie and his publisher, the copyright owner of the song. Subsequently, Bowie—who called Hadfield’s cover “possibly the most poignant version of the song ever created”—helped to renegotiate an agreement with his publisher that allows the video to remain on YouTube until November 2016. To view it, go to http://tinyurl.com/jse9jt7.
Bowie died in January 10, 2016. The video posting by Rare Earth [Col. Chris Hadfield] is dated May 12, 2013. Despite the agreement to end its run in 2016, the recording of the wonderful space-made performance remains up as of February 19, 2021.
With 50,000,000 views thus far, it would seem terrestrial copyright remains flexible.
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p.s. A 2018 self-analysis of the hit music video by its videographer-singer-guitarist for Ars Technica magazine.