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Guess what, Will?

What's that, Mango?

So I have a riddle for you.

What do H.G. Wells War of the Worlds, the Carrie Grant movie, His Girl Friday, and the Mona Lisa all

have in common. Man, starting this one out with a tough one. I'm going to go, I've got to guess,

I'm going to go with things that inspired the musical artist Prince. Maybe, but the answer I was looking for was that they're all works that are in the public domain.

All right.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense, which means I can set up a Mona Lisa stand in my front yard and sell

prints without getting sued now, right?

Yeah, finally a second career option for you, the one you've been waiting for. But creative works in the public domain aren't protected by intellectual property law. So that means you can take it, you can use it, you can remix it, you can sell it in your front yard to all your neighbors, and you don't have to worry about copyright. So if you want to make a movie adaptation of War of the

Worlds starring the Mona Lisa, it might be difficult creatively, but you can do it now without

getting into any sort of legal trouble. Well, when you look at it, the War of the World's

version that had an Ice Cube, but that got something like, I think it was like 4% on Rotten

Tomatoes,

so it's probably due for a remake. Yeah, and I know these are kind of silly examples, but

public domain is really important for art and culture, because without it, we wouldn't have

masterpieces like West Side Story, which was based on Romeo and Juliet, or The Little

Mermaid, which was based on Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale.

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