I'm curious to know what the consensus is on using jokes and stories as the basis for a production.
I'm not talking about say something identifiable like from an existing show, but the run of the mill stuff that you'll find copied across hundreds of websites. I'm talking about stuff like this:
http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/jokes/
http://www.inflection-point.com/jokes.php
http://www.aerojokes.com/category/Restaurant_jokes.html
Obviously someone made them up, and therefore someone owns a copyright on them, but people seem to blatently ignore it for this genre.
Does it fall into public domain? How the heck would you go about securing copyrights on that kind of stuff?
I'm not talking about say something identifiable like from an existing show, but the run of the mill stuff that you'll find copied across hundreds of websites. I'm talking about stuff like this:
http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/jokes/
http://www.inflection-point.com/jokes.php
http://www.aerojokes.com/category/Restaurant_jokes.html
Obviously someone made them up, and therefore someone owns a copyright on them, but people seem to blatently ignore it for this genre.
Does it fall into public domain? How the heck would you go about securing copyrights on that kind of stuff?
