gedaliyahWhen will Mickey Mouse enter the public domain?
S410Even with the character in Public Domain, I doubt Disney would be particularly happy with anyone using it.
They can send cease and desist letter left and right, claiming that "the use of the mouse is fine, but the elements X, Y and Z were introduced in a later work of ours that's still protected", even if it's a plain lie.
Trying to take Disney to court is suicide.
The have enough money to hire half the lawyers in the world and make them come up with a lawsuit even if there's no basis for one. They can stretch the lawsuit process to last years, and yet the fees would be but a fraction of a fraction of a percent in their yearly spending. Almost any defendant, meanwhile, would be financially ruined by it, even if they end up winning.
SCBI find it insane that anyone should be allowed to use Mickey Mouse. Similarly, the 30s version of Superman is in public domain, soon, and that is similarly insane to me.
These are still Active properties closely tied with a company’s marketing and image. We badly need to update our IP laws.
PottedPlantThe public must gain it’s share of the revenue for allowing a private company to use public domain IP exclusively.
Hold a yearly auction to see who is granted rights to the property which is now the public’s.
The public must gain it’s share of the revenue for allowing a private company to use public domain IP exclusively.
Pretty strongly disagree with the idea of a company’s product just becoming the public’s because a certain amount of time has passed.
the argument is that the people, and the political system the people put in place enabled the company to create and benefit off its creations.
“we live in a society” but unironically.
enabled the company to create and benefit off its creations.
And you want to… Stop that?
I want to limit the amount of benefit they can reap.
Why?
Because people should get benefits rather than corporations?
How are the two at odds here?
Please explain how Disney being the only ones able to use an IP causes their employees to get a higher salary. Executives do not count, as they get paid obscene amounts as it is anyway.
It allows them to get a salary, and their salary negotiations are neither here nor there
Copyright was never meant to be used how it is today. It was specifically made to protect small creators from having big companies come in and rip them off. Companies were never meant to be the beneficiaries. But lot of lobbying plus corporations are people too bullshit changed that.
Copyright is meant to last roughly the lifetime of the artist, but organizations can live forever. And then nothing ever goes in the public domain, a shared culture dissolves in to nothingness.
Copyright is meant to last roughly the lifetime of the artist, but organizations can live forever.
This is why I think it needs to be updated.
And then nothing ever goes in the public domain, a shared culture dissolves in to nothingness.
I don’t see how these two things relate to one another at all. We currently have a shared culture.
Literally how it’s worked forever, how do you think books and films become public domain? Blame the Romans.
“this is the way it’s always been” is never an acceptable defense of anything
I’m confused, are you actually advocating for companies to retain control of their properties forever? Public domain exists for the benefit of all people, to keep knowledge and art open and available, and to allow future generations to build on existing work.
Sure not a huge deal for Mickey mouse because it’s not as important as research work or whatever, BUT considering Disney was literally built on repacking public domain stories, it’s past time they contributed back.
Sure not a huge deal for Mickey mouse because it’s not as important as research work or whatever, BUT considering Disney was literally built on repacking public domain stories (Pinocchio / Snow White / Beauty and Beast directly taken from previous works, Lion King is basically Hamlet with animals), it’s past time they contributed back.
I’m not sure how updating IP laws get in the way of this and no one seems able to article it for me.
And yes, I believe that any trademark characters/IPs should be protected forever. I don’t see how letting me write and publish independent Doctor Who stories benefits anyone but me, while damaging the “real” Doctor Who universe.
Do you have a reason for the alternative view?
For me it’s quite simple. The options are offering timed control over an IP, or have the wild west of no copywrite. We, as a society, decided we will protect an IP for said time to allow profit and encourage creation, before the public can go wild on it. Without copywrite protections, derivative works are available immediately.
Under this perpetual exclusive rights system/scenario you’re proposing Disney straight up does not exist. Whichever company held the rights to the Brothers Grimm estate would have immediately cease and desisted Disney’s Snow White. No Disney, no Mouse, end of story.
The options are offering timed control over an IP,
I don’t understand why this shouldn’t be perpetual if the IP is in use.
Implying there is no difference between derivative works and reimagining. Let me use another example- 100 years from now a creator has a great idea to release a story expanding Harry Potter to introduce a new school, idk.
Under your proposed system, this creator now needs to get a license, or build an entire off-brand wizarding world. You seem believe taking “inspiration” from public works is ok, while using or expanding the preexisting works is not. Meanwhile in reality all works are derivative of SOMETHING that came before it, and rights holders will absolutely C&D my story “Jerry Popper and the Warlock’s Boulder”, even though my story is “totally original” about Jerry’s first year at Noxorth.
If you don’t see the problem here I have to concluded you’re either a trolling contrian, or the type that votes to defund libraries.
Under your proposed system, this creator now needs to get a license, or build an entire off-brand wizarding world?
Yes, absolutely. Same reason I don’t think someone should “create” in Middle-Earth without licensing.
Meanwhile in reality all works are derivative of SOMETHING that came before it, and rights holders will absolutely C&D my new movie “Jerry Popper and the Warlock’s Boulder”, even though my story is “totally original” about Jerry’s first year at Noxorth.
Seems like this would be happening more often if it were the case?
Because your proposal makes no sense mate, however you cut it, I’m sorry. No public domain means no Dracula, no War of the Worlds, no Alice in Wonderland, no Moby Dick, no Sherlock Holmes, the list of work embedded into the fabric of society ceases to exist. Or copywrite is then collectively ignored and unmarketable fan fiction is all that remains, I suppose.
I mean, all of those properties still exist. I’m fine with you having to name your vampire something other than Dracula.
The whole thing just seems like a weird mix of leftist “no one should own anything” philosophy with like, die hard fanfiction lovers.
harkDisney themselves benefited from the public domain since they didn’t invent the stories of Snow White, Cinderella, etc.
They didn’t tell them as-written, either, so this is neither here nor there.
You don’t have to remake steamboat willie frame-by-frame either.
You do know that Disney made money from other people’s works like the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen right? Their works are in public domain
They made money off of their version of those works, yes. They’re quite different from the originals.
This is what I mean about our laws needing updating - time alone is not enough any more. We need to define levels of differentiation that are commercially acceptable.
MisterFrogWhy are you such a corpo boot licker? What exactly do we gain as a species by allowing companies to hoard IP of creators of which are long since dead?
Nek minnit you’ll be telling me I can’t put on a play from Shakespeare or recite Beowulf without paying some corporation a fee?
Seriously?
No actually I think plays should be free to use for amateurs, and only require licensing for paid performances, since we’re talking reforms.
Also why are you being an asshole for no reason?
HeavybellWe agree on updating IP laws, but I think they should be curtailed rather than extended. You should not have the monopoly on an idea your entire life. If you can’t milk a fortune from it in 50 years it wasn’t that good an idea, so everyone else should be free to build on and improve it after that point.
And even if you absolutely kill it and your brand is still going strong decades later, that 50 years will cover anything new your did in that time. Plus it’s not like people wouldn’t know yours is the original even after the copyright expire; something entering public domain doesn’t make it legal to claim you invented it if you didn’t.
If you make something, it should be yours to disseminate as you wish. It’s silly to suggest otherwise. You literally created it.
No-one creates something from whole cloth. All ideas are based on things that came before them. Locking those ideas up indefinitely will stifle creativity and stagnate culture.
Locking those ideas up indefinitely will stifle creativity and stagnate culture.
How? I don’t see any evidence of this. Can you point some out?
Copyright isn’t just paying for an idea, its giving a complete monopoly over a concept. We came up with the idea of copyright to give creators a much easier way to profit off their creation (not having to compete after its created) to make sure innovation is very rewarded. That said, its still a government enforced monopoly, with all the issues that come with that, and with how much its been extended, its far past the point of encouraging innovation and instead just works to cement large companies in place, resting on their laurals rather than making anything new. Even when a copyright ends, the current copyright holder wouldn’t lose the idea, they just no longer have a monopoly on it. Disney can and will keep making Micky Mouse content, and the mouse will probably keep being accociated with them for centuries to come unless someone makes something that dwarfs the impact of Disney’s work with the character, in which case its best that it was released anyway.
I don’t disagree with this necessarily (obviously, I think Mickey Mouse should belong to Disney forever) but this is why I recommend reform rather than throwing it out
Well, why should the government protect their monopoly? The original creator is dead, so he doesn’t benifit from it. The cartoon is 95 years old, and I doubt Walt Disney factored in the profit his company would make 60+ after he died, when deciding to make the original animation. The only reason to let Disney maintain their monopoly on it is to allow a massive coorperation to get more money without doing any new work.
Except they do create new works using that same IP, quote regularly.
I think you’re misunderstanding how copyright works. Losing the copyright doesn’t mean they won’t be able to make new works, nor does it mean those new works won’t have copyright. Copyright is only lost on the original work, so while others can use Steamboat Willie, and that very specific version of Micky Mouse, Disney still owns modern updates to him. Either way, the end of that monopoly opens more avenues for newer authors to build on it, while again, doing nothing but reducing Disney’s passive income for work their founder did a century ago. Its a more physical example, but along the same line of logic, if I cure cancer, it might make sense to give me time to get a head start on profiting from it (so I am rewarded for my work) but it would be ridiculous to say no one is else is allowed to use my cure for cancer or build on it for the next century or longer. Theres absolutely no reason not to allow the ideas to spread once the author has had plenty of time to make a profit.
emptyotherI find it insane that tvshows regularly show people watching 70+ year old tvshows. Nobody does that in real life. Doesn’t feel authentic.
I find it insane that we’ve reused characters in stories for thousands of years, but just a century ago it suddenly became illegal until almost every character was old enough to be forgotten and culturally irrelevant.
Fan fiction of relatively new IPs should be sellable, imho, without having to beg a corporation for permission. Its stuff we’ve grown up on. Disney and others are literally holding our culture hostage and dictates terms.
Fan fiction being sellable would require significant changes to copyright. It seems like you’re agreeing with me?
Idk what you mean by Disney “holding our culture hostage” - that seems weirdly hyperbolic.
That we’ve retold and improved stories for the most of human existence, suddenly we don’t. Thats what I mean with holding culture hostage.
I agree there should be some protections for artists, but not a hundred years. It should be close enough that the media is still relevant to the generation that it was presented to. Yeah, it would take drastic changes, but we got ourselves into this, we should be able to turn it back.
That we’ve retold and improved stories for the most of human existence, suddenly we don’t.
In what way is this not happening?
If your idea of retelling and improving upon a story is to carefully create a similar-ish general plotline in a different setting that doesn’t overlap enough to be sued by the previous author, for “retelling and improving”… You miss out.
How crazy it is that creators have to go out of their way to not name something that looks and act like a lightsaber, a lightsaber. For a century! Everyone knows what a lightsaber is. It is part of our culture now. But we cant re-use them as is in any creative work (except for parodies) without begging Disney to pay for the privilege to use it if we are well-known enough. Its silly.
I feel.like you keep bringing up stifling creativity being a reason to not enforce copyright, but then you suggest that there is simply no room for creativity outside of established universes.
This really doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t see how anyone benefits by a glut of terrible Star Wars fanfiction being published, throwing the entire canon into disarray, and fundamentally changing what the material is about.
Terrible Star Wars fan fiction is what we get anyway, just look at Disney’s trilogy. Its already changed. Its creator(s) doesn’t even have a say anymore. If anyone could make Star Wars, we could vote for the one taking it in the best direction with our wallets.
Theres of course a bit room outside of established universes, but why should we, when its the in-universe story that has occupied our minds for decades? Why re-invent everything for every story now when we once didn’t have to? What gives modern people this permanent ownership of an idea that past people didn’t? Why aren’t we allowed to use Hobbits, but we use halflings which everyones know is just hobbits in all but name. Why can’t we use Beholders and Illithids when its common knowledge what they are? What if Santa Claus was a copyrighted character belonging to Coca Cola? Or still belonged to the Dickens family so Coke never hired an artist to create the Santa Claus as we know today?
Also this obsession with “canon”, its stories not actual events. Its fun to have a shared understanding of past fictional events, but obsessing too much over it isn’t healthy for the fiction. But thats a different discussion.
samus12345“Larry… Swharz…”
We badly need to update our IP laws.
Yes, by abolishing IP as a concept entirely.
I don’t feel that this would have the positive impact you seem to think it would - and I cannot even picture how you think this would be a positive.
I mean, IP isn’t all bad. I can’t start selling p*ss in a bottle and label it with Coca-Cola branding. I’d get sued into oblivion. In this particular case, that would be a good thing. It also means that if you find a rat in your coke, you can sue CocaCola. If there were no IP, everyone could make it and it would be almost impossible to know where it came from.
There would also be no widely distributed film, TV, music, books, etc. Do you really want to live in a world where WattPad is the engine of literature?
If you sell cheap knock-off cola and slap a Coca-Cola label on, that isn’t copyright infringement, that’s a trademark violation.
I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about how it’s ridiculous that a corporation earns money every time someone plays a song, because they bought the “rights” to that song, whose author may or may not even still be alive.
Getting rid of copy-right entirely would remove the predatory publishing industry and make art non-commercial again. Small artists will still be able to live from their art, by performing on stage. I fail to see any negative, unless you’re Disney.
I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about how it’s ridiculous that a corporation earns money every time someone plays a song, because they bought the “rights” to that song, whose author may or may not even still be alive.
Getting rid of copy-right entirely would remove the predatory publishing industry and make art non-commercial again. Small artists will still be able to live from their art, by performing on stage. I fail to see any negative, unless you’re Disney.
I’d say that while copyright was intended to incentivise creativity and allow authors to share without suffering from rip-offs (at least it seems like it was), it evolved into something completely abominable. But that’s not the only one thing in the current state of world that did.
Games? Name five great FOSS games.
Games and other media that are labor intensive to make and trivial to copy will not exist without some form of copyright.
Live music and theater will still exist, as well as physical works like paintings and sculptures. But say goodbye to professional books, films, games, comics, and scripted television (I guess we’d go back to sports and live variety shows). No more professional journalists, nature photography, audiobooks, podcasts…
Trademark is a form of intellectual property but never mind that. Who do you think is paying for all those indie games and films?
Sure, we can talk about some major reforms, bit you seem to be fine throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Linux, Firefox, LibreOffice, etc. are all labor intensive to make and trivial to copy.
People buy games on Steam they could easily pirate cause it’s more convenient.
And you could just turn AAA games into a subscription model or charge for accessing the server per hour.
Novels can be financed through donations to pay for the author’s time, or by a government grant.
Journalism lives from being the first to publish something, by the time it’s copied it’s already worthless, even in today’s model.
Science journals and text books should be financed by the state and made available for free.
My takeaway message here is: Removing copyright won’t remove the demand for media. If supply dries up because current distribution models aren’t profitable, the demand will drive other methods of monetization.
You should find it telling that you couldn’t name even one game.
Software that functions to meet a practical need is a tool, not media. People will fund ongoing work to develop and maintain tools that they use. People very rarely fund incomplete artworks.
We don’t have to speculate what models may exist, because they already do. Movies like Veronica Mars and the Babbadook (and Atlas Shrugged III) do get made through crowdfunding, but they still depend on marketing and distribution from companies that rely on a degree of exclusivity. So I guess there’s… Big Buck Bunny?
For games, there’s itch.io, patreon, etc. for gripping titles like Yandere Simulator and Liberal Crime Squad. But charging to access a server for a non-exclusive game? Better to just start my own server. Then I can charge for the game myself.
I already mentioned WattPad.
Copyright is still the best way for small creators to make a living. I personally would not want to live in a world where government grants would decide who gets paid for their art and who has to set up a donation system and hope for the best. Art would be worse, not better. Companies would still need artists to help sell their products, and there would be a fantastic supply of starving artists at the ready.
Commercials and billboards would become pretty banging, so I guess there’s that.
Name five great FOSS games
battle for wesnoth, teeworlds, 0 A.D., warzone 2100, and soldat.
The point of patents and copyrights is to promote and reward creative artists and inventors, not create a permanent revenue stream for corporations. Walt Disney died in 1966 and he, his investors, his heirs, and even their heirs have all been handsomely rewarded.
Now let’s get Steamboat Mickey in Smash Bros.
Steamboat Mickey could be in Smash Bros if Nintendo wanted to license it, but IIRC Smash Bros is specifically only properties owned by Nintendo on purpose. Smash Bros is effectively free advertising for other Nintendo games, in addition to a fighter.
I don’t see why Disney, rather than Walt himself, shouldnt own the copyright on Mickey Mouse.
Because the whole point of copyrights is to promote creativity. No one at Disney today had anything to do with creating Mickey Mouse. Why should they have the exclusive right to create derivative works? The people who are there seem perfectly capable of coming up with new characters. And the copyright expiring will push them to do so.
And besides, it’s not really about Mickey Mouse. It’s also about art, music, and literature. Beethoven’s heirs shouldn’t be getting a check every time an orchestra plays the 5th Symphony.
Why should they have the exclusive right to create derivative works?
Because Mickey Mouse is a core brand to the company. It’s literally referred to as the “House of Mouse”