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Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

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Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#81

Post by HeinzStuckeIt »

mattmaroon wrote: post #75
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, TIL. I had assumed that Warren Beatty was suffering from dementia due to his great age and his retirement from cinema. I had no idea he was still making media appearances.

You assume he has dementia because he’s old and retired?

Sad as it is, when stars from classic Hollywood stop being visible but are still known to be alive at a highly advanced age, dementia is often the case. Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, and Jack Nicholson are notable cases, and I just assumed Beatty was similar.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#82

Post by oniony »

7bit wrote: post #78
latexr wrote: post #50

> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office. You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law. > when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, o…

That's why it's called copyright. You can perfectly sign it away. In Germany the right is called "Urheberrecht" which literally translates to "author's right". And while you can license your work and sign away the usage, you cannot by definition sign away the fact that you are the author of a work.

So how does ghostwriting work then? Lots of books have unaccredited ghostwriters.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#83

Post by cnnlives8472 »

latexr wrote: post #50

> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office. You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law. > when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, o…

> You have to wait half a lifetime?!

I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us.

With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought of getting a lot of plays is a little scary.

(Note: Statistically, people don’t live forever.)

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#84

Post by [deleted] »

cnnlives8472 wrote: post #83
latexr wrote: post #50

> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office. You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law. > when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, o…

> You have to wait half a lifetime?! I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us. With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought…

[deleted]

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#85

Post by brainwad »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #80
brainwad wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shortening copyright terms would reduce the power of any given media company; but I think it might disadvantage creators of new works overall. Right now each company has a smaller back-catalogue than they would under a shorter term regime, and so the relative value to them of new content is higher. Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differen…

I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content. Currently, people give a ton of money to Comcast/Disney for stuff made decades ago, which in turn gives Comcast/Disney more power, since people are far likelier to stay within those silos. If friends/seinfeld/whatever could be…

> I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content.

Because this syllogism doesn't hold. There's not a fixed pot of money that must be spent on content. If now every streaming service has access to a bigger pool of old hits, then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.

> If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.

Each service will just become sameier and compete more on their UX than their exclusive content. You can see this in music, for instance, where the big streamers already have more or less identical catalogues. Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#86

Post by fragmede »

cnnlives8472 wrote: post #83
latexr wrote: post #50

> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office. You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law. > when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, o…

> You have to wait half a lifetime?! I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us. With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought…

Estimates suggest around 117–120 billion people have ever been born, while only about 8 billion are alive today, meaning roughly 93% of all humans are dead. So statistically, if you're alive today, there's a 7% chance that you'll live forever.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#87

Post by danaris »

brainwad wrote: post #72
lotsofpulp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can Congress make it any easier to access an audience? The Internet made it so there is zero friction between a media consumer and a media creator. Having to compete with a billion other content creators (including hits from the past) is inherently hard. The most valuable service the big media sellers provide these days is curation. Reducing copyright length would be the best thing to reduce the big companies’ po…

Shortening copyright terms would reduce the power of any given media company; but I think it might disadvantage creators of new works overall. Right now each company has a smaller back-catalogue than they would under a shorter term regime, and so the relative value to them of new content is higher. Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differen…

The vast majority of money for any given copyrighted work comes within the first few years of its existence. (This is extra true for things like video games.)

Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator.

You seem to be thinking of copyright purely in terms of vast media conglomerates, but it affects literally every work created by every human in the country. That includes these HN discussion posts!

Additionally, I find it hard to see how your second paragraph holds. If the amount of exclusive content a given entity holds affects their odds of being bought by a larger conglomerate, I would think it would be in the opposite direction: having more exclusive content would make them more likely to be a target for acquisition, so that the larger company could then hold all of that exclusively.

If everything older than, say, 35 years were suddenly in the public domain, available to be distributed by any of the distribution companies, and Hypothetical Media Corp had half the back catalogue that they used to, then surely that would make big conglomerates less interested in buying up Hypothetical Media Corp?

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#89

Post by brainwad »

danaris wrote: post #87
brainwad wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shortening copyright terms would reduce the power of any given media company; but I think it might disadvantage creators of new works overall. Right now each company has a smaller back-catalogue than they would under a shorter term regime, and so the relative value to them of new content is higher. Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differen…

The vast majority of money for any given copyrighted work comes within the first few years of its existence. (This is extra true for things like video games.) Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator . You seem to be thinking of copyright purely in terms of vast media conglomerates, but it affects literally every work created by every human in the country. That includes these HN…

I am generally anti-copyright; but it's not really a pro-creator policy to curtail copyright; it's pro-consumer.

> If everything older than, say, 35 years were suddenly in the public domain, available to be distributed by any of the distribution companies, and Hypothetical Media Corp had half the back catalogue that they used to, then surely that would make big conglomerates less interested in buying up Hypothetical Media Corp?

Doesn't your first point contradict this? If almost all the value of copyrighted works comes in the first few years, then no, curtailing copyright terms doesn't discourage buyouts, because the buyout is going to be mostly justified on the recent works held by the purchased company, not the residual value of its old works.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#90

Post by vessenes »

k__ wrote: post #42

35 years seem quite excessive. Taking half your life to get your stuff back?

it's a double edged sword -- media companies are generally franchise/lifetime hits oriented businesses - they pay (and generally lose, per investment, btw) for a shot at a hit.

On the one hand, imagine they could only negotiate rights to monetize that hit for, say, one year, and then this termination right kicked in. What do you think would be the top offer they could make an author?

The fraction of creatives that are great creatives and also great marketers/producers/runners of media companies is small, really small. So, creatives have an incentive to have a system where some amount of time is contractable. And media licensors rely on this hits-based model to fund all their development and betting on things that don't work out. And also to fund their jets and cool Bel-Air homes.

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