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Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

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Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#91

Post by vessenes »

olalonde wrote: post #45

> Remember, Termination is one of the only copyright policies that solely benefits creative workers. To play devil's advocate, this provision probably lowers how much media companies are willing to pay when acquiring copyrights.

It doesn't, in practice. Consider the NPV of year 36 with, say, a 10% discount rate. It's low. Also, having watched directly some fairly famous friends deal with property coming up on the 35 year mark, media companies are adept at tying in other deals, finally getting projects financed, cutting a deal for a different project with some agreements made about the original property.. You can imagine.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#92

Post by mattmaroon »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #81
mattmaroon wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you think perhaps there is a sample bias because old actors who retire and don't have dementia don't get written about?

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#93

Post by jgalt212 »

> Copyright is a very weak tool for protecting creators' interests, because copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power,

This is drivel written by someone who doesn't understand the mechanism of supply and demand. If you don't like the price, don't sell. If you don't like the terms, propose alternative ones. The real risk to creators is artificially suppressed demand through industry consolidation, not nuances to copyright law.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#94

Post by lotsofpulp »

brainwad wrote: post #85
lotsofpulp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.

Why would they have customers in the first place if all they offer is reruns, which everyone else also offers? Streaming only old content will be a very, very low profit margin business.

> 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.

Creating and streaming audio is not a comparable business to creating and streaming video, due to the vastly different sums of money, and hence risk, involved.

But, also, people have to pick only Spotify/Apple/Amazon/Alphabet and a couple others because of excess copyright terms. All the old hits people want are controlled by Universal, Sony, and Warner, and so if your audio streaming business does not contract with those 3, then you’re dead in the water. Which means every audio streaming business, and hence every audio streaming customer, is always paying rent to those 3 businesses that own copyrights.

That means there is less money available for new audio creators. And this holds true for all rent seeking. If it weren’t for excessive copyright, there could be much more variety in audio streaming.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#95

Post by vidarh »

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.

In English this is usually translated as "moral rights"[1]. They are fairly widespread in other civil law jurisdictions than Germany too. Less so in common law jurisdictions.

But they exist to a (very) limited extent even in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#96

Post by philistine »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #69
mayoff wrote: post #33

I don’t know if Cory Doctorow has read the “fantastic 1981 novel”, but I have (decades ago) and as I recall the plot of the book and the plot of the movie are very different from each other. The author of the book didn’t write the screenplay and I doubt he had much (if anything) to do the character designs in the movie. So even if he has the rights to his novel back, it’s not at all clear to me that he could just mak…

>clearly Disney isn’t interested often big media companies aren't interested in exploiting specific properties if there is ongoing litigation regarding them.

In this case it’s not that there is litigation. It’s that Steven Spielberg must approve any and all content featuring Roger Rabbit. The delinquent partner who sits on their hands and does nothing is Spielberg.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#97

Post by gorgoiler »

Hot damn I’m a sucker for a good analogy…

”Giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. You're just enriching the bullies.”

The big “5,4,3,2,1” is also a powerful piece of rhetoric. Who is this Doctorow person? He has my attention! :)

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#98

Post by Lerc »

oniony wrote: post #82
7bit wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a Lawyer, but this seems like work-for-hire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire

I assume Germany has something like this (possibly a EU requirement). It would cover more than just ghostwritten books.

Most software is written in a similar manner. Microsoft didn't write windows, lots of ghostwriting programmers did.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#99

Post by 999900000999 »

joecool1029 wrote: post #16

Sorta related since Disney held a share in it previously but Dick Tracy exclusive rights are still held by Warren Beatty who produced and starred in the role back in 1990. He had to fight off a challenge from Tribune Media in court decades ago but stipulation was he had to produce new Dick Tracy stuff every few years. It’s lead to a series of increasingly surreal late night specials on TCM where he appears in charact…

There's also a legendary Star wars merch rights agreement that only expired because the rights holder forgot to send Lucas a check while the franchise was inactive.

Billions of dollars gone because of an oversight.

Arguably they didn't know Lucas was going to bring it back.

https://equinoxbusinesslaw.com/blog/how-hasbro-almost-blew-a...

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#100

Post by brainwad »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #94
brainwad wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

> then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down. Why would they have customers in the first place if all they offer is reruns, which everyone else also offers? Streaming only old content will be a very, very low profit margin business. > Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so put…

> Why would they have customers in the first place if all they offer is reruns

You can ask the same question for cable TV, but it's not dead. Netflix also started as purely "reruns" and was still quite popular.

> Creating and streaming audio is not a comparable business to creating and streaming video, due to the vastly different sums of money, and hence risk, involved.

If anything that extra risk should make studios more shy of investing in new content vs just serving up old hits. It's noticeable that film leans way more heavily on franchises and remakes already, which agrees with this hypothesis?

> That means there is less money available for new audio creators. And this holds true for all rent seeking. If it weren’t for excessive copyright, there could be much more variety in audio streaming.

You assume this, but I really don't think it's true! Most people don't seek out new music; their tastes are set in their youths and then they happily listen to the same music for the rest of their lives. The choice is to make them pay to listen, generating at least some stream of royalties, or let them listen for free, in which case they will be happy to.

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