Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

pluralistic.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 260 posts

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#121

Post by skybrian »

neves wrote: post #101

The phrase below is worth the read: > giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money you can give that kid that will buy them lunch – you're just enriching the bullies

Misleading phrases like this are why I dislike Doctorow.

Just before that he tries to sell us on the idea that there are no alternatives when actually there are. For example, you don’t have to publish a book through the Big Five. There are many large and small independent publishers, and some authors have had good luck with self-publishing.

I do think copyright law needs reform, but don’t trust Doctorow to explain it properly.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#122

Post by ghaff »

noirscape wrote: post #103
danaris wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator. It's important to recognize why this is the case - a lot of the hubbub around posthumous copyright comes from the fact that a large amount of classic literature often went unrecognized during an author's lifetime (a classic example is Moby Dick, which sold and reviewed poorly - Melville only made 1260$ from the book in total and his wif…

In the modern world, some sort of reasonable fixed duration seems to make a lot of sense. An elderly author cranking out a work partly for the benefit of a soon-to-be widow/widower isn't insane. You can argue about exact timeframes and details but some sort of duration after creation (maybe not less than life of creator) probably works pretty well.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#123

Post by tempfile »

philipallstar wrote: post #60
latexr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fairly, respectfully, and without exploitation? Most business conducted in the world does not require someone to reject their lawful rights. For consumers in the EU, for example, the law even offers explicit protections by stating specifically that contract terms which are unfair have no legal binding. https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...

[flagged]

It is really not any harder to define than "freely". Presumably by "what I signed up for freely" you mean "what I signed up for without any coercion, threat of violence, etc". The people using "exploitation" here just mean that those conditions also include the implied threat of not having money to live. This is a real material condition which affects what people are prepared to agree to (even if they might be able to find a better offer by shopping around).

It is not hard to understand, and I suspect you are not trying to understand it.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#124

Post by vessenes »

k__ wrote: post #104
vessenes wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

Sure, but what about 10 or 15 years?

very reasonable ideas! Of course creators could license for this term right now, but generally they do not have the bargaining power when they need it.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#125

Post by randallsquared »

> Termination is a powerful copyright policy, and unlike most copyright, it solely benefits creative workers and not our bosses.

That's an interesting framing. I know why Doctorow wants to import the boss/worker concept here, but it just doesn't apply. Disney wasn't Wolf's boss in any sense that is usually understood, and it just obscures the picture with a bunch of class-based chaff.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#126

Post by badlibrarian »

skybrian wrote: post #121
neves wrote: post #101

The phrase below is worth the read: > giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money you can give that kid that will buy them lunch – you're just enriching the bullies

Misleading phrases like this are why I dislike Doctorow. Just before that he tries to sell us on the idea that there are no alternatives when actually there are. For example, you don’t have to publish a book through the Big Five. There are many large and small independent publishers, and some authors have had good luck with self-publishing. I do think copyright law needs reform, but don’t trust Doctorow to explain it…

His book "Why None Of My Books Are Available On Audible: And why Amazon owes me $3,218.55" captures the soul, heart, nuance (and grammar) that he repeatedly brings to these issues.

He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection. Resulting in twice compressed 128k MP3s and innumerable blog posts.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#127

Post by jajuuka »

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…

Yeah the Roger Rabbit is a miracle where multiple major studios came together and allowed their IP to be in the same work. Disney, Warner Bros, Fleischer Studios, Harvey Comics, King Features Syndicate, Felix the Cat Productions, Turner Entertainment, and Universal Pictures/Walter Lantz Productions all agreed to share their characters. One of Steven Spielbergs great accomplishments was negotiating this. With how protective these studios are about their IP anymore I doubt we'd see anything close to the Roger Rabbit movie sadly.

Not to mention some of the actors have passed like Paul Reuben who really sold the cartoon aspect of Roger Rabbit.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#128

Post by [deleted] »

pavlov wrote: post #113
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…

Disney definitely owns the character designs, so Roger and Jessica Rabbit will have to look different if a new movie is made using the IP owned by the book's author.

[deleted]

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#129

Post by cholantesh »

skybrian wrote: post #121
neves wrote: post #101

The phrase below is worth the read: > giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money you can give that kid that will buy them lunch – you're just enriching the bullies

Misleading phrases like this are why I dislike Doctorow. Just before that he tries to sell us on the idea that there are no alternatives when actually there are. For example, you don’t have to publish a book through the Big Five. There are many large and small independent publishers, and some authors have had good luck with self-publishing. I do think copyright law needs reform, but don’t trust Doctorow to explain it…

Why is it misleading? The fact that alternatives exist doesn't mean that they're any good .

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#130

Post by Ntrails »

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?!

Yeah, I cannot quite believe the term on that thing. Somewhere between 10 and 20 feels far more reasonable since businesses do need time to work plan around and develop property.

I'm not sure how I feel about auto-reversion as a concept. I can see real problems with it conceptually (creating a deadzone around expiry etc)

Post reply on HN