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Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

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Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#191
> Under Termination, a media company can force you to sign away your rights in perpetuity, but you can still claim those rights back after 35 years. Termination isn't just something to bargain away, it's a new power to bargain with.

It's sentences like these that make it hard for me to take Doctorow seriously.

No media company is "forcing" anyone to do anything. They're paying creatives for their work. Every creative is free to say no. Musicians are free to shop their music to different record labels for the best deal. Authors pitch their books to different publishers to see which one offers the best deal. And there's always self-publishing as well.

We can have a reasonable conversation about copyright without saying silly untrue things like media companies are "forcing" creators to take deals.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You answer your own question. Yes, intellectual property rights should be different than physical property rights.

No, they're not different. If I can't sign away the title to my car, it's literally worthless. Exactly the same is true of my IP rights.

They're inherently different: creative work (especially in a digital, trivially replicated format) is non-rivalrous, and at least partially non-excludable. "You wouldn't download a car." [0]

Property rights are a social technology to balance incentives and peacefully negotiate scarce resources (including time and effort). It's helpful to think about them in reverse: that they encode legitimacy to use force (usually via the State) against anyone who violates the right. That doesn't make the force right or wrong, a priori; it simply describes what happens. Exactly when that force is legitimate is the question at hand.

"Intellectual Property" is a post-hoc neologism. What we actually have are three very specific institutions: copyrights, patents, and trademarks. The last is arguably more like regulation than property: persistent brand identity to prevent fraud and confusion. Copyrights and patents are extremely clear in the Constitution, that their purpose is collective, moreso than an individual right for its own sake: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Hence why they expire: at some point, the incentive has already been provided, and the body politic benefits more by their being open-sourced.

Whatever "rights" framework one subscribes to, it is an extremely thorny question, whether they include the right to alienate those rights, to give them up on purpose. We allow people to alienate their labor, an hour at a time; but not to do so for a lifetime (voluntarily sell one's self into slavery). Many US states now refuse to defend "non-compete" clauses: that you cannot constrain your future self from working for a competitor for X years, even if you wanted to, even for very lucrative terms in the contract.

I'd argue that intellectual/creative works, are more like non-compete clauses: you actually create more bargaining power if you limit the scope, and take away the capacity to give up future bargaining power.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_gZZHu4TBk

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#193

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…

So is Warren being an asshole here? I mean, we haven't seen a Dick Tracy movie since the 90s. I am out of the loop so trying to understand.

> So is Warren being an asshole here? I mean, we haven't seen a Dick Tracy movie since the 90s. I am out of the loop so trying to understand.

Well the rights were held by Disney from 1988 until 2005, and then they were tied up in court (between Beatty and Tribune) until 2011, when Beatty won the rights. The movie you're referring to was released in 1990.

So Beatty has held the rights for only 14 of those 35 years. Although the first special he made was released in 2010, during that legal battle.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#194
Does this takeback include the likeness of Roger and Jessica Rabbit from Disney's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or just the content from the original 1981 novel? From what I can tell, the familiar cartoon movie designs are unique to the Disney movie and affiliated Disney shorts.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#195
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

haha, you probably want to replace "their" with "[media conglomerates']"

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Car leasing is a massive market, and a large percentage of people and companies are very happy to pay to access cars and trucks without owning the title. Same goes for companies happily building on top of leasehold properties whenever it makes financial sense for them. And as for IP, with the time limits, patents and copyrights are inherently defined to expire, but are definitely not worthless.

Valid argument. Car analogies usually break down at some point, and leasing is a definite weakness of that one. But at the same time, hopefully you won't complain about the encroaching "You will own nothing and be happy about it" corporate ethos, if you want to restrict peoples' rights to buy and sell property of either a physical or intellectual nature.

Good point, but in this case I'm arguing for the exact opposite: I'm suggesting that (natural) people are the ones owning IP, and companies only lease it. I was just making the case that a lease is not "worthless".

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is Warren being an asshole here? I mean, we haven't seen a Dick Tracy movie since the 90s. I am out of the loop so trying to understand.

Perhaps, but he's also highlighting how fundamentally broken the copyright system is. I don't think that's his goal (he's mostly being petty; there's a reason there's a pop song about his vanity), but it is an interesting side-effect of his odd project.

I think it's simpler than that. IE; not a vanity thing for his ego or pettyness for the sake of being petty,

Entity owns an IP, Entity doesn't want another entity to own it for risk to the IP. (the other entity being a globally publicly owned historic aggregator of IPs for sake of short term profits)

DIsney is doing the same in reverse with the Muppets/Henson Properties. Don't do anything with it beyond semi-annual short projects to retain the IP.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#198
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…

No. You don't need to wait half a lifetime. You only need to wait that long if you sign a contract and sell all of the rights. If you don't want to wait, just insist upon another time period. And it should be noted that the contracts only transfer ownership rights to a piece of property. It's like selling a car or a house. Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years.…

> Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years.

Plenty of people lease. One way of looking at this is that Congress has kind of said you can only lease copyright (of certain types) and the maximum lease term is 35 years. Other jurisdictions have similar things with different names.

You could get different terms, but I'm sure you need clout first. Of course, the majority of my output is work for hire and I retain no rights and can't terminate it later; oh well.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's true that the alternatives may not be good, but if so it suggests that maybe publishing is a business that requires certain behavior. I think the best thing that Doctorow could do is set up his own publishing business and show the big companies the right way to do it. If he's right, he'll get the best new talent and quickly succeed. But I'm guessing he'll discover what the major companies know: the consumer is f…

Doctorow has been distributing most of his books for free for at least 20 years.

That's how I read them as a kid with no money.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#200
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like you're not responding to my actual point, so let me repeat my first sentence: > And what alternatives existed for Wolf in the 80s?

Really? It isn't obvious? > The big publishers do provide utility, but there's also an incredible asymmetry (they have trivially made many more book deals than any of their authors) Literally doesn't matter in today's meta for people making music, video, or games. A substack or podcast following will do the same for authors. It's not that this isn't hard. I'd argue it's harder to get noticed today now that everyone c…

> Literally doesn't matter anymore

This is incredibly incorrect! The examples you've pointed to illustrate the smiling curve [1].

Publishers still have an enormous amount of leverage and power, and that is extremely important for other businesses operating in that space. Not everybody is an individual creator, and some creators prefer to work on small teams. You're describing this incredible transformation of the value chain (who provides value, who captures value) while missing the point!!

> It's just that the power asymmetry is disappearing

This is so fundamentally untrue. Do individuals have more power? Yes! Their BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is now "fine I can self publish and survive." That doesn't mean there's not a huge power asymmetry still. Without the blessing of Microsoft, Sony, Apple, valve it is hard to get my game featured. Can I still go viral? Of course! But listen to Zach Gage talk about the funding difference for making a game for Apple Arcade. It prefunds development and allows him to hire a team.

As for rights negotiations, even Taylor Swift had some difficulty reclaiming ownership of her masters. The power asymmetry is alive and well.

> Would you rather I delete my comment

No, I want you to read more carefully and engage with the things people are actually saying and not what you think they are saying from briefly skimming what they write.

[1] https://stratechery.com/concept/aggregation-theory/smiling-c...

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