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Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

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Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#201

Post by noelwelsh »

parineum wrote: post #136
noelwelsh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You quoted one of the key sentences from the piece, and yet missed the point. It's the "you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them." part that is important. In the case of Roger Rabbit, the problem is the Disney has not made any new Roger Rabbit movies or other media in 35 years, despite the first movie being very successful. No doubt other concept, that could b…

No, I got that point. I just find it funny that the article completely glosses over the reason why artists license their work in the first place. Because the company they license it to is far more capable of making money off of their work and, in most cases, the artist will make far more money by licensing their work than they would by trying to make an indie film on a shoe string budget with their own resources. Tha…

The article does touch on that (monopsony) but it is largely irrelevant to the main point of the article.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#202

Post by badlibrarian »

chimeracoder wrote: post #187
badlibrarian wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection What are you referring to here?

He set up two computers and manually played low-res DRM-protected MP3 files out of one and into the other for weeks, documenting the process on BoingBoing. He touted this not only as freedom but "preservation."

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#203

Post by mrguyorama »

chimeracoder wrote: post #190
benmanns wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs (relative to a straight 100% increase relative to the basic income). So you might send everyone $100 per month and costs go up $100 per month, until supply chains shift towards supplying lower income humans with more goods and services than they used…

> It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs Landlords are, by and large, not the ones who create new housing units, and "lack of profit potential is" also generally not the main impedance to creating new housing in most locations either.

>and "lack of profit potential is" also generally not the main impedance to creating new housing in most locations either.

It somewhat is. Housing builders can only do so many projects per whatever cycle they run. They will optimize towards building fewer projects that are highly profitable rather than building tons of low income housing or starter homes that each have much lower profit.

Builders don't want to scale up, they want to make money. Building would also be abysmal to scale up anyway, because it's somewhat skilled labor that you pay peanuts for.

This is just one of the ways that wealth inequality results in market failures.

People with lots and lots of wealth value each individual dollar significantly less, and are therefore willing to part with significantly more dollars per unit of service or product. That means you always get a much higher profit margin targeting stupid rich people than anything else. So everything is built around bilking these dumb but wealthy people for everything you can, and nobody builds or sells much to the poorer people. This drives prices for things up in general, and starves the market of oxygen for meeting the needs of less wealthy people.

Ask any developer, big or small, who their target market is, and they will not say "poor people" and this has been true for decades, and the difference between "poor" and "not poor" has only continued to grow.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#204

Post by jandrese »

chimeracoder wrote: post #187
badlibrarian wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection What are you referring to here?

Sounds like the analog hole. You play DRM material out the audio port and at the same time capture the input of that and re-encode in a non-DRM format.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#205

Post by toast0 »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #166
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…

I read the "fantastic 1981 novel", too, and you know what? It wasn't very good. It had a lot of really interesting world-building and some cool ideas, but the characters were flat and the central mystery was terrible. Despite common wisdom, the book is not always better than the movie. I mean, given that Disney wasn't doing anything new with Roger Rabbit, I'm glad he got the rights back. But I think part of the reaso…

> the characters were flat

Yeah, isn't that the central gag of the movie though?

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#206

Post by jandrese »

chimeracoder wrote: post #190
benmanns wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs (relative to a straight 100% increase relative to the basic income). So you might send everyone $100 per month and costs go up $100 per month, until supply chains shift towards supplying lower income humans with more goods and services than they used…

> It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs Landlords are, by and large, not the ones who create new housing units, and "lack of profit potential is" also generally not the main impedance to creating new housing in most locations either.

Really, any place where building falls behind demand you should expect the lower profit affordable housing to be the first projects cancelled. Economically it only makes sense to service the affordable housing market if the luxury housing market is too saturated to support more projects.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#207

Post by huslage »

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…

He describes what he sees as a monopsony. That is not misleading. You can have lots of options and still be stuck in this monopsonistic (sp?) world that controls your rights and your financial future.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#208

Post by munificent »

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…

You're correct that you no longer need to go through one of the big five publishers to get your book in front of readers.

But Doctorow also says:

> or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks

And this is largely true. I don't think there's any viable path for self-publishing success right now that doesn't go through Amazon.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#209

Post by mrguyorama »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #180
falcor84 wrote: post #161

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.

>But at the same time, hopefully you won't complain about the encroaching "You will own nothing and be happy about it" corporate ethos

This has come about due to a strengthening of IP rights, and could be reduced with a weakening of those same rights back to where they were a few decades ago.

In the 80s and early 90s, companies like Sony, Nintendo, and Sega tried to use copyright and Trademark and patent and other IP based rights to legislate their consoles and keep people from interoperating with products and software they sold. The courts correctly found against them: That general consumer product rights, even in their minimal state in the US, gave consumers the right to buy products that could interact with their other products, and that companies that sold those products were not allowed to prevent it, generally following first sale doctrine.

You as a video game seller could literally violate Sega's trademark rights to make your game work on the sega consoles, as verified by a judge, that was "Fair use". If you could find a way to get by Nintendo's security chip, you could sell games for their consoles, and Nintendo could not stop you through lawfare. You could build an emulator of the sony console that you sell for cheaper than a playstation, and that was also fair game. You could reverse engineer the IBM PC bios in order to sell machines that could use the same software that was written for those PCs. All these things were litigated in court and affirmed by judges as "No, consumers have rights and companies should not be allowed to stop you from buying stuff from other people that works on their machine"

Companies didn't like this though, because having to compete with someone else selling stuff for your console meant you had to compete. So they got the DMCA, and now all they have to do is put a teeny bit of "copyright protection" code somewhere, and it is now a crime to interoperate with that system.

The reason computers stopped being so interoperable and stopped being so open and stopped cultivating a vibrant market like that is because you just can't do those things anymore. Microsoft can legally prevent you from writing software that interacts with systems in ways they do not want. You cannot sell non-Nintendo approved games on the Switch like you could on the SNES not only because cryptography and computer security improved, but because trying to get around that can now be a crime!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention#United_Stat...

Imagine if physical product manufacturers had such insane laws benefitting them. Not only would your car need to take Ford branded gasoline, but any company trying to produce a gasoline that was compatible with Ford cars to compete with Ford branded gasoline would likely violate a bunch of laws and lose their shirts in court.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#210

Post by xoxxala »

shadowgovt wrote: post #133
skybrian wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> some authors have had good luck with self-publishing Indeed. What are the relative statistics on authors who have managed to bootstrap themselves vs. authors who make a comfortable living through the Big Five?

According to this survey:

"The median income of full-time self-published authors in 2022 was $12,800 from books and $15,000 total from all author-related activities. Full-time self-published authors who had been publishing since at least 2018 reported a median income of $24,000 compared to $13,700 in 2018, a 76 percent increase."

Traditionally published commercial authors made about $10,000 more.

https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author...

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