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

251–260 of 260 posts

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#251

Post by axiolite »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #53
axiolite wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the point of buying something if the other person is allowed to steal it back. If you can't make a profit off of a licensed property after 35 years of exclusive control, you've done something horribly wrong. If you sit on a licensed property and do nothing with it for decades, it should be allowed to revert to someone else, or better yet go into public domain.

The issue is, what happens if you have a work where e.g. the music and the script were written by different people? If one of them can terminate the license then you create a situation where nobody can distribute it because nobody has the rights to all of it anymore. Of course, what they should do is have the copyright expire after 35 years. Then if the original creators want to make sequel at that point they're enti…

> what happens if you have a work where e.g. the music and the script were written by different people?

This happens ALL THE TIME. 2001 A Space Odyssey, Heavy Metal (1981-Blue Oyster Cult), Rocky (1976) airing on TV without Eye of the Tiger, It's a Wonderful Life was public domain but distributors needed to pay for the soundtrack. TV shows like Married with Children and Dave airing in syndication with different opening theme songs. etc.

All over archive.org you'll find tons of classic films but with the soundtracks stripped out.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#252

Post by philipallstar »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #109
philipallstar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you’re swindled, you’re not given them away freely. How do you define "swindle"?

This really reads like you’re playing rhetorical games. Do you legitimately not know what these terms mean or how they apply in the context of signing legal agreements? Are you unaware of their literal definitions? If you don’t then my apologies, we can break them down for you and link dictionary definitions (or Wikipedia if that’s your preference).

If the statement is that any right that can be signed away can be swindled away, then I think something needs defining to make it a non-fatuous statement. I can sign away 4 years of my life to the military. Does that mean my life can be swindled away?

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#253

Post by cxr »

echelon wrote: post #220
wrsh07 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 val…

> You're describing this incredible transformation of the value chain (who provides value, who captures value) while missing the point!! Yikes. I really do not appreciate your unkind tone in these last few messages. There's a really big trend you're missing by focusing on old anecdotes. The creator economy is on pace to exceed the size of Hollywood and the music industry combined. There are kids on Roblox making six…

You keep trying to turn the other person's question into a different one that they didn't ask. That's the only unkind thing happening here.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#254

Post by cholantesh »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #250
Taek wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but do the books make more money and get more distribution? Quality is not the critical factor here

Good or bad seems like its about quality?

Yes, of the publishing method at giving authors ROI. This should be pretty clear from the context.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#255

Post by wrsh07 »

echelon wrote: post #220
wrsh07 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 val…

> You're describing this incredible transformation of the value chain (who provides value, who captures value) while missing the point!! Yikes. I really do not appreciate your unkind tone in these last few messages. There's a really big trend you're missing by focusing on old anecdotes. The creator economy is on pace to exceed the size of Hollywood and the music industry combined. There are kids on Roblox making six…

> There's a really big trend you're missing by focusing on old anecdotes.

We're talking about the same trend: the transformation of the publishing industry across all different types of media.

I'm not missing it. I'm paying attention to the context of this transformation and what it implies for all of the participants, not just individuals.

The point I was making in my original post is that an author in the 80s did not have the same options as a creator today. You have repeatedly responded by talking about how creators today have so much power.

Please, go read a piece about the smiling curve from Ben Thompson, because it's important. This trend implies that margins accrue to the two ends of the spectrum. Yes, individuals with low costs win, but also there is another side to the smiling curve. While life can be good as a YouTuber, TikTok, Meta, and Google are not taking risks on content like the publishers of old but they still reap the profits from media production. It is the creators who now bear the risks.

This also means that the traditional mechanisms of funding your book through an advance are fundamentally different (they exist, yes, but they're different)

And because the smiling curve implies a hollowing out of the middle, it is harder to survive as small publisher (see the transformation and aggregation of magazines, newspapers, tv stations)

Am I excited about this future? Yes! But it's not an unmitigated good. And one can't understand it if they don't know any of the historical context or see what's happening to other players in the industry

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#257

Post by int_19h »

ghaff wrote: post #122
noirscape wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think it would make more sense to simply start taxing copyright as property, if we insist on "intellectual property" in the first place. Have an exemption in place for the first few years, then gradually ramp it up - the longer you keep something out of public domain, the more it costs to do so every year. Use those funds to subsidize new works released under permissive licenses.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#258

Post by int_19h »

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…

Anything that kills of "exclusives" as a business model is worth considering for that reason alone.

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#259

Post by [deleted] »

philipallstar wrote: post #252
Forgeties79 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really reads like you’re playing rhetorical games. Do you legitimately not know what these terms mean or how they apply in the context of signing legal agreements? Are you unaware of their literal definitions? If you don’t then my apologies, we can break them down for you and link dictionary definitions (or Wikipedia if that’s your preference).

If the statement is that any right that can be signed away can be swindled away, then I think something needs defining to make it a non-fatuous statement. I can sign away 4 years of my life to the military. Does that mean my life can be swindled away?

[deleted]

Re: Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

#260

Post by MichaelZuo »

cholantesh wrote: post #254
MichaelZuo wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good or bad seems like its about quality?

Yes, of the publishing method at giving authors ROI. This should be pretty clear from the context.

Giving authors ROI?

Why would anyone, excluding authors, even want low quality books to have any ROI?

Post reply on HN