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There was a big high law there that, tried to stop me. The sign was painted said "intellectual property" but on the backside it didn't say nothing, this Mouse was made for you and me
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Dec 8, 2018 10:59
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Hamas mouse wasn't made for us, we're evil Westerners!
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Dec 9, 2018 01:39
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Spacewolf posted:Hamas mouse wasn't made for us, we're evil Westerners! That's the one and only American, Michael M. Mouse.
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Dec 9, 2018 05:00
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I'm glad that when Disney and Sonny Bono extend the copyright term "because artists have the right to profit from their work," it applies in the same way to scientific papers whose authors paid a publishing fee for the privilege of transferring their copyright to elsevier.
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Dec 10, 2018 17:20
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I'm going to guess most of the people who've posted itt so far are almost entirely consumers of media, not creators. Whenever I talk about this stuff with artists (including my own family members), they have a very different take on the matter. While they'll happily invoke Fair Use for whatever fan stuff they're doing (even for cases where it dubiously applies), they get very defensive at the idea of anyone doing anything with their original content without their explicit written permission, and start shrieking to high heaven when I propose any plan that would curtail the current IP laws. Sometimes they'll invoke economic arguments ("but, my GRANDKIDS will need to be taken care of!", ignoring this is an argument for things like M4A and UBI more than anything), but much more often feels like they're just unironically saying "the only moral Death of the Author is my Death of the Author."
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Dec 10, 2018 21:20
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Kerning Chameleon posted:I'm going to guess most of the people who've posted itt so far are almost entirely consumers of media, not creators. Whenever I talk about this stuff with artists (including my own family members), they have a very different take on the matter. That kind of hypocrisy is definitely a thing (like Alan Moore getting mad about Before Watchmen despite much of his own work, including Watchmen, being fanfic to varying degrees - although that was more a moral argument than an IP law argument). I'm not sure how widespread it is among artists, though, and it probably plays much less of a role in the current problems of IP law than more straightforward forms of self-interest do.
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Dec 10, 2018 22:19
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Kerning Chameleon posted:I'm going to guess most of the people who've posted itt so far are almost entirely consumers of media, not creators. Whenever I talk about this stuff with artists (including my own family members), they have a very different take on the matter. I guess this is a good segue into another aspect of this: free speech vs. authorial intent or perception. Most of the conversation here has been commercial and innocuous in nature. But with the Fox News Superman comment and Death of the Author what about an artist wanting to disallow use based on political grounds? And example: you’re all probably aware of vaporwave/synthwave/outrun music. There’s now another version that goes by “fashwave” and similar to vaporwave’s mixing of 80’s music, commercials, and corporate aesthetics and culture, this poo poo does that with fascist iconography and symbolism. Most of the videos are simply video of Nazis or fictional fascist characters from tv and movies overlaid on music made by other artists. So what’s the rub there? Is an overt political ideology disqualifying for fair use in certain aspects? Or are authors and creators just S.O.L. If Nazis decide to latch onto what they made?
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Dec 11, 2018 15:35
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I hadn't realized that there would finally be new works entering the public domain next year. Back when I was in law school it was just assumed as a matter of course that there would be another copyright extension by now to prevent that. I guess Disney's lost its magic touch with copyright extensions.
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Dec 11, 2018 16:02
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Easy Diff posted:It kind of should, but only for certain things. This exact situation came up with Sherlock Holmes: some of the works are in the public domain, others are not. So the question of is the character "Sherlock Holmes" in the public domain or not was a big issue. The owners of the copyrights for the later Sherlock Holmes stories kept demanding licencing fees for any work that included the character Sherlock Holmes (on the theory that the still copyrighted stories meant they retained a copyright on Holmes himself) and someone finally had enough and took them to court over it. So now the character Sherlock Holmes is definitively in the public domain - but if you reference any details from the final ten works still under copyright, the estate might be able to sue you: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150524/17521431095/sherlock-holmes-case-never-ending-copyright-dispute.shtml
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Dec 11, 2018 16:06
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evilweasel posted:I hadn't realized that there would finally be new works entering the public domain next year. Back when I was in law school it was just assumed as a matter of course that there would be another copyright extension by now to prevent that. I guess Disney's lost its magic touch with copyright extensions. I’m not so sure. It really depends on how the make up of the house and senate moves over the next 8 years. If we end up with more people in the AOC wing I can see a possible fight. Otherwise it’ll probably get little coverage and be passed.
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Dec 11, 2018 16:16
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Crain posted:I’m not so sure. It really depends on how the make up of the house and senate moves over the next 8 years. If we end up with more people in the AOC wing I can see a possible fight. Otherwise it’ll probably get little coverage and be passed. This is less of an AOC issue and more that the public has gotten very interested in copyright/net neutrality/etc, things that ten years ago everyone assumed were much too boring for the public to understand - so Disney could plausibly tell legislators that nobody who mattered was going to object. Now, people will object. Not just progressives - this is something with a pretty broad base of interest.
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Dec 11, 2018 16:22
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evilweasel posted:This is less of an AOC issue and more that the public has gotten very interested in copyright/net neutrality/etc, things that ten years ago everyone assumed were much too boring for the public to understand - so Disney could plausibly tell legislators that nobody who mattered was going to object. Now, people will object. Not just progressives - this is something with a pretty broad base of interest. As another poster pointed out: Public interest isn't necessarily an issue here. People were HUGELY against gutting net neutrality and it still passed because those voting on it were more aligned to business interests than those of the populace. If that holds true then it won't matter how many protests there are. However if enough politicians who are against the current revamp of Robber Baron capitalism gain a foot hold it will.
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Dec 11, 2018 17:19
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Crain posted:As another poster pointed out: Public interest isn't necessarily an issue here. People were HUGELY against gutting net neutrality and it still passed because those voting on it were more aligned to business interests than those of the populace. If that holds true then it won't matter how many protests there are. it passed because all that needed to "pass" to gut net neutrality was for republicans to control the FCC, which they now do automatically due to trump being elected. republicans hoped to use the repeal of net neutrality rules to force democrats to agree to a weaker legislative repeal of the net neutrality rules, but nobody was interested. you'd need actual legislation to pass an extension of copyright terms, not just get the FCC to reverse itself
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Dec 11, 2018 17:33
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evilweasel posted:it passed because all that needed to "pass" to gut net neutrality was for republicans to control the FCC, which they now do automatically due to trump being elected. republicans hoped to use the repeal of net neutrality rules to force democrats to agree to a weaker legislative repeal of the net neutrality rules, but nobody was interested. That’s a good point. I forgot that the FCC could do that unilaterally. Still, a GOP controlled Congress is bad news for anyone but rich people.
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Dec 11, 2018 17:43
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The average person is unlikely to have strong opinions on medical patents or rules governing academic research but they sure do like being able to watch all the latest television shows and films online. For a while there it seemed like piracy was dying out thanks to easy available and relatively inexpensive streaming services but with the recent trend toward everyone trying to set up their own $20 a month netflix clone full of exclusive content I feel like piracy is due to make a comeback and I wonder if that has a subtle influence over how people think about intellectual property in general. Not that I think this is going to become a hot button political issue but it makes sense to me that people would be aware of these issues and more likely to have opinions about them right now compared to in the past.
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Dec 11, 2018 18:15
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Helsing posted:I feel like piracy is due to make a comeback It certainly already is. The media companies that are planning to set up their own streaming screwed up and pulled their stock from Netflix too soon. They didn’t have a legal avenue available for them, so people went right back to piracy. Not to mention the much more splintered market for niche genres like anime where there are already like 6 major dedicated platforms plus Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon and each season is split up 6 ways from Sunday. Not to mention the dubbed versions. Even if it weren’t a money issue, people just don’t want to deal with that many accounts.
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Dec 11, 2018 18:23
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I'm gonna admit I'm one of "those people" who are obsessed with the Disney company and it's products and obsessively collects photos of theme park break rooms that are off-limits to the public. I think there needs to be a distinction between reference works and pop culture. Reference works are information and the public is owed information at some point. Pop culture has a much longer shelf life than it did when copyright started. Very few people wanted to listen to 1940s swing music by the 70s, but 80s hits are still being listened to and covered and remixed today. Edit: Fun second-hand fable: the Sherman Brothers considered donating all of their royalties from "It's a Small World" to UNICEF as the ride was originally designed for that charity's Worlds Fair pavilion. Walt actually took them aside and told them that was insane because their grandchildren would buy houses with that money. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Dec 11, 2018 |
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Dec 11, 2018 20:49
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property is theft op, so rent seeking of ideas is as well abolish all copyrights, trademarks, and property.
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Dec 11, 2018 20:54
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Crain posted:It certainly already is. The media companies that are planning to set up their own streaming screwed up and pulled their stock from Netflix too soon. They didn’t have a legal avenue available for them, so people went right back to piracy. Yeah, the breakdown of the deal between Funimation and Crunchyroll was incredibly stupid.
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Dec 11, 2018 20:58
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Craptacular! posted:I'm gonna admit I'm one of "those people" who are obsessed with the Disney company and it's products and obsessively collects photos of theme park break rooms that are off-limits to the public. I think there needs to be a distinction between reference works and pop culture. Reference works are information and the public is owed information at some point. Pop culture has a much longer shelf life than it did when copyright started. Very few people wanted to listen to 1940s swing music by the 70s, but 80s hits are still being listened to and covered and remixed today.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:01
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:I don't see what this has to do with it. It's really cool that works are staying in the public consciousness for longer, but I don't think the point of copyright should be to cover the entire period that something is known or discussed - quite the opposite. I think songs that have lasted since the 80s ought to be treated as irrevocable pieces of american culture, something that belongs to us collectively rather than whoever happened to pay for it to be recorded 40 years ago. Surely they've been amply compensated in the intervening time. I think that it's absurd for one company to own an idea indefinitely, even if it's present in nearly every american's head. At its most extreme, the shareholders of the disney corporation had about as much to do with mickey mouse's conception as I did. The argument that the fair amount of compensation is going to be earned within a few decades, at most, of protection is pretty strong - anything more than that is just rent-seeking and gravy. Artists do feel territorial about their art though, and I have some sympathy for the idea that an artist who still owns their copyrights should have the right to control the use of the work during their lifetime. Much less so once a corporation owns the copyrights instead, however.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:09
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:I don't see what this has to do with it. It's really cool that works are staying in the public consciousness for longer, but I don't think the point of copyright should be to cover the entire period that something is known or discussed - quite the opposite. I think songs that have lasted since the 80s ought to be treated as irrevocable pieces of american culture, something that belongs to us collectively rather than whoever happened to pay for it to be recorded 40 years ago. Surely they've been amply compensated in the intervening time. I think that it's absurd for one company to own an idea indefinitely, even if it's present in nearly every american's head. At its most extreme, the shareholders of the disney corporation had about as much to do with mickey mouse's conception as I did. And that's not an illegitimate position, I see the value in it. I'm just saying I'm a corporate whore that would side with big business if it were put to a vote. And that's really more about the length of time than any cheats or extensions, those are poo poo. Like I'd probably just put it at a solid century and leave it at that. By 2066 if every YouTuber and Soundcloud singer wants to sell their cover of "What a Wonderful World" without paying Louis Armstrong's estate, let em. People saying ten years or whatever seem, in my opinion, kinda nuts. You'll basically have new Eminiem albums alongside some reality star's cover of The Real Slim Shady.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:10
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Craptacular! posted:And that's not an illegitimate position, I see the value in it. I'm just saying I'm a corporate whore that would side with big business if it were put to a vote. And that's really more about the length of time than any cheats or extensions, those are poo poo. Due to quirks in American IP law dating back from when sheet music was copyrighted but recordings didn't exist, anyone has the right to record and sell covers of other people's music without their consent, just by paying a statutory licencing fee. Because otherwise how would anyone ever listen to the music if people couldn't perform it?
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Dec 11, 2018 21:13
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evilweasel posted:Due to quirks in American IP law dating back from when sheet music was copyrighted but recordings didn't exist, anyone has the right to record and sell covers of other people's music without their consent, just by paying a statutory licencing fee. Because otherwise how would anyone ever listen to the music if people couldn't perform it? This is what makes discussions about topics like these erode to, "it sure would be nice if..." talk. Very few people can speak authoritatively because it's by design a very lawyer-y subject.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:15
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Craptacular! posted:You'll basically have new Eminiem albums alongside some reality star's cover of The Real Slim Shady. evilweasel posted:Artists do feel territorial about their art though, and I have some sympathy for the idea that an artist who still owns their copyrights should have the right to control the use of the work during their lifetime.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:20
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Craptacular! posted:I don't know what the current law is, I'm just an average schmuck who hears news like "crowd banned from performing Happy Birthday at ticketed event" or whatever. I know that some of that has eroded, and obviously there's entire YouTube channels full of people singing other people's music, but I figured those are either non-commercial or the person plans to argue fair use. banning people from performing "happy birthday" is about (a) avoiding the licencing fees and (b) using the song in a commercial context other than selling recordings of the cover needs a licencing fee
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Dec 11, 2018 21:21
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also it's now in the public domain
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Dec 11, 2018 21:40
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XMNN posted:also it's now in the public domain yeah it turned out they were lying about when it was written the whole time
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Dec 11, 2018 21:48
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I have this horrible feeling that in a few years the hottest issue in I/P isn't going to be related to medicine, the cultural commons or anything directly relevant to our well being. It will be the controversy over using photo realistic CGI to make it look like various celebrities, politicians and fictional characters are having sex with each other.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:59
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Helsing posted:I have this horrible feeling that in a few years the hottest issue in I/P isn't going to be related to medicine, the cultural commons or anything directly relevant to our well being. It will be the controversy over using photo realistic CGI to make it look like various celebrities, politicians and fictional characters are having sex with each other. You have IP rights in your personal likeness though it's been a long enough time that I don't recall the exact contours of those IP rights (and if they're statutory or common-law). Plus using CGI to make photorealistic pornographic images/videos of people who didn't agree to it is all sorts of other torts. Plus that already exists, it's called deepfakes - they're basically neural networks that will paste a known face over a face in a video with a fair amount of realism. Not the body itself, and there's still some uncanny valley poo poo, but its good enough people are already understandably super not pleased.
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Dec 11, 2018 22:05
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Helsing posted:I have this horrible feeling that in a few years the hottest issue in I/P isn't going to be related to medicine, the cultural commons or anything directly relevant to our well being. It will be the controversy over using photo realistic CGI to make it look like various celebrities, politicians and fictional characters are having sex with each other.
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Dec 11, 2018 22:08
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evilweasel posted:You have IP rights in your personal likeness though it's been a long enough time that I don't recall the exact contours of those IP rights (and if they're statutory or common-law). Plus using CGI to make photorealistic pornographic images/videos of people who didn't agree to it is all sorts of other torts. I know that it is technically covered by existing law but I think once it passes a certain threshold of being both easy to make and realistic looking it is going to enter mainstream political and cultural consciousness in a much bigger way and create all kinds of weird new cultural issues.
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Dec 11, 2018 22:09
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Helsing posted:I know that it is technically covered by existing law but I think once it passes a certain threshold of being both easy to make and realistic looking it is going to enter mainstream political and cultural consciousness in a much bigger way and create all kinds of weird new cultural issues. I'm not sure how - it's going to be the sort of thing that bubbles up from the sewers of the internet in a way that's not easy to squash effectively. You can go after any company that distributes it, but I'm not sure what else you can do. The big thing is it's going to make video of any kind easy to forge, and make it harder to trust the authenticity of videos without a lot of external verification.
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Dec 11, 2018 22:14
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Like, if anyone hasn't seen it, you should watch this as a reference for what this is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0
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Dec 11, 2018 22:15
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Craptacular! posted:And that's not an illegitimate position, I see the value in it. I'm just saying I'm a corporate whore that would side with big business if it were put to a vote. And that's really more about the length of time than any cheats or extensions, those are poo poo. But why though. I’m really struggling to see the reasoning. If Harry Potter only had a 30 year IP protection, does anyone think JK Rowling wouldn’t have written the books? If anyone today could publish their own Star Wars stories and comic books, George Lucas would still be rich and we’d all have cool Star Wars stories freely exploring and subverting the existing tropes. I really struggle to see understand the justifications for those super long restrictions. They make everyone worse off for the benefit of a few large corporations and millionaires.
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Dec 11, 2018 22:20
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Squalid posted:But why though. I’m really struggling to see the reasoning. If Harry Potter only had a 30 year IP protection, does anyone think JK Rowling wouldn’t have written the books? If anyone today could publish their own Star Wars stories and comic books, George Lucas would still be rich and we’d all have cool Star Wars stories freely exploring and subverting the existing tropes. An author who has a good but not international blockbuster instant billionaire book may rely on that income for the rest of their life. JK Rowling isn't gonna be in the poorhouse if she loses her copyright tomorrow, but I can easily see it mattering to many artists.
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Dec 11, 2018 22:23
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evilweasel posted:You have IP rights in your personal likeness though it's been a long enough time that I don't recall the exact contours of those IP rights (and if they're statutory or common-law). Plus using CGI to make photorealistic pornographic images/videos of people who didn't agree to it is all sorts of other torts. Uh I remember when they used Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cgi likeness in Terminator: Salvation he wasn’t entitled to any royalties because Warner Bros already owned the right to his image from the first Terminator. So if Warner Bros wants to make a terminator themed sex cgi model I’m not sure there’s anything Arnold could do to stop them.
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Dec 11, 2018 22:29
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Squalid posted:Uh I remember when they used Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cgi likeness in Terminator: Salvation he wasn’t entitled to any royalties because Warner Bros already owned the right to his image from the first Terminator. So if Warner Bros wants to make a terminator themed sex cgi model I’m not sure there’s anything Arnold could do to stop them. That's going to be an issue of the exact wording of the contract you signed, if the contract allows for it or not.
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Dec 11, 2018 22:31
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I saw an interesting proposal once that suggested replacing i/p laws as the funding mechanism for artwork and entertainment with a voucher system. Everyone has a certain number of vouchers each year, say 1000 of them total, and can choose to give those vouchers to any artist they please. Each voucher the artist receives is equivalent to X funding from the government. At least theoretically you'd still have a decentralized marketplace system incentive's people to come up with popular entertainment but there'd also be opportunities for less popular artists to develop a reliable niche audience. If you had diverse tastes you could spread your vouchers widely but if you really wanted to see a specific project realized you could dedicate most or all of your vouchers to a single person or group. If inequality is a concern you could at least partially mitigate it by making vouchers non-transferable and making it so they expire after a given period. It's not politically feasible but it's an interesting thought experiment for contemplating alternative ways that you could fund creative endeavors in a socialistic fashion that still manages to approximate some of the competition and decentralization of a private market.
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Dec 11, 2018 22:36
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evilweasel posted:An author who has a good but not international blockbuster instant billionaire book may rely on that income for the rest of their life. JK Rowling isn't gonna be in the poorhouse if she loses her copyright tomorrow, but I can easily see it mattering to many artists. I can see it mattering to a very small number of artists like Steven King, but crucially I can't see it acting as a real incentive for creators that will actually effect their creative output. This is because 99% of IP probably won't produce hardly any returns after just a few years. So just talking about novels for a moment, I would expect the distribution of total revenue per book to follow a logistic distribution. That is to say most produce extremely little revenue, while a very small number produce huge returns. Revenue per unit of time for each book probably follows a negative logistic curve, with most books producing the vast majority of sales shortly after publishing and rapidly declining to negligible rates after a few years. The exceptions are very few, and the equivalent of winning the authorial lottery. Something like the book To Kill a Mockingbird that continues to sell copies year after year. There's probably only a few hundred novels like this out of millions. Authors are very well aware of the improbability of their work achieving the level of success of Harper Lee and JK Rowling, therefore their decisions as creators are predicated on much more realistic assumptions. What motivates them are fat advances, which are money in the bank, and the prospect of selling a few thousand or million copies over the next decade To still be selling thousands of copies of a book 50+ years in the future is so improbable a scenario and so little relevant to their immediate life I can't see how it could possibly influence creator behavior. Its impossible to plan for that kind of success because its impossible to predict. I'm not sure of the exact time scales involved, but after a certain point which is much shorter than a human life I think the total social value of copyright protections drops to zero. In the short term it encourages creative production because it guarantees authors a right to profit from their work. The additional incentive value for each additional unit of time allotted to the IP monopoly is going to rapidly decrease. Certainly I doubt Walt Disney would have changed his behavior had his mouse gone out of copyright a decade ago, we have gained no social value from continuing to enforce a Disney IP claim to that idea.
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Dec 11, 2018 23:01
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