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Disney Wins, Eldred (and everyone else) Loses
hondo77 writes "In a 7-2 decision, The Supreme Court gave Disney what they wanted. Story just broke, no details yet." They're talking about the Eldred case, recently argued before the Supreme Court and mentioned on Slashdot many times. The upshot is that no works produced in the United States after the 1920's will ever go out of copyright. Opinions: Majority opinion, Stevens' dissent, Breyer's dissent.
This is awful for fair use, obviously. We've got to somehow get Congressmen elected who can see the folly of the current path, and who are immune to the ideal-destroying effects of large campaign donations. Doesn't look like we'll be reading Faulkner on line anytime soon...
Yes. The arguments were strong and the discussion about how it went looked promissing. We'll have to wait for the actual decision to see the details. Hopefully, they worded their decision in a way that would discourage Congress from extending the term again (and again, and again ...).
Has anyone ever explored a sort of "salvage use" copyright? In other words, I don't have a huge problem with Disney wanting to control a copyright on Mickey, because they're still actively using him in their business.
But what about something like the Katzenjammer Kids (for a comic from about the same time as the first mickey shorts) that aren't being actively used by anyone. No real reason for something like that to not be in the public domain.
In other words, don't extend copyright for everything, but give extensions for things that are still being actively used (and no, I don't have the time to work out a legal definition of "actively used").
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem
What happend to conflict of interest?
/ ne ws/archive/2003/01/09/financial1022EST0075.DTL&typ e=books
"Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas will receive more than $1 million for his memoirs from publisher HarperCollins.
Multiple publishers vied for the rights to Thomas' autobiography, which he started writing in 2001, but Thomas liked the package offered by the New York-based HarperCollins, including the editor assigned to work with him, people in the publishing industry with knowledge of the deal said Thursday.
The amount of the deal was not revealed, except that it was in seven figures. "
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
Some wrongs can not be resolved by the courts. I think the most poignant quote during the hearing of the case was from Sandra Day O'Connor.
Time to educate the public--and change Congress's mind. Hard, but not impossible.
P.S. Washington Post has an AP article up and some links to background on the case.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
right to own what they produced
No they don't. Or at least not in the case of intellectual property. If we are talking a physical item, then yes, ownership makes sense. But the fact is that all works are derivative works, derived from the input that society gives the artist. All of society help an author write a book, a painter paint a painting, a musican write a song.
We give them a short term monopoly on their work as a repayment for coming up with it, but then it should get turned over to the society that helped make it happen.
That is the reason for the public domain, and to me, it's a damn good one. This decision really pisses me off.
-no broken link
I know it sounds so 60's, or was it 70's or 80's? I don't know but the point is that it's high time we took this to the streets.
Don't discuss this on the level of some tech-geek thing. People glaze over and go stupid real fast.
This needs to be presented plain and simple. Disney is stealing from the past and locking it up for themselves (Grimm for example).
It's time to actively boycott Mickey Mouse. Does anyone know where I can get a bumper sticker with a Mickey Mouse outline and a bit red circle+slash?
We need access to things like Mickey because everything in our culture and our knowledge is based on something that came before. Look at Disney's movies. All are based on some old fairytale or myth, or are an adaptation of a book. Imagine if those works had never become "public domain". Disney would never have created any of those movies! Copyright is a double-edged sword. If you are a strong supporter of long copyright terms, you'd best check that the things you create your works from are not based on public domain works.
The constitution states that copyright was created "to promote science and the useful arts". Giving a creator a limited monopoly on their creation does just that. But when the creator is long dead and the evil, bloated corporation that he founded is still sucking every dime they can from the same old characters, it hardly seems that "science and the useful arts" are getting anything back.
We need Mickey because along with him, we'll get a vast catalog of early films, books songs, and other works. IF we don't get them soon, they will disappear altogether. And once they're gone, they're gone for good.
Copyright is supposed to have a limited term. Almost 100 years can hardly be construed as "limited".
Exactly the point: you grew up your whole life with mickey mouse, as did your father. As did your granddad. Their whole life has had micky mouse in it. How could anything they/you do or make or create not be tinted (in some tiny way) by that fact? This is not some actual thing (like Coca Cola) we're talking about, this is a cultural nicon, like the flag of a nation, the great literature you've read.
And it's even worse because Disney got to steal from the cultural works of their fathers and grandfathers, but if you decide to do something based on "the little mermaid', there is a chance you could get sued. Or what if your grandkid decides to do some derivative work off 'Lilo and stitch'? He could get sued. Now that's just plain wrong...aka "we can do it, but you can't".
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Would I be right in assuming that this basically means that all composers who sign contracts with U.S. companies are now no more than indentured servants who will never be able to own the rights to their own creations unless they become rich enough to buy back the copyright on their work from the record companies? I realize that it was basically this way before, but now it seems the record companies have unlimited control.
Would any artist in their right mind ever sign with a U.S. label again? Why not just find a label in a country with much saner copyright laws, say... Canada? Seriously, if enough artists get pissed and just bypass American media corporations altogether, this could be the beginning of the downfall of the U.S. corporations control of the music industry. This idea could work for other types of artists as well, such as screenwriters.
Then again, musicians could just self-publish their work and retain their copyright fromt he beginning.
Is this idea naive? Yes. Is it unrealistic? Yes. Could it ever work? Probably not, but I'm not quite so jaded as to give up hope.
Now, from a Lessig interview:
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
What's wrong with 14 years of copyright protection? Why is "lifetime of creator plus 90 years" a good thing?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
TO BE USED TO INNUNDATE SLASHDOT EDITORS WITH REQUESTS FOR POSTING TO ASK SLASHDOT
Why can't we accomplish anything? The Slashdot community is fair sized and to me seems more intelligent than most. So why is the biggest and best thing we can accomplish shutting down any misbegotten website that has the misfortune to put up something interesting without having industrial-strength bandwidth?
What would your top issues be if you could REALLY organize this and other online communities? A candidate for president? Maybe a mutual fund - we could work out several dozen tech stocks that we think deserve support and agree to put in money, grit our teeth, and keep it there for the longer haul - say three years? What else? How would YOU organize the support? What would the system be for input, dissent, advice, decisionmaking? Would we ever be able to agreee on a sufficiently common groung? If we really put our better than average minds to it, could we actually DO something?
Okay, so get posting. For my part, I will post this myself, and if it actually gets up there I will participate in the discussion, and participate in anything that comes of it. Go on, why not? Waste another five minutes, it's just work. Stop talking and give anarchy by collective agreement a try...
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
"Heaven forbid anyone should maybe get off their lazy ass and write a new fucking 'happy birthday' song and use that instead of complaining and whining. Sheesh."
Mike Jittlov ended up doing exactly this for his movie The Wizard of Speed and Time. (I feel fortunate in owning a laserdisc copy of this wonderful film - only 6000 were made before it got yanked off the market due to copyright disagreements.)
Originally, Jittlov had a scene where a group of people were singing the classic Happy Birthday song, but he then found he'd have to pay significant royalties on it, so he wrote his own "Merry Birthday" song and used that instead. It's actually quite good!
Some restaurant chains have their own compositions as well for when the servers come out to wish a guest a happy birthday in song.
Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants, referenced by others here, beautifully expresses a downside to extending copyrights to infinity.
stealing' from those bastards is not a crime.
No kidding, eh? I know this decision has made *MY* respect for copyrights, our entire judicial system, and the government in general, go way up. Golly. Better "plug that analog hole", aka our eyes, by chipping our brains right away, Fritz, 'cuz my opinion of your "rights" just hit bottom. Time to start violating copyrights to material I don't even *want*, just for the sake of civil disobedience.
As an independent artist I can tell you that copyrights are the only thing that can protect us from people taking advantage of our work.
And as a recent article about the dojinshi phenomena in Japan shows, that doesn't quite hold true.
However, I *do* respect you, and thank you for producing works that I (or others, if not me) might enjoy. Seriously, no sarcasm intended.
However...
Those copyrights don't *NEED* to protect you after you die. Current copyright terms *will* last longer than any of us will, unless science "cures" death in the next few years. The idea of "to the author's death plus 70 years" seems quite adequate to me.
As for your "legacy"... Face it - If your work doesn't make you wealthy in this life, it won't do so in the next. At most, someday your kids might make a few bucks selling the distillation of your life for some company to use in a commercial. Yay, the thought makes *me* want to go out and create.
I think a lot of people have missed the big *philosophical* issue involved here. Corporate America has us so brainwashed to believe in their "rights" that we don't even realize the true nature of such rights. Many of us think it MORALLY wrong to "steal" 80-year-old copyrighted material. Yet, the US constitution *only* allows copyrights "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
For THAT reason, all Americans should feel outrage at this decision. The supreme court has sold us out. Unlimited extensions ala the Sunny Bono act do not equal "limited" copyright terms as allowed in the constitution.
I'll skip getting into the obvious rant about erosion of fair-use rights as well.
Well, at least you Europeans don't need to worry about your artistic heritage vanishing into the past because something ceased to exist (think nitrate film) because it became unprofitable before its copyright expired. Perhaps when (if) the US gets some sanity back, you'll lend us a copy so we can enjoy the past as well?
It is, as Mary Lease (a Kansas Populist) said in 1890:
"Wall street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street."
Take hope, however. In time, most of the Populist reforms were enacted. Which leads me to another quote, better known, from Mother Jones:
"Don't mourn, organize!"
Red All Over: Rambling Missives from an Aspiring Revolutionary
It's not about the mouse.
"The Little Mermaid" was written by Hans Christian Andersen. Disney took the story, mangled it a bit, didn't credit the original author, and now protects it like a rabid bulldog. Same with "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". Written by Victor Hugo. He's not credited either. "Pocahontas" was a (more or less) true story. "Mulan" is based on a Chinese legend. "Atlantis" is an adaptation of "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" (and draws many compelling comparisons to "Nadia: Secret of Blue Water"). "The Lion King" was a direct ripoff of "Kimba, The White Lion", an original work done by Osamu Tezuka. "Cinderella", "Snow White", "Beauty and the Beast" and "Sleeping Beauty" are all widely known faerie tales.
Disney most certainly got to "steal from the cultural works of their fathers and grandfathers".
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
That will work great unless you want to have your work actually published. Publishers these days require that you sign over any copyright on your work to them, and they aren't going to release anything into the public domain before they are forced to.
sometimes not even then. There are stories of movie studios burning prints of the films that are about to enter the Public domain to prevent them from competing with their current releases. Not that anybody will have to do that anymore, film stock will be long gone before the copyright expires now.
I read the internet for the articles.
Another reason Disney CAN'T lose their copyrights quite a few people are unaware of is alot more immediately more important to the Disney corporation: They can be quickly ruined by things they published in the 20s 30s and 40s.
Here's a fairly tame example of Disney's fears. They produced piles upon piles of literature that - while not meant to be degrading at the time - would be a serious embarassment if they were made widely known today.
My grandfather has a few of the Donald Duck comics he used to get at his gas station in 1940s Dayton, Ohio. In these, Donald refers to various and sundry brown people as "porch monkeys" and "cotton pickin tar babies" - let alone the dozens of people of color portrayed in pitiful stereotype. Native Americans, negros, hispanics, etc. etc. all shown as lazy, drunken, slobs or as murderous psychopaths.
The least of Disney's worries is their animated/live action film "Song of the South" - which they have pulled from shelves. This movie actually celebrated the rich culture of blacks in the 19th century south and in treated the subject with respect.
With the works I'm talking about, there was no respect present. Such as that shown in the example - the stereotyped character was put on display as an oddity.
that, I think, is Disney's major motivation for keeping an iron grip on copyright.
"Eldred v. Ashcroft"
Need more be said?
The law is constitutional - that is now a fact thanks to this ruling. I've thought since the beginning that this was the wrong way to go about things. Pushing this case through reminds me of school children playing a game - a small group finds the rules to be unfair, and instead of trying to find a solution with rest of the children, they instead run to the teacher and complain that the rules are unfair and that the teacher should strike them down. Hmm - that was a bad analogy. Ah well.
What we need to do - if we truly believe that copyright law is an injustice - is to organize rallies and get the word out! If a bunch of Farscape fans could run ads to push for the show, then I would hope that people who believe strongly against copyright could push this issue in time for the 2004 Presidential elections. Get the public outraged. Educate them on the issues and hope that some will decide that this issue is indeed important to them.
I highly doubt that most people either understand copyright or see it as anything wrong. We live in a world of perpetual copyright - people honestly believe that it is right for someone to have a monopoly on their works for all eternity. Asking the Supreme Court to change this is the wrong way to do it. We need to get the laws changed. If copyright can be retroactively extended, then it can be retroactively reduced. Stop trying to get the Supreme Court to overrule the will of Congress, and make this an issue that people have an opinion on!
C'mon - if people could organize protests against Dmitry being jailed, I really hope we could organize on the issue of copyright. If people can lead a case against copyright, I would hope that they can lead a group of people towards getting people to have an opinion. Let's see if we can get the law changed through the lawmakers and not go crying to the nine "teachers" that the law is unfair.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
OUR EVOLVING CONSTITUTION
Imagine that you live in Plum Creek, a fictitious, medium size town somewhere in the United States. It has two high schools, East High and West High. The rivalry between the two schools' football teams has been a major feature of local culture for decades. Last year, a boy living next door to your home was playing on the West High team. He invited you to attend the season finale, the game against East High. It began with the usual rules; however, East High couldn't seem to move the ball. The team had big, strong players but they were slow, and they had no passing game.
The referees reacted by announcing some rule changes. From now on, a team only needed thirty-nine and one half inches for a first down. And it had five attempts rather than four, but only if it didn't try a pass play. Any forward pass would end a series of downs.
People sitting near you in the stands were quite upset about the changes. They were aware that two of the three referees were uncles, and the third a next door neighbor, of East High players. A committee elected by all the high school coaches in the state had hired the referees. But they had long term contracts, and it was almost impossible to get rid of one who was biased, corrupt, or incompetent.
Many years ago, the coaches committee had also written a rule book, and all the coaches had then voted to adopt it. It stated that no rule could be changed without the written approval of three-fourths of the coaches. It also said, "A first down requires an advance of ten yards or more in no more than four plays." It didn't say anything about special limits on pass plays.
When irate fans complained about the clearly fraudulent rule changes, the referees brushed them off. "You don't understand the rule book," they said, "it's a living document which evolves to meet the needs of changing times. And we have the authority to guide that evolution."
You have just read a rough description of modern U. S. Supreme Court jurisprudence.
(copied from http://ttokarnak.home.att.net/Evolution.html)
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