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The Double Edge of Copyright Extensions
porkface writes "The Morning News is running a simple, but eloquent editorial that plainly shows how Hollywood has routinely benefitted from the expiration of copyright, despite their adamant pressure on Capitol Hill to extend copyright almost indefinitely."
...to the link at the bottom of the editorial - http://eldred.cc - where a campaign to petition Congress to effectively add registration to patents over fifty years old is underway.
Granted, if they want to mess with anything below fifty years, they are on seriously shaky ground - a $1.00 tax isn't enough to be considered more than a formality, in my opinion. Still, just imagine how much stuff Disney will find itself dealing with on a yearly basis to keep all of its creations and movies locked from the public domain - even if they're a large enough corporation to deal with it.
Nicholas Eckert
vidstudent
Everyone is griping about how long copyright is, instead lets lobby congress to reduce the length back towards the origional 28 years.
What congress can do, it can undo. All that is needed is a little pressure. In fact there is a large lobby group that already exists in trying to reduce the copyright period to 50 years, unless the owners pays $1 at:
http://eldred.cc/
So lend your support to it.
Actually, even once the copyright on the work itself expires, you'd still have to pay Disney a licensing fee to use Mickey, as Mickey Mouse is a registered trademark of Disney.
The only thing they would lose control over is the restrictive copyright to the expired works themselves, you still couldn't make a derivitive product (except under Fair Use) until they relinquish the trademark.
I recall reading recently about a spat between Nintendo and Universal(?). Basically Universal called up Nintendo one day saying to cough up millions of bucks for Donkey Kong, because, so they claimed that they (universal) owned the rights to King Kong. Well as the story went, Nintendo wanted to quickly settle as to not rock to boat of their franchise. So they went away tell universal they were going to research the amount and get back to them. Well Nintento cameback and told universal to go wash their heads. It seems that back in the day Universal went thru great pains to prove that King Kong was public domain so *they* didnt have to pay royalities. Of course Universal sued and lost badly as I recall reading. What can we extrapolate from this? Basically, if they cant get you to cough up legally, they will try to do it illegaly, by lying or misrepresentation. Its about who can scam the most bucks.. its not about 'intellectual property' at all.
(boy i hope that story was true:)
Too bad you don't use it properly. But you're in good company, because 90% of English speakers make the same mistake.
@BEGIN(pedantic)
An acronym is a word made up of single characters or character groups from a phrase, i.e., 'scuba', 'UseNet', 'SIGGRAPH', etc. The operative term is word -- you pronounce the conglomeration as a word: 'skoo-bah', not 'ess-cee-you-bee-ay'. If you pronounce each letter individually, it's an initialism or an abbreviation, not an acronym. If you pronounced 'LXG' as something like 'licks-ug', instead of 'ell-eks-gee', then it would be an acronym. There are a few oddities that are pronounced both ways, like 'ASAP' ('ay-sap' or 'ay-ess-ay-pee'), but they're not common.
@END(pedantic)
As well as buying up other people's hard work then rebranding it Disney (see Winnie the Pooh). They act like Microsoft in the way that they swallow up good characters and established stories instead of creating their own. These purchases are then rebranded robbing the original author of credit (I'm sure they get a tiny mention somewhere).
Ah, mod points for the second time ever, and they're no use now. I'll post a reply instead, about why I think this one isn't that interesting.
:P
The thing is that the Brüder Grimm didn't go around writing these fairy tales. They travelled around Germany collecting them. These Märchen or fairy tales were stories that had been told and retold throughout different parts of the region, and the Brothers Grimm went and gathered them all up, and published them as a collection.
Even Disney didn't copy the stories verbatim. Snow White, for instance, is mostly the same but there are quite a lot of differences between that and the story of Schneewittchen. Although this is a meaningless difference, I like how the evil Queen asked the hunter to bring back Snow White's lungs and liver so that she could have them cooked and eat them, so that she would be the most beautiful in all the country. I eat meat but not organs. Yuck.
Oh, yeah. A point. Err, well, I doubt that the Brothers Grimm could have claimed copyright for each story (although they certainly could for the actual collection of stories). And Disney made plenty of modifications to make it more suitable for kids. I do enjoy the grittier and gorier original published version, but Disney's Snow White is charming and magical and worthwhile all the same.
Which is why you have to have a cutoff date on copyrights -- the origins of so much material is lost in the poorly documented past. What's new is that we've effectively fixed the cutoff date for all material late in the 19th century. So Hollywood gets to have it both ways: they can mine traditional literature for free material, but their own work (even their own interpretations of traditional literature!) are protected forever.
There are two particular instances that I find particularly bizarre. The first is the song "Happy Birthday" which is under copyright even though nobody knows who wrote the lyrics. (The music dates back to 1893.) So every time it's sung at a part... well, maybe that's "fair use". But it's a fact that you can't sing it on TV without paying royalties.
The other bizarre example is the Frank Capra classic, The Best Years of Our Lives. For various reasons, nobody bothered to renew the copyright on this one. That's why it got played to death every Christmas for so many years. Then all of sudden, Aaron Spelling informed everybody that you couldn't show the film without paying him royalties. How did he seize control of a film in the public domain? By buying the rights to the story it was based on, and also to a song played in the movie.
Perhaps if you really wanted to, you could challenge Spelling's right to collect royalties on Lives. But no one will: Spelling has deep pockets, and it'd be expensive to assert a moral principle here.
And the moral of the story, boys and girls, is that it's not about what's right and wrong. It's about who can afford justice!
No suit--I don't fit into any of my suits anymore and can't afford a new one.
I'm actually in New Hampshire (near Massachusetts) and my free online book web site at http://www.eldritchpress.org is still up and running on my Linux box at home via a cable modem--unless it has been slashdotted.
The rumors of my turning Freenet infoterrorist are false. My current projects are scanning books for the Distributed Proofing project at http;//www.pgdp.net, promoting legislation at http://www.eldred.cc, and filtering books for the Internet Archive Bookmobile at http://www.archive.org.
Probably all are considered dangerous by the various $$ publisher groups, but I'd welcome co-conspirators!
I have disclaimed all copyright on this translation, which is a backtranslation of a Spanish rendering, which I made primarily from the original German version, well, the 1857 version anyway (there are variations in older printings, e.g., Snow White's stepmother in the 1857 version was her natural mother in the original).
-uso.
Snow White's accursed stepmother was invided to the feast as well, and when she had dressed herself in her most beautiful clothes, she stood in front of the mirror and said:And the mirror replied:This reply greatly frightened the accursed woman, and she did not know what to do. First, she thought that she would not go to the wedding, but she felt that she could not relax until she had seen the young queen. When she entered the palace, she recognized Snow White, and she was very afraid, so much so that she could not move.
But already there had been brought a pair of red-hot iron slippers, and she had to put on the slippers, and dance around the hall, until she could dance no more, and she died.
They do not have a trademark on Mickey Mouse, that's the point.
Yes they do. In fact, that's the only way they can protect themselves from "evil Mickey pr0n". The copyright on Steamboat Willy (and other Mickey works) does not prevent anyone from using those characters in all-new works. It only prevents people from copying/modifying those copyrighted materials.
And no, the trademark probably doesn't date back to 1928, but it doesn't have to. Trademarks don't have the strict requirements that copyrights and patents have.
Now, the situation if Steamboat Willy ever fell into the public domain would be rather interesting. People could make derivative works (including Pr0n) based on those images only, but would have to be careful not to push so far that the work would no longer be considered a derived work, because then it (probably, IANAL) be subject to trademark violation suits. An interesting reversal on the usual situation with copyright violations.
The idea that the Brothers Grimm collected fairy tales in germany is heavily disputed. See here.
Lots of evidence that they didn't collect the stories as they claim is easily available.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
You might also say that the use of a already worldly known character would make a film easier to sell to viewers, but since the film wouldn't be from Disney, who would be running to the theatres to see it just because of Mickey (it could even be a porn movie, not that you would like your kids to see that, would you?).
What about Pinocchio, or Cinderalla? I'm sure Disney would love to lock those characters up. There have been porn movies based on Pinocchio and Cinderalla, but most people can tell the different - the X-rated sign, the other movies at the theater or in the rental show. Heck, there have been other movies based on Pinnochio and Cinderalla - has it really made much difference to Disney? It's easy to tell the difference between the whip-driven, minimum-wage animated stuff and stuff professionally done, and even the other well done Pinocchio movies haven't had nearly the impact of the Disney version.
There are 32 movies with Pinocchio in the title in the IMDB, including The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio. Show me that not controlling Pinocchio has really hurt Disney, and I might start to believe it about Mickey.