Hacker News Reader

Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

I hope Disney wins. The 1998 Copyright Extension is over this year and WELL POSSIBLY we could get things back into public domain again!!!

Can we please figure out how we can have renewable copyright law which cost over $1,000 a year per copyright item. That way Disney can keep Mickey Mouse and 99% of the rest gets released as public domain. If not they are looking to increase the Copyright to 125 years after death.

I pray the reign of terror of Mickey Mouse might be over soon. https://boingboing.net/2018/01/08/sonny-bono-is-dead.html

View on HN

>Can we please figure out how we can have renewable copyright law which cost over $1,000 a year per copyright item.

No fuck Disney and their reshaping of America's copyright law. For one stupid animated mouse they changed how the entire Public Domain worked. It's not really possible to boycott Disney at this point, but if I could I would because of this issue alone.

>It's not really possible to boycott Disney at this point

How not? I consume nearly no Disney media. My biggest consumption right now would likely be hulu, and that's a shared account that I don't pay for

Disney owns 30% of Hulu and is purchasing 21st Century Fox which owns an additional 30% of Hulu.

Yes, and I didn't __need__ hulu. If it was my choice, I wouldn't have the account.

It is your choice, especially if you don't pay for it.

My mother pays for the account whether I use it or not. I cannot affect her purchase of it (I've tried). I don't have a choice on whether or not disney makes money from that account.

How about ABC or ESPN? If not them I'm sure there are a dozen other examples of things Disney owns that may or may not be common knowledge.

I'm not saying it's impossible but it is sure hard at this point. Personally I'd really feel like I was missing out by boycotting Star Wars or Marvel. I know not everyone likes the direction Disney is taking these franchises but I continue to enjoy them, especially when sharing with my kids. I'd miss out if I tried to boycott Disney.

Doesn't mean I like them as a company though!

Never cared much for the original Star Wars, and certainly don't care for the new ones. Don't care for the vast majority of movies, or even traditional media. I don't consume sports, so the only ESPN I view is Five-Thirty-Eight on election cycles. Meanwhile I haven't watched TV, or ABC in 8 years. Apparently I'm (accidentally) boycotting a lot of media.

I actually didn't realize it was so hard to avoid most of those things. They're full of the same old same old, and produce nearly no satisfaction for me. It's like eating fast food, very tasty, but of no quality. Though I say that, and yet regularly consume fast food. Goes to show my opinion of most "mainstream" media I guess

Do you ever go to any Marvel films?

I've seen very few of them since Iron Man 2. I don't particularly care for them. I have paid out of pocket for a single Star Wars film. I don't think I purchase much media they are connected to, more out of apathy than purposeful boycott, and I think it would certainly be possible to boycott them, just disappointing to some friends who enjoy their content. I took issue with "nearly impossible to boycott"

Because they own so many things. ESPN, Marvel (movies and comics), Photobucket, the History channel, 8 local TV stations, a documentary The Trial of Adolf Eichmann which aired on PBS, Vice Media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Disney and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_production_companies_o...

To be honest, and I admit that this is just me, but you described a whole lot of media I don’t consume and never will. I didn’t even realize that my viewing/listening habits amounted to a Disney boycott, but there it is. I guess they helped me along by being such crap.

It's just an example of their breadth. It would be difficult to intentionally boycott them because you'd have to cross-reference everything against a huge list of random junk like that.

Disney also has partnerships with studios behind Youtube channels who make money by mocking Disney. Epic Rap Battles has a lucrative (to all parties) partnership with MCN Maker Studios. Maker is owned by Disney.[0]

[0]http://newmediarockstars.com/2015/08/did-epic-rap-battles-pi...

Or just do what the original copyright law did -- you get 14 years with a renewal option for 14 more years. That's it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_th...

Cost should rise proportionally to length of copyright to disincentivize retaining copyrights indefinitely.

Ex.

First 10 years - free

Second 10 years - $1k/year

Third 10 years - $10k/year

Fourth 10 years - $100k/year

and so on...

So under your system, big blockbuster productions would have the longest copyright term.

I'd like to try exactly the opposite: when a work has been seen by a million people, it becomes public domain — whether that takes one year or 100 years.

Why? Because when you make a derivative work of Harry Potter or Star Wars you are not thinking that you can hoodwink your audience into believing that yours is the original, rather you're writing for a cultural context that assumes that people know the original. And to me that's exactly the underlying idea behind fair use.

I think it's done this way as a compromise to the current copyright holders.

Disney can and will easily pay 100,000 per year for all their productions in the vault, so no change in the status quo there.

However, most sci-fi books from the 70s which are already out of print, will become public domain, and you can now write "fan-fiction" for it and get paid without having to seek out the original copyright holders (if they still even exist).

It's questionable if Asimov's estate will pay 100,000 per year for each of his short stories, and lots of those make fantastic premises. If we didn't have eternal copyright, they'd make up a part of our literary landscape like Romeo and Juliet, or fairy tales do---something that can be freely alluded to, or redone.

The Monster (Short Story) would make an unbelievably great movie. It was written in 1948 70 YEARS AGO and is still under copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monster_(short_story)

Now that I thought about it. The Monster is the best story of the century and it can't be touched.

One idea that I had was to have copyrights expire after e.g. 20 years, but allow for renewals in exchange for an exponentially growing renewal fee. The first ten-year renewal would cost 1 million dollars (granting 30 years of copyright), and each subsequent renewal would last 5 years and cost twice as much. At this rate, holding a copyright for 75 years would cost about a billion dollars cumulatively, with another billion dollars required to hold it for 80 years and so forth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com