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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

It’s not really worrying. Disney owns the films. They don’t have to distribute them at all, and in this case, they’ve determined it that the money they’ll make from an independent theater is smaller than the money they’ll make distributing another way, or perhaps not distributing at all for the time being.

I recently contacted a student artist to ask to buy a print of a work they posted on an art forum. I had no particular limit to my budget. The artist said no.

You know what I can do about it? Absolutely nothing. It doesn’t matter how badly I want that piece in my home.

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If they own the rights they can do whatever they want to, but that doesn’t mean we cannot consider it worrying. In fact, if we consider some of their actions too worrying, we can change the copyright law to better benefit the society.

You seem to be confusing what is legal with what is reasonable. It's entirely justified to criticize a company for doing entirely legal things. Indeed it is impossible to make illegal everything for which a company might deserve such criticism.

> It's entirely justified to criticize a company for doing entirely legal things.

Especially a company that had such a large role in writing those laws as Disney did.

So then I’ll ask, what about this specific action is unreasonable?

It is unreasonable to deny the entire public of works of art that are culturally relevant.

Who determines what is culturally relevant?

You’re saying that if I make my own movie with my own funding and time/effort, if enough people like it and the culturally relevant switch gets flipped on they get to take it from me while I’m still alive and I don’t have any say on whether my work is duplicated or screened?

What if I run a SaaS product, people have been using it for 30 years, and they’ve determined it to be culturally relevant. Do they get to copy my source code and run it for themselves?

These are 70s and 80s movies. Many of those who contributed to them are still alive. It’s entirely reasonable for those people to determine how/whether to distribute their own art.

If you believe in that level of public ownership I can respect that you hold that opinion, but I don’t agree with it. At the same time, I do believe that copyrights expiring a lifetime after the creator dies are unreasonable.

To me, the right balance of copyright law is somewhere in between the extremes of Mickey Mouse ownership in perpetuity and complete public ownership.

I am pretty sure if you asked the creators of these films, they’d want them still shown. We’re talking about the actions of Disney, which wasn’t even the studio for the Fox films.

The “creators” wouldn’t have been able to create anything without the financial backing of the studios. You have a few like Lucas and Spielberg who owned their own production companies.

You're right, those uppity "creators" should be thankful.

Joking aside- This will become less true as technology makes film-making and distribution more accessible. Studios know this, so they've switched focus to tightly controlling distribution. Hurray for cultural gate-keepers.

How are they controlling the “distribution”? There are so many streaming services and cable channels hungry for exclusive content that if you make something halfway decent someone will buy it from you. On top of that, you can sell directly to consumers on iTunes, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Redbox VOD, etc.

> How are they controlling the “distribution”?

What do you mean? The very article we've been discussing is about Disney's attempt to control distribution.

I agree that for now there's a healthy ecosystem of distribution channels for newer, lower budget content - I said as much. What's happening is that the studios are countering that by tightly controlling valuable legacy content. The kind of stuff we see as part of the cultural zeitgeist of the last several decades (again, see the article for examples).

Disney is controlling access to their content not content you create yourself. Disney isn’t stopping any of the content distributors I named from distributing anyone else’s content.

Using your dominant control over a resource in order to kill off a business in competition with you could be viewed as anti-competitive?

Using copyright for control and censorship, instead of remuneration.

You mean like the GPL3 is using copyright to control which companies can use code?

The GPLv3 doesn't do that. The GPLv3 allows any company to use the code, provided they're willing to abide by some reasonable terms (which they are free to view as unreasonable, just as I am free to view them as unreasonable.)

The GPLv3 is not being used to create artificial scarcity of popular culture for corporate profit. That might be a difference you're keen on abstracting away, but I think it's a pretty big difference.

Disney uses copyright to control distribution to commercial entities and those commercial entities - cinemas - think the demands are unreasonable for their business model.

TiVo and I am sure other commercial entities think that the GPL has unreasonable demands.

This attempt to morally equivocate an international corporation denying people access to popular culture, and volunteer developers giving away source code for free on the condition that anybody who wants to sell it also distribute the source code, is absurd. Bordering on offensive.

They created the “popular culture” authors of GPL software didn’t whine about Microsoft not open sourcing Windows, they created their own software.

Authors of GPL software have the right to distribute their software as they please...just as Disney does.

Disney's legal right is not in dispute. A morally equivalence is the matter disputed. You can only hope to equivocate the two by abstracting away "minor" matters like the vastly different power dynamics involved, or the nature of terms of the licenses in question.

>authors of GPL software didn’t whine about Microsoft not open sourcing Windows

We both know that's not true, but it's also not relevant.

The entire software market was about proprietary servers running proprietary servers backed by corporations. Open source software took over the server market.

Blumhouse and Tyler Perry Studios are evidence that you can be successful without budgets of $100 million budgets.

None of that comes anywhere close to justifying your equivalence of Disney and free software developers. Rather you seem to be trying to walk that back by instead talking about other things.

The simple fact of the matter is the nature of the licenses in question are very different, and the nature of the licensers in question are very different. They share little other than a relation to copyright. The social impact of their use of copyright, which is the matter of contention, is worlds apart.

No, I think that any time posters on HN want the government to intervene and dictate what others can do with their content would be horrified if the same policies applied to their sacred cows. Whether it be GPL or the right for companies like ElasticCo and Mongo to forbid cloud providers from offering their software as a service.

What’s the difference between Disney not allowing their content on Netflix or in theaters so they can exclusively use it on Disney+ and ElasticCo not allowing third party cloud providers to allow their software to be sold as a service so that they can exclusively offer managed services?

Do you want the government to step in and tell you how you can distribute your work?

You would have strictly fewer rights if the code did not include the GPL. It lets you use the code with no restrictions whatsoever, provided you place no restrictions on your users. And if you don't like that, you're still free to negotiate different terms with the owner of the GPLed code.

Really, you're complaining that the GPL takes away your right to take away rights.

The author of that software has the right to distribute software as they please because of copyright law. The government/copyright protects creators and allows them to dictate terms of distribution just like it protects Disney.

It’s worrying because Disney lobbied over the years to increase the length of copyright.

They perverted the intent of copyright, which is to encourage the arts by providing a temporary monopoly: After which artists are expected and encouraged to freely borrow any bits of the work and create their own.

Now they’re outright restricting even viewing of famous works. Disney is terribly corrosive.

While true, Disney has nothing compared to European authors, who lobbied the EU to create significantly stronger copyright protections than even Disney was able to lobby for in the US.

So stop blaming Disney for the state of copyright, and start blaming all the European auteurs who tried (and nearly succeeded) in getting indefinite copyrights that passed down from the creator to his estate in perpetuity.

A business practice of refusing to make key cultural works available to the public-- this is on par with patent trolling. I don't debate their legal right to do it. It's still surprising and another reason to criticize both their business model and the current incarnation of copyright law, which this company had a significant role in creating.

There's almost nothing we can do about it, though. Nobody cares enough to force congress to reverse direction on copyright laws.

However, individuals and companies can contribute to the public domain. That is something we can do regardless of what the current copyright law is.

Patent trolling, for example, is less profitable due to reforms around the edges. We've seen an almost shocking level of legal innovation in many backwaters, from pot to legal opiod to climate change. The ground is shifting and a company that controls 40% of the nationwide market for anything is (or ought to be) subject to a higher standard.

We can change the laws. We just need enough people to make a fuss about it.

This is a major misstep by Disney, because it the crosses over to the older generation.

Best to spread the word.

It's legal for them to do this, sure. It may even make business sense. But should a society lets them do this?

That is more pertinent question.

Is it legal though? It could be market abuse?

And the reason they own some of them instead of the public, is that they are large and rich enough to have laws changed to allow them to continue to own them.

how everything you said "It’s not really worrying"?

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