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.
Especially a company that had such a large role in writing those laws as Disney did.
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.
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.
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).
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.
TiVo and I am sure other commercial entities think that the GPL has unreasonable demands.
Authors of GPL software have the right to distribute their software as they please...just as Disney does.
>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.
Blumhouse and Tyler Perry Studios are evidence that you can be successful without budgets of $100 million budgets.
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.
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?
Really, you're complaining that the GPL takes away your right to take away rights.