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Comment by lancesells | Hacker News Reader

> Don't recruit me into some bullshit argument that rewrites history and entrenches Disney's ill-gotten monopoly.

You don't think it's them being allowed to buy Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm? Is creativity ruined because I can't make a Mickey Mouse cartoon or t-shirt? Does the world need Luke Skywalker coming from any individual studio?

People are free to make the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Aladdin, etc. and there's nothing out there that stops them.

I've got no love for giant corporations but I see it a lot less about copyright than massive corporation gobbling up more corporations. There's no shortage of creativity out there if you look for it.

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The copyright system is what has enabled so few companies (and one giant corporation in particular) to become the owners, controllers, and beneficiaries of the vast majority of American fiction and culture. From visual media companies, record companies, and publishers, you can probably distill ownership of more than 90% of the culture that the average American lives in to fewer than 20 companies.

Copyright has been the most powerful tool in any media company's toolbox when it comes to consolidating power and IP and rolling into a larger and larger ball of what we call culture.

That IP is sold overseas, so the USA has pushed very very hard to have copyright extended on other countries, presumably because it is a huge financial benefit to the USA (and indirectly to its citizens). Copyright extension is a non-negotiable item in a number of international agreements.

This is really a big problem with copyright - most people don't even get to vote for or against it because whatever "democratic" laws there are are only formalizing trade agreements that would be too costly to violate that doing so is not even up for discussion.

The three acquisitions you mentioned all took place many years after the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. Without the financial benefits conferred by that law (the timing and content of which benefited them more than it did their competitors), they might not have made all of those acquisitions.

A lot of people in this thread seem to be undervaluing those old school Disney characters, yes now Disney is huge and has a much larger portfolio of IP, but in 1998 they were a far bigger percentage of Disney's portfolio than they are now.

You're not wrong that consolidation is a problem. My point is that Congress changed the law in a way that helped Disney and at least partially enabled that consolidation. (In fact, it's fairly rare to come across a monopoly or any heavily entrenched corporation that isn't enabled in some way by government collusion.)

If you shoot someone, take all his money, then build a business with it, you're still a murderer. (Just now you're a rich murderer.)

> A lot of people in this thread seem to be undervaluing those old school Disney characters

Right? There were even competitors back then. People all but forgot the Looney Tunes.

They also tend to omit that at the time of the buyout Marvel was at a sales (and in many ways creative) nadir. It was hardly a media juggernaut. They actually went bankrupt in the late 90s, and it was only Carl Icahn buying much of their outstanding debt for Pennie’s on the dollar (and then firing basically all of the then-current board) that kept them from going under totally.

What's needed regardless of copyright or patent terms, is a similar attitude to legal predation as there is to physical stalking and threatening.

i.e. enforce egregious IP violations while criminalizing trolls.

I was "doing the analysis" w/ Toy Story not long ago. They basically invented Woody/Buzz out of whole cloth, "guilty of being an incredibly lovable toy by association" (with other incredibly lovable toys). As I'm watching Toy Story with my kid, and seeing classic toys (eg: Mousetrap in the background), all the "friends" are legit copyright classics from other companies, but Buzz and Woody are "Disney/Pixar Exclusives" and nobody else can include them. A clever mechanism that seems to have paid off over two modern generations to guarantee they can "craft" a new copyrighted character at any moment (Buzz 2.0, Space Cowboy 9000, whatever...).

Wow I never noticed this. Thanks for sharing!

Concentration is absolutely a problem, but the second point undermines the first. The world is more interesting because anyone can adapt old stories like The Little Mermaid however they want. How could it not be even richer if the same applied to newer creations like Bugs Bunny?

Both things can, and I think are, true. I see it as reduced competition in both cases, corporate consolidation making companies huge and large copyright timelines.

The long timelines stifle new creative works by keeping other, especially smaller, outfits having to make sure they don't accidentally run afoul of another copyright from decades ago. This needs capital to either be proactive in searching or to defend a suit that's brought.

Here's a recent article about the battle between the copyright holders of Let's Get It On and Ed Sheeran for Thinking Out Loud. Those two songs are separated by around 40 years. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/may/07/ed-sheeran-cop...

> People are free to make the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Aladdin, etc. and there's nothing out there that stops them.

IP law reasonably does. See: https://trademarks.justia.com/852/28/the-little-mermaid-8522...

"No one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm." L. Lessig

I’m no fan of the life of the author plus 70 years copyright regime we have today but the Brothers Grimm died roughly 70 years before Disney started making cartoons.

So that is still something possible to do in roughly 20 years.

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