Peter Pan copyright | Hacker News Reader

Peter Pan copyright

gosh.org

142 pointsthunderbong106 comments

I'm sure someone has already pointed out the irony of a story about a kid that refuses to grow up being granted perpetual copyright.

I would have rather the government (through a third party) estimated the present value of the hypothetical royalties and set up an endowment if they wanted to support this hospital, rather than pervert copyright law for special interests.

Most of the relevant copyrights are expired everywhere. The last ones expire this coming December.

Except in the UK, where a 1988 act provides special copyright status to "Peter Pan" that gives GOSH royalties for performances and adaptations, publications and broadcasts forever.

It would really suck if all of a sudden the government would have to make sure the hospital is fully funded. /s

Strange because in the UK, hospitals are allegedly fully funded by the government.

Not after over a decade of Tory rule.

The hospital is "fully" funded, which means they pay for doctors and treatments and stuff, but most (maybe all) UK hospitals have a charity arm that pays for some extras, like refurbishment of rest and waiting areas and things like toys for kids to play with.

Because Great Ormond Street is the UKs top children's hospital, kids get referred there from all over the country so their charity also fund places for families to stay nearby and sometimes pay for travel.

Great Ormond Street's charity raises enough money to also make grants for research into childhood disease and stuff.

https://www.gosh.org/what-we-do/

Oh, thanks for that correction.

"The various uses of Peter Pan that have given the hospital money throughout most of the years since Barrie's death in 1937,

will continue in the UK at least thanks to former prime minister Jim Callaghan.

Encouraged by his wife Audrey, who was a chairwoman of Great Ormond Street,

Callaghan successfully campaigned to get the UK's 1988 copyright act amended

to give the hospital the unique right to royalties from stage performances of Peter Pan and any adaptation of the play forever."

Very convenient.

A little marital cronyism! Gotta love it.

To be clear, I’m fully in support of the cause. But this is still cronyism.

Cool word to learn as non-native English speaker! Never heard of it before. I thought you were mentioning Cryonism, or Crayonism. I wondered what kind of religion that was.

It's the word that's used in place of "corruption" when speaking of one's own country.

Corruption is a rude and dirty word. It's use would besmirch the good reputation of those engaging in it. Cronyism is considered much more polite.

Cronyism is a specific subclass of corruption.

How is that even legal?

The UK passed a law saying it is?

Yep, here it is!

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/VII/crossh...

Can they pass a law to cancel all copyright as well?

Yes, though as they signed the WIPO copyright treaty that would piss off ~80% of the world.

UK has no (codified) constitution. They can just write whatever weird shit they want and call it law, for the most part.

Parliamentary sovereignty is often seen as a central element in the British constitution, although its extent is contested. It means that an Act of Parliament is the highest form of law, but also that "Parliament cannot bind itself".

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

To be fair, a constitution doesn't seem to prevent weird and perverse laws. Look at Florida.

Nothing is perfect. A constitution is there as a mechanism to make it harder to pass weird and perverse laws that are inconsistent with the state's values. But if the voters keep electing people who work to weaken the constitution or to amend it (or replace it altogether), it'll happen eventually.

A lot of things in modern democracies, or even older ones (like the US's federal constitution) are really there to act as roadblocks and prevent a simple majority of voters from electing some shitty politicians who make wild changes in the law. It's a bit like that scene in "Alien" when Sigourney wants to blow up the Nostromo, and has to go through a ridiculous process of flipping switches and raising and turning and lowering some metal cylinders inside a control panel in the floor: blowing up the ship doesn't really need all that stuff, but it's just there to make it hard to do quickly and easily.

The principles of Parliamentary Sovereignty, Rule of Law, Democracy and Internationalism are all mechanisms used to also ensure that laws must be consistent with the state's values.

I dunno. Parliamentary systems are supremely malleable. Look at what is happening in Israel.

I don't think Israel, a theocracy, is representative of parliamentary systems. Almost all of Europe is governed by parliamentary systems, and most of the EU countries are fine.

>A lot of things in modern democracies, or even older ones (like the US's federal constitution) are really there to act as roadblocks and prevent a simple majority of voters from electing some shitty politicians who make wild changes in the law

I wonder if this creates a feeling among voters that it is OK or even desirable to vote for batshit politicians, because they'll be constrained by the constitution and "nothing ever changes anyway".

And then those politicians decry the constraining checks and balances as the "deep state" or "the blob".

The "deep state" was never meant to be part of the checks and balances; it was meant to be prevented by such. Yet Hobbes's Leviathan grows unchecked.

Look at the federal gov.

I thought according paragraph 61 of the Magna Carta the 25 Barons are expected to declare them selve in rebellion as a control mechanism.

A fringe group of modern day commonwealth citizens construct quite elaborate fantasies based on that:

https://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2020/12/04/magna-carta-and-fre...

Most the Magna Carta has been repealed by now and replaced with newer laws more appropriate for modern times.

The Queen gave her royal assent.

And everyone knows what would happen if she didn’t, they just like to pretend otherwise.

Welp, laws literally define what's legal. Get a law to say so, and pass it, and execute it, and tada.

Whats the point of copyright laws if you can bypass them at will?

Can you elaborate?

And it only took damn-near a century after the author’s death for it to expire.

The supporters of copyright fear monger and present a parade of horribles that will flow if excessive copyright isn’t allowed. (Folks will “abuse” the Mickey Mouse character via pornography, etc).

But I think history has, and will continue to, prove out that these are BS and that it’s all just a cash grab.

> Folks will “abuse” the Mickey Mouse character via pornography, etc

Clearly these people haven't actually looked at cartoon porn sites.

That's not even copyright, that's Trademarks and maybe registered design patents.

If I draw fan art of Mickey Mouse, it's copyright me, not Disney. If I sell it or use it for promoting something, then it's probably a violation of Disney's trademarks - trademarks are there to make sure you don't think something was made by one entity when it was actually made by another.

Trademarks don't expire after 50 or 80 years or whatever. They exist as long as the holder continues to assert them.

Surely UK law doesn't carve out a special provision for Great Ormond Street to receive royalties for Peter Pan? Oh hang on, yes it apparently does: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/schedule/6

There's also a special law for IP related to the Olympics, though I think that's quite common internationally. Not that it makes it any better.

Also, perversely the KJV of the Bible has perpetual copyright in the UK. Not sure if God sees any of the royalties.

At least arguably the Crown paid for that translation.

Quite. And if you'll excuse the pedantry, the KJV is patented, under a “letters patent” issued by The King.

I point this out because these days the term patent almost always implies an invention. It's an interesting counterexample.

> Not sure if God sees any of the royalties

God didn't write it - it was written by a committee of 47 scholars overseen by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the behest of King James the first, so the Church of England/UK State should get royalties. Although presumably most of the plot was copied from previous authors.

That "Peter Pan" is permanently copyrighted in the UK is just an eccentricity. I might even like the Brits precisely because of their eccentricity. The reason I do not like copyright law is not because of its eccentric, but because of its normal rules with far too long protection periods.

>I might even like the Brits precisely because of their eccentricity.

Eccentricities: plural. Thanks for the kind thoughts, though.

> Adjective. deviating from the recognized or customary character, practice, etc.; irregular; erratic; peculiar; odd

Perfectly valid usage.

While you are correct that "eccentricity" as an adjective is a correct usage, OP used it as a singular noun in the preceding sentence, making it ambiguous whether they are appreciating the British for their eccentricities, or for the particular mentioned eccentricity.

If OP's intended meaning matches the adjective as you describe, then it would be clearer communication to use "eccentricity" in this context.

It's not really ambiguous at all, unless one is being pedantic. "I like the Brits because of their eccentricity" is perfectly normal English, referring to their overall quality of being eccentric.

The sentence before it with “an”

You can technically read it that way, but that's not how I think most native speakers would read it.

If you like us for our eccentricity, you'll love us for our pedantry

> OP used it as a singular noun

Is that the case? Reads as a possessive adjective to me. The OP likes the Brits because of the characteristic that they possesse.

Nevermind, as someone else pointed out, it is used as a noun. Still, it's the correct usage in the possessive context.

That seems to be “eccentric” not “eccentricity” (your failure to cite the source of the quoted definition makes it harder to tell, but it is almost verbatim the M-W definition of “eccentric”.)

(Eccentricity, the noun used, is just fine with “the British” if onenis referring to the collective manner in which they are eccentric, the plural “eccentricities” would be appropriate if one was referring to the diversity of particular manners in which they were eccentric.)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eccentric

> eccentric - 1 of 2 - adjective

Edit: Ah, I misunderstood your comment, my bad! Yea, I quoted the adjective definition, but the original comment is still using the word correctly.

The American colonies fought a war to escape such eccentricities like unequal protection under law.

Peter Pan fought Captain Hook for the same reason.

America's story: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!"

> That "Peter Pan" is permanently copyrighted in the UK is just an eccentricity.

'is just eccentricity' no article

it's an adjective after all

"Eccentricity" is a noun, not an adjective. "Eccentric" is the adjectival form.

It had taken a new meaning I think, “an eccentricity” is, like, a single eccentric action or trait.

No need to do a pedantry.

All three of these are valid:

1. X is just an eccentricity --> Noun (countable)

2. X is just eccentricity --> Noun (uncountable)

3. X is just eccentric --> Adjective

For (2) see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun

(1) is probably the best in context here, i.e. "an eccentricity of the UK legal system"

Agreed; it only took damn-near a century after the author’s death for the copyrights to (mostly) expire.

But I think history has, and will continue to, prove out that these are BS and that it’s all just a cash grab.

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

> Disney was a long-time licensee to the animation rights, and cooperated with the hospital when its copyright claim was clear, but in 2004 Disney published Dave Barry's and Ridley Pearson's Peter and the Starcatchers in the U.S., the first of several sequels, without permission and without making royalty payments. In 2006, Top Shelf Productions published Lost Girls, a sexually explicit graphic novel featuring Wendy Darling, in the U.S., also without permission or royalties.

Hey I read Lost Girls. It's by Alan Moore (Watchmen, Swamp Thing...). It's good.

Is a well-written Naruto fanfiction featuring Naruto and Sasuke having sex good? Because that's what this is the pre-Internet equivalent of.

I'm not seeing your point. Writing is writing, it's not good or bad because it's fan fiction or inspired/derived from another writer's work. And there are plenty of great works of writing that feature sexually explicit scenes.

Didn't Fifty Shades of Grey start out as a Twilight fanfic?

Yes, interestingly it's not even notably good fan fic. So this suggests that there was an underserved audience.

That is to say there were a lot of people (mostly women, statistically) who wanted to read about this messed up romance where the very rich guy with mummy issues treats our heroine poorly and she's ok with that because of the money. In some larger cultural sense that's not great, but nobody else was writing the stories they wanted to read.

… is it not? Well written fanfiction is still well written. I mean, look at Monty Python And The Holy Grail. Is that not well written Arthurian fanfiction?

Doesn’t “well-written” imply “good”? Or is there a nuance I’m missing?

Yes, to the same extent Idylls of the King is well-written King Arthur fanfiction.

Only on HN would people complain about a kids' hospital getting a little extra money from the copyright of a book, which was the author's intention.

As it happens, I'm off to GOSH this morning, to teach kids on the dialysis ward how to use Scratch.

Ooooh nice! I remember when I celebrated Halloween there with my ex a few years back, when she worked there. Lots of fun memories.

To the other HNers, I can tell you that GOSH is one of the more deserving places for a perpetual copyright.

As has been pointed out: Give them perpetual funding according to the needs of the children, not pervert unrelated systems to provide an unstable income stream.

Your mistake is in equating a voluntary donation by a private individual out of his own goodwill to government funding. As a private individual, if I wanted to simply give money from my work to an institution, the government should have no say in how returns from my work should be used, except if it is in the spirit of facilitating my intended purpose. The status quo is exactly what JM Barrie had intended.

when someone uses children to get money, I'm mores suspicious, not less

I think the issue is more that this kind of stunt is necessary at all - that a private memorial for a man’s money should be needed to preserve the lives of children.

That hospital should be fully funded through taxes. The government should be taking care of those kids, not the Peter Pan Estate.

The hospital itself is primarily funded through the NHS which pays for its core work. The GOSH charitable foundation (which the PP Royalties go to) pays for things like additional research funding, some capital equipment for cutting-edge kit and additional family support.

The one thing that I think it funds that should be coming out of government funding is building work to maintain/replace buildings that are near end-of-life.

Do I weep at how broken it is or laugh at the absurdity?

That does not seem to have stopped them from making endless film adaptations of the book. Feels like there's been a new one every five years for my entire life.

I appreciated the comic book adaptation called Peter Panzerfaust, where the Lost Boys were a resistance cell in WWII, and Captain Hook was a Nazi officer. I assume that doesn't require licensing, because it just uses the ideas without reusing any specific, named elements. It would be better to make something completely original rather than just adapting old material, but that's evidently not possible anymore. So, the next best thing is to recontextualize it and change the idea enough, which not only makes for something novel, but also dodges these ridiculous legacy licensing issues in certain cases.

Bangarang!

In seriousness, this seems to be due to the risk aversion in the film industry which started in the 2000's:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_based_on_Peter...

Hardly the only casualty (see: spider man).

Nazi Hook is interesting because of the hidden theme behind Peter Pan. Wendy is really the protagonist of the story (hence the original name Peter and Wendy). She enters a dream world where Peter represents her child side that refuses to grow up and Hook represents the adult side. Hook and Wendy's father are voiced by the same people in the movies and plays.

So a Nazi Hook might represent Wendy's subconscious pressure to become Nazi? Intriguing idea. Though possibly it doesn't realize the subtone of the original.

This kind of thing requires a teleological analysis. Is it really so bad for a children’s book to serve as a perpetual annuity for a children’s hospital? It certainly serves the public purpose better than a certain mouse empire that’s dictated US copyright law from its quasisovereign territory in central Florida for the better part of a century. Should we morally lump them together?

No, can you see? It would be far better for the copyright system to exist wholly designed for profit and us fighting to destroy it rather than one part of the system being designed to benefit a children’s hospital and us still fighting to destroy the whole system!

Anything less is copyright realism!

If the hospital needs to be funded, then the British government should properly fund it, based on a progressive tax code. If the hospital doesn’t need the funding from the royalties, then it’s a meaningless regressive tax that, if anything, harms children to some amount, since they can’t enjoy any works that would have otherwise been freely created but can’t be.

Disney is certainly morally much worse than a children’s hospital, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t criticize the hospital. And I doubt the comments here are hurting the hospital in any way, for that matter.

You’re basically just replacing a tax on the returns of a specific play with a tax on income.

At least the tax on the play can’t be spent on something else.

Basic funding is through the NHS. The charity mainly funds additional advanced R&D, family support etc.

I always find it interesting how people want to eliminate (or radically shorten) copyright for books, and forget that copyright also applies to software code (something they don’t want eliminated or shortened).

You have this backwards. Anticopyright sentiment started with software developers who did not want to be locked out of modifying their own computers. Free Software came first, Free Culture later on.

Free Software isn’t against copyright law. Copyleft couldn’t exist without copyright.

Some of the early Free Software ideologues specifically referred to copyleft as a way of using the copyright system against itself, but ultimately they would have preferred no copyright at all.

> Some of the early Free Software ideologues specifically referred to copyleft as a way of using the copyright system against itself, but ultimately they would have preferred no copyright at all.

If they really preferred no copyright as an ideal, they would have created a free software license that imitates the no-copyright state as far as possible in the given system:

A license that does allow to distribute compiled code (executable binaries) without the necessity to provide the source code, but which also does not forbid any person to redistribute, modify, reverse-engineer, ... these binary files without having to ask for permission (with a virality in the latter conditions).

Perhaps such a license would also contain clauses that by using the software, you give any other user of this piece of software for any applicable software patent (to handle the situation regarding software patents, which is a topic separate from copyright, but still relevant to FOSS).

I am not aware of the existence of any such an open-source license.

I had also had a similar idea, and am also not aware of such a thing, nor about how to write such a thing.

(I also want to not require attribution, to require that other distributions and derivative works that have been published must also provide the same permissions to anyone else (even if the license is not included), that you are only sued for violation of this license if you sue or otherwise use legal methods (e.g. lawsuits, DMCA, etc) to stop someone from exercising their rights under this license, and that (for practical purposes) you may relicense any derivative work by GNU GPL 3 and GNU AGPL 3 (or later versions) if you have what you need in order to do it (in this case, source code and attribution are needed to relicense it in this way).)

The GPL uses copyleft to both disable copyright and turn software into something more like a book that doesn't have a distinction between binary and source code. So it effectively also disables arseholes who would refuse to share with the community they took from. It's brilliant!

I'm not sure that's true.

Lacking copyright restrictions, I can take any AGPL code, compile it into my commercial product, and distribute only the binary.

In other words, lacking copyright restrictions, hinders the goal of Free Software, it doesnt enhance it.

What happens if you include AGPL code into your commercial product assuming copyright laws exists:

* you must give source code (to the software users, not necessarily to anyone)

* receivers of software gain rights to modify it (because AGPL says so)

* receivers of software gain rights to further distribute it with or without modifications (because AGPL says so)

What happens in the previous scenario without copyright law:

* receivers of software can modify it (because copyright law doesn't prevent it)

* receivers of software can further distribute it (because copyright law doesn't prevent it)

Even more so the same happens automatically if you don't include AGPL code.

That's 2/3 things which copyleft code grants not being necessary because there is nothing preventing it. Sure not having the source code and having to reverse engineer things to modify them takes more effort. But large portion of software is closed source anyway, reality is that in many case GPL type licenses instead of increasing amount of open source software simply prevents its usage in the commercial software. The current trend with programming languages is going for higher level ones which are much easier to reverse engineer or require barely any reverse engineering. There are also plenty examples where copyright law get's used to prevent doing anything near the product containing closed source software not even directly modifying the software in situations where people are willing to spend the effort for creating new software or do the reverse engineering. Stuff like John Deer preventing repairs because you own the tractor but not the software. Cricut (vinyl cutter maker) preventing creation of third party desktop software for using their hardware because that would somehow violate copyrights of their firmware.

Preventing commercial software from using open source libraries isn't the goal of Free Software. It's a middle finger for copyright law doing the same in opposite direction.

The idea is that benefits of being able to freely modify and distribute any software might be might outweigh the few cases where software vendor decided instead of not using the GPL library to make their whole software open source.

We can only speculate how it would play out in long term. Would more commercial software be written using C++ instead of javascript and electron? Would more software be server side only? Would obfuscation be more widely used? Or would everyone accept that that's the norm, which wouldn't be that different from how things were in the early days of computers.

I don't doubt that if copyright was suddenly one day canceled companies would use every possibility to claw back privileges they had before. Once something is given it's hard to take away.

The goals of copyleft could exist without copyright; we could for example have consumer protection/right to repair laws that require that all companies that sell products that include software must provide the source code for that software, and must not use technological methods (e.g. cryptographic methods or burning a fuse after programming) to prevent consumers from running modified software.

I think you possibly misunderstood the point of the parent.

Without copyright law its not possible for the GPL to exist. Specifically the freedoms given by the GPL would be meaningless and all (currently GPL) code would be "public domin" and therefore could be used in closed-source projects.

So, absent the ability for the author to decide on the license, you are suggesting that, instead, you would require legislation forcing all software producers to release all source code for everything.

There is precisely zero chance of that being possible. Never mind the moneyed interests that would rail against it, never mind that it would need international ratification, it would have knock-on effects with regard to trade secrets and so on.

In reality, as much as OSS would hate to admit it, the revenues from closed-source are ultimately what drive the OSS movement. The failure of OSS to monetize at scale, the reliance on money from the likes of Google, Meta, Microsoft and so on, show the need for both a copyright system and the fact that some licenses generate more cash than others.

OSS and FS allow creators the -choice- of how to license their work, and by extension choose how their work is used. Suggesting that "there should be a law that all software is AGPL" (my interpretation of your suggestion) would meet strong resistance.

There's zero chance of copyright reform either (copyright has also ossified itself through international treaty), so as long as we're discussing "what ought to be", it's worth pointing out that it wouldn't be that crazy to require source code availability as a consumer protection regulation. It's essentially analogous to requiring manufacturers make their service manuals generally available. In fact the whole free software movement was kicked off in response to printer manufacturers making their products impossible to fix, which is still a problem. And fundamentally, it's a right-to-repair issue.

The FOSS movement predates all of those companies, and Microsoft was actively hostile toward it for a long time. GNU/Linux, BSD, GNOME, KDE, postgresql, etc. would still be here without them. Plenty of FOSS development could be done as a synergy with other products; e.g. Intel has a good history of this. With adequate consumer protection, all software could be this way (things like games could have copyright on the artistic assets. See e.g. id software). And in a world where all software is FOSS, it would still be a multi trillion dollar industry (perhaps with more of a professional services model) because software automation is simply too valuable not to be created.

Anyway, the point is that copyleft is a (well done) hack on the legal system. It's meant to be a practical solution while we advocate to fix the law. It's not an end in itself.

I mean you're just wrong.

"Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

If there are no copyright restrictions, then all works, derivative or not, are freely available. Elimination copyright all together is the most extreme version of copyleft.

Free Software is 100% against copyright law. Copyleft is a hack which uses copyright to effectively disable itself. It's necessary because of the viral nature of copyright. If we could just switch off copyright for software then copyleft, the GPL etc would be laid to rest, their job done. Copyleft is a pragmatic solution in a world where copyright does exist.

it's a feature not a bug

> and forget that copyright also applies to software code (something they don’t want eliminated or shortened).

We don't forget at all. That's, like, half the shit we argue about.

Get rid of it. It'll make the world a better place, and those of us that write code will be able to get so much more done without having to worry about this stuff.

You position your argument as a consumer, not a producer.

Under your suggestion I can take the GNU source code, add some stuff, fix some bugs, and release a binary-only version (presumably for money).

Under your suggestion, authors would have no control over their work at sell. Uou made z great text editor? Great, I'm using it in my proprietary closed-source IDE.

Under your suggestion there would be no balance. Without the stick of virility there can be no carrot of "publish our source code".

In the long run, the lack of copyright would hurt OSS since much of OSS is funded, directly or indirectly by commercial closed-source software.

> You position your argument as a consumer, not a producer.

I am both.

> Under your suggestion I can take the GNU source code, add some stuff, fix some bugs, and release a binary-only version (presumably for money).

Sure, but you can't copyright the binary either then.

In fact, get rid of intellectual property in general. It's kinda BS, since there's no natural scarcity.

> Under your suggestion, authors would have no control over their work at sell.

Correct. I think my previous sentence also covers this.

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