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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

i'd never seen steamboat willie before; now that it's public domain in the usa, i have

wp says:

> In the 1950s, Disney removed a scene where Mickey tugs on the tails of the baby pigs, picks up the mother and kicks them off her teats, and plays her like an accordion, since television distributors deemed it inappropriate.[34] Since then, the full version of the film was included on the 1998 compilation VHS The Spirit of Mickey and the Walt Disney Treasures DVD set "Mickey Mouse in Black and White", as well as on Disney+.

this version has the tugging on tails, but not the picking up and accordioning of the mother, so it's a falsified version

the version xdennis linked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jap-UBbmPsw in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38830369 does have that full segment and is also clearer

View on HN

The version that was put on the Main Page of English Wikipedia today also has the accordion part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:POTD/2024-01-01

That’s one sadistic cartoon…

I just love those old pre-hays-code movies. The Hay's code brought censorship from the movie industry in 1934 because they were afraid the government would step in otherwise.

The fact there's no censorship just makes them so raw.

> this version has the tugging on tails, but not the picking up and accordioning of the mother, so it's a falsified version

I wondered if that puts the Corridor version in jeopardy in any way, given that the version they have posted was produced many years later. In my few minutes of research, it seems like the answer could be quite complicated and it would depend on whether or not the censorship process exceeds the threshold of originality.

For example, I imagine if Disney had engaged in a significant colorization process of the original footage in the 50s that the resultant colorized footage would still be under copyright today.

I do think that the process of removing footage could be considered a sufficiently creative endeavour. For example, if Kubrick released a re-cut version of Odyssey 5 years after the original, I would not expect the re-cut to enter public domain until 5 years after the original (even if the only difference was removal of certain scenes). If anyone could argue that censoring a film constitutes as an editorial creative process and thereby should be granted copyright protections, it's Disney.

wow, i didn't even think of that problem! by falsifying our cultural heritage you may gain the legal right to further suppress its publication and study. a harsher indictment of copyright is hard to imagine

According to the US copyright office, this is unsupported.

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf

Even reading that document, I think the answer is "it depends".

For example, this[1] work is entirely derivative, created only using cuts from another piece of media and yet the resulting work is a complete departure and loses practically all meaning from the original. If Disney had done something like this years later using Steamboat Willie, I don't think there'd be any question that it should be considered a copyrightable piece of work and exceeds the threshold of originality.

According to the Copyright Alliance[2]:

> There is no requirement that the work be novel (as in patent law), unique, imaginative or inventive. A work need only demonstrate a very small amount of creativity in order to meet the originality requirement.

If J.K. Rowling replaces the word "wand" with "wang"[3] in the Harry Potter series and publishes a new revision, has she created a new work? According to your link, yes, she has. If you upload Harry Potter "wang" edition to the internet after the original edition enters the public domain, have you violated the copyright on the "wang" edition? Well, I think it could be argued that you have!

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=694_jtbvJuY

[2]: https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai... basics/requirements-for-copyright-protection/

[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080618113626/http://www.bash.o...

All good points.

I posted the PDF but should have quoted, “it is not possible to extend the length of protection for a copyrighted work by creating a derivative.” But, I get your point: is it possible to practically extend a copyrighted work by defending a carefully-chosen derivative?

I was surprised how broad this can go: the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. Section 101: A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a "derivative work."

So, it appears I’m not clarifying anything. But, maybe we look at the things which are not derivative works. Let’s say a movie shows a copyrighted picture on the wall. There seems to be a six-second convention beyond which a production assistant would typically obtain permission.

The Titanic story comes to mind: James Cameron paid for a particular painting shown in Titanic. It was re-released in 3D and he was asked to pay again. So, within the industry, his derivative work enjoys protection, but insider copyright agreements do not survive the derivation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3890204

https://archive.ph/VF2AR

your understanding of derivative works 'protection' is backwards, in large part because copyright lawyers use euphemistic doubletalk. 'protection' doesn't mean you can't be sued or will win if you are sued. it means you can sue someone else and win, such as a guy on a blanket outside the mall selling titanic dvds or your translation of don quixote

This clearly can't be the case since then copyright could be extended for thousands of years just by purely cutting out scenes here and there.

I think it entirely depends on if those cuts constitute the creation of something that could be considered a new piece of original work.

Sometimes the removal of certain scenes from a movie could completely change the way you think about that movie, or completely change the overall tone.

So this still seems like it would allow copyright to be extended for thousands of years? A 2 hour movie can easily be edited, significantly, a few dozen times.

only if nobody saves a copy of the unedited film

a more serious risk is not having any way to save it or distribute it reliably; works that are too similar to copyright-restricted works tend to disappear into the memory hole on youtube and similar platforms, with no due process and no appeal. for now you can still get hard disks that don't automatically scan their contents against a youtube-style blacklist, and which can retain their contents for more than a few months when turned off because they aren't SSDs, but neither of those is likely to remain practical forever

Colorization might be interesting in court. If original colorization was actual manually painting animation cells, and 2023 colorization is applying the right parameters to Stable Diffusion, then maybe the manual effort is protected whereas mechanical is not.

Is this related to how mainstream music publishers have been churning out pointless remasters of albums made decades ago "to improve how they sound on modern devices", while dropping the licensing of the originals on digital music platforms (to buy and stream)?

that would require music execs in 02020 to spend money today to guarantee their companies' profits in 02040, instead of spending it on buying cocaine for the next boy band, so it seems improbable

Meanwhile, continuing down the rabbit hole of corporate psychopathy:

Clicks link to view video

Confronted by blocked video with the message "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube," even though he turned off his ad blocker a week ago

Changes URL to onion.tube to view it there

Confronted by a message saying that YouTube is currently attempting to block Invidious instances, so this video can't be viewed

Clicks Switch Invidious Instance

Finally watches the video

...I guess the moral of this story is, soon we won't even need copyright law to stop us from watching all the things

you can also open Youtube on a computer without an ad blocker (e.g. a stock Firefox or Chrome instance), or pay for premium if you don't want to watch ads

The lengths people go to to escape an easy and affordable option is curious.

When subscription prices get too high and the service lackluster, I can understand. Every production company tried to build their own subpar streaming service, and value delivery just doesn't scale like that.

When every one of a million different news websites has its own individual subscription, I can also understand. Nobody has time for that, and the service offered is never worth the value.

But YouTube premium is dirt cheap. And you're paying for legions of engineers to make the service rock solid. And it has everything. I think it's the last service I'd ever cancel, and I don't even watch YouTube that often.

I pay for it myself, but I Don't think I'd call it dirt cheap? 14 a month isn't much cheaper than streaming services used to be. Netflix used to be under ten dollars a month so maybe that anchored the price a bit in my head.

14 dollars a month is more than i spend on internet access and transportation put together, because i live in a third-world country in an economic crisis

right now i'm visiting my in-laws for the new year, and they have netflix; i think they pay 8 dollars a month for it

Dirt cheap? And when combined with all the other services? Which ones do I get?

in this case what it's providing you is (instant, seekable) access to (recoded versions of a falsified version of) a public-domain video which it attempts to prevent you from storing a copy of locally

it's ridiculous that we're even considering depending on those legions of engineers given that most of us have at least ten-megabit internet service at home, but decentralized alternatives like lbry/odysee and even bittorrent are getting lobbied out of existence, in large part because they are resistant to censorship

I'd rather just be able to own the pixels that hit my screen. They gave me the information and it's now mine - sorry!

I would tape rented VHSes back in the day too.

At least Blockbuster charged me for the original. YouTube just makes me "watch" an ad before I get my copy [1]

[1] A computer watches the ad for me

I don't like the bait-and-switch. It's evil and scummy. I feel dirty paying for evil and scummy.

Youtube was built based on work of a creator community -- much more so than Alphabet engineers -- who viewed this as a sort of open platform. Once there was network lock-in, the paywall hits, the mandatory obnoxious ads hit, and the user-hostile JavaScript hits.

Alphabet holds the legal contract, and the army of lawyers, but there was a social contract with a community which it simply broke.

It tried (with mixed success) to do the same with the free GSuite service (once they have all your email, bill you for seeing it). Remember how Alphabet originally won by using unintrusive adwords instead of flashing banner ads? All these things might be legal, but they ain't right.

I pay for subscription services, but yes, I'll go to great lengths to never, ever pay a penny for Youtube.

this is why free software and peer-to-peer network architecture is important. centralized network services and proprietary software inherently make users vulnerable to such abuses, and the companies that engage in them will be more profitable than their competitors who don't

No! Absolutely not! This is war now: either YouTube goes ad-free for free or YouTube goes bust!

i'm skeptical that google will continue to operate youtube as a public charity indefinitely; perhaps we should switch to decentralized systems with higher reliability instead of locating a single point of failure on sundar pichai's desk

Other than the bullshit computerised systems behind the scenes that are the bane of creators on the platform… it’s hard to think of a more reliable website than YouTube…

I’ve heard Google employees/engineers make jokes (not entirely sure how much is a joke and how much is real) about how YouTube might be the first website back online after WW3 assuming it didn’t destroy the internet (seeing as the internet originally was designed to survive such a thing it’s not entirely far fetched to imagine global chaos and heavily degraded services but still operating in some capacity)

the reliability of centralized systems is like the reliability of the farmer's generosity toward the turkey: unfailing until the inevitable thanksgiving

the year youtube ceases to be profitable is the year it deletes 100% of its videos and you discover that your extrapolation of its reliability into the future was based on an incorrect understanding of the world

if you've been paying attention, though, you know that a substantial percentage of its videos have already been consigned to the memory hole, so its reliability as a repository of human culture is already observably poor

I think it's just YouTube being buggy.

90% of the time they block me because I have an ad blocker that is _disabled for their website._ The other 10% they show me the video. This feels like a bug.

I'm not going to pay them because they have a bug, or if it's not a bug, pay them because they think they can tell me what addons I can run when viewing other websites. That would be like Stockholm syndrome.

YouTube is a highly optional part of my life, so if they are going to fuck around and be shitty, fuck em I'm out. Happy to instead do my small part in breaking the monopoly and just reduce my YouTube consumption, plus encourage other people to reduce it as well.

You can run Piped or Invidious locally without needing to worry about Google blocking the IP.

Or download Freetube desktop app.

If yt-dlp works, you can also use Celluloid to watch videos from Youtube — choose Open Location and enter the URL of the YouTube video or playlist page.

=> https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

=> https://flathub.org/en-GB/apps/io.github.celluloid_player.Ce...

yeah, i watched it with yt-dlp

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