Disney Lost Roger Rabbit
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law.
> when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.
That’s the sign of a deeply broken system. It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
Yeah, I cannot quite believe the term on that thing. Somewhere between 10 and 20 feels far more reasonable since businesses do need time to work plan around and develop property.
I'm not sure how I feel about auto-reversion as a concept. I can see real problems with it conceptually (creating a deadzone around expiry etc)
So, if I sell you my house or car I can't sign away my rights on it? - Sure, there is a difference between material and intellectual property ...
Against swindling there needs to be protection from fraud, but that exists in most legislative systems.
Yes, intellectual property rights should be different than physical property rights.
Property rights are a social technology to balance incentives and peacefully negotiate scarce resources (including time and effort). It's helpful to think about them in reverse: that they encode legitimacy to use force (usually via the State) against anyone who violates the right. That doesn't make the force right or wrong, a priori; it simply describes what happens. Exactly when that force is legitimate is the question at hand.
"Intellectual Property" is a post-hoc neologism. What we actually have are three very specific institutions: copyrights, patents, and trademarks. The last is arguably more like regulation than property: persistent brand identity to prevent fraud and confusion. Copyrights and patents are extremely clear in the Constitution, that their purpose is collective, moreso than an individual right for its own sake: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Hence why they expire: at some point, the incentive has already been provided, and the body politic benefits more by their being open-sourced.
Whatever "rights" framework one subscribes to, it is an extremely thorny question, whether they include the right to alienate those rights, to give them up on purpose. We allow people to alienate their labor, an hour at a time; but not to do so for a lifetime (voluntarily sell one's self into slavery). Many US states now refuse to defend "non-compete" clauses: that you cannot constrain your future self from working for a competitor for X years, even if you wanted to, even for very lucrative terms in the contract.
I'd argue that intellectual/creative works, are more like non-compete clauses: you actually create more bargaining power if you limit the scope, and take away the capacity to give up future bargaining power.
The broader point of my comment remains: a vehicle is a useful asset even without transferability.
IP rights require specific limitations on speech for everyone who is not the owner of an IP. It's walling off some expression as "copyrighted" so that no one other than the "owner" can express them (in a commercial way at least). Compare this to traditional property rights that merely prevent you from walking up to the owner and taking their (non copyable stuff) - a much lesser restriction.
This is why IP rights need to have limitations like a time limit, but I don't see why other limits like non-transferability are out of the question.
Why is that so hard to understand? You're free to negotiate such terms, but the buyer can and will push back.
And as for IP, with the time limits, patents and copyrights are inherently defined to expire, but are definitely not worthless.
But at the same time, hopefully you won't complain about the encroaching "You will own nothing and be happy about it" corporate ethos, if you want to restrict peoples' rights to buy and sell property of either a physical or intellectual nature.
This has come about due to a strengthening of IP rights, and could be reduced with a weakening of those same rights back to where they were a few decades ago.
In the 80s and early 90s, companies like Sony, Nintendo, and Sega tried to use copyright and Trademark and patent and other IP based rights to legislate their consoles and keep people from interoperating with products and software they sold. The courts correctly found against them: That general consumer product rights, even in their minimal state in the US, gave consumers the right to buy products that could interact with their other products, and that companies that sold those products were not allowed to prevent it, generally following first sale doctrine.
You as a video game seller could literally violate Sega's trademark rights to make your game work on the sega consoles, as verified by a judge, that was "Fair use". If you could find a way to get by Nintendo's security chip, you could sell games for their consoles, and Nintendo could not stop you through lawfare. You could build an emulator of the sony console that you sell for cheaper than a playstation, and that was also fair game. You could reverse engineer the IBM PC bios in order to sell machines that could use the same software that was written for those PCs. All these things were litigated in court and affirmed by judges as "No, consumers have rights and companies should not be allowed to stop you from buying stuff from other people that works on their machine"
Companies didn't like this though, because having to compete with someone else selling stuff for your console meant you had to compete. So they got the DMCA, and now all they have to do is put a teeny bit of "copyright protection" code somewhere, and it is now a crime to interoperate with that system.
The reason computers stopped being so interoperable and stopped being so open and stopped cultivating a vibrant market like that is because you just can't do those things anymore. Microsoft can legally prevent you from writing software that interacts with systems in ways they do not want. You cannot sell non-Nintendo approved games on the Switch like you could on the SNES not only because cryptography and computer security improved, but because trying to get around that can now be a crime!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention#United_Stat...
Imagine if physical product manufacturers had such insane laws benefitting them. Not only would your car need to take Ford branded gasoline, but any company trying to produce a gasoline that was compatible with Ford cars to compete with Ford branded gasoline would likely violate a bunch of laws and lose their shirts in court.
GM also comes to mind, where they void the warranty if you flip your new Z06 or ZR1 within 6 months. It's nothing more or less than an encumbrance on the title, and they shouldn't be able to demand that without consideration in the form of a discount. But they can, because they have monopoly power in that particular niche.
Key point is that Ferrari and Corvette are niche markets. Car customers in general wouldn't put up with it, because there's plenty of competition for their business.
The intent was to prevent permanent poverty (poverty = not owning land), and any slaves are also freed on the Jubilee (because slavery was also a poverty thing then). Today, though, it'd probably be more of a tool of a permanent ruling class, so it's probably a good thing that Jews and Christians mostly ignore that section.
It (Leviticus 25) was a tool of a ruling people-group; it kept Jews special and relegated other people's to potentially be slaves, and to not own property in Jewish lands. Also have special privileges to priests (Levites).
I mean that's part of why it's not relevant to Christians - per Galatians 3:28 - there's not supposed to be racial distinctions! And there are not supposed to be priests either.
In Germany the right is called "Urheberrecht" which literally translates to "author's right". And while you can license your work and sign away the usage, you cannot by definition sign away the fact that you are the author of a work.
But they exist to a (very) limited extent even in the US.
Yes, Louisiana somewhat notwithstanding, the US is basically common law like the UK (and much of the Anglosphere/Commonwealth).
As a bit of trivia, the MIT License was essentially created because of issues with "just" making X public domain. https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire
I assume Germany has something like this (possibly a EU requirement). It would cover more than just ghostwritten books.
Most software is written in a similar manner. Microsoft didn't write windows, lots of ghostwriting programmers did.
But we also the right to be named as author is not a requirement to be named as author.
My guess is that you won't find any publishers interested. Why? Because developing a work requires quite an investment and only the hits make any profit. The backlist is what keeps everyone in business.
Plenty of people lease. One way of looking at this is that Congress has kind of said you can only lease copyright (of certain types) and the maximum lease term is 35 years. Other jurisdictions have similar things with different names.
You could get different terms, but I'm sure you need clout first. Of course, the majority of my output is work for hire and I retain no rights and can't terminate it later; oh well.
What are you talking about? These aren't human rights we're talking about, it's copyright we're talking about.
Of course you should be able to sell your copyright to something. That's a major way you can make money, and a major way to get funding to create something in the first place. Every day you go to work and write code, you're selling your copyright to that code in exchange for your salary. You're saying you don't think that transaction should be legal...?
Yes you can be swindled. Guess what -- you can be swindled when selling a house or a car too, if you don't check the market rate and sell it for too little. Do your research, your due diligence, and if something looks like a swindle, then don't do it.
Most business conducted in the world does not require someone to reject their lawful rights. For consumers in the EU, for example, the law even offers explicit protections by stating specifically that contract terms which are unfair have no legal binding.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...
I believe the post makes a good case that "freely" doesn't mean by choice at all. In other words, not what people consider freely.
I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us.
With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought of getting a lot of plays is a little scary.
(Note: Statistically, people don’t live forever.)
Not at all.
7% have uncertain lifetimes, >= (current value).
In any case: """Yes, you're likely thinking of the "Wheel of Time" pilot episode titled Winter Dragon, which aired in 2015. It was a low-budget production that was released with almost no promotion and aired in the middle of the night on FXX. The purpose of this release was widely believed to be an attempt by Red Eagle Entertainment to retain the rights to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, as their licensing agreement required them to produce something before a specific deadline."""
Another less token one I'm aware of is the Marvel themed land of Universal Orlando. Universal has an indefinite license to the IP as long as they don't 'mishandle' it. An easy way to make it very clear that you haven't done that is to just never change anything. So all the rides, signage, etc is carefully maintained but identical to how it was 20 years ago.
Entity owns an IP, Entity doesn't want another entity to own it for risk to the IP. (the other entity being a globally publicly owned historic aggregator of IPs for sake of short term profits)
DIsney is doing the same in reverse with the Muppets/Henson Properties. Don't do anything with it beyond semi-annual short projects to retain the IP.
I mean, let the IP free or try to sell it if you are not doing anything with it.
No, let me correct you: He's being a Dick.
Well the rights were held by Disney from 1988 until 2005, and then they were tied up in court (between Beatty and Tribune) until 2011, when Beatty won the rights. The movie you're referring to was released in 1990.
So Beatty has held the rights for only 14 of those 35 years. Although the first special he made was released in 2010, during that legal battle.
Lots of old actors who don’t have dementia retire, there just aren’t stories about how they don’t have dementia.
Billions of dollars gone because of an oversight.
Arguably they didn't know Lucas was going to bring it back.
https://equinoxbusinesslaw.com/blog/how-hasbro-almost-blew-a...
> giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money you can give that kid that will buy them lunch – you're just enriching the bullies
Just before that he tries to sell us on the idea that there are no alternatives when actually there are. For example, you don’t have to publish a book through the Big Five. There are many large and small independent publishers, and some authors have had good luck with self-publishing.
I do think copyright law needs reform, but don’t trust Doctorow to explain it properly.
Like many industries, book publishers integrated: editing, production, marketing, and distribution. They may have also helped with licensing.
Would _Who Censored Roger Rabbit_ have been the success it was with a different publisher? These counterfactuals are hard to prove! (Look at the discussions this year around k pop demon hunters - how much credit does Netflix get for growing an objectively good film's audience? Reasonable people debate this!)
The big publishers do provide utility, but there's also an incredible asymmetry (they have trivially made many more book deals than any of their authors)
VivziePop with Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss was able to do this on YouTube and then ink deals with Amazon and merch retailers (where the real money is). Her shows alone rake in over $100m and the merch significantly more.
Glitch with Murder Drones and Amazing Digital Circus did the same. And they've stolen a lot of high profile folks from Disney for Knights of Guinevere and upcoming shows.
Psychic Pebbles did it and how has an Adult Swim show. Joel Haver, lots of others...
This is basically what George Lucas was able to engineer with his 20th Century Fox deal to maintain merch rights. But it's even better for creators today.
> And what alternatives existed for Wolf in the 80s?
> The big publishers do provide utility, but there's also an incredible asymmetry (they have trivially made many more book deals than any of their authors)
Literally doesn't matter in today's meta for people making music, video, or games. A substack or podcast following will do the same for authors.
It's not that this isn't hard. I'd argue it's harder to get noticed today now that everyone can make content. It's just that the power asymmetry is disappearing because you can hold onto more of your rights.
Today it's about building a brand following. If you can do that, the publishers will chase you.
It wasn't available for Wolf because nobody realized this strategy yet. A lack of Internet made it more difficult, but not impossible. George Lucas kind of got it.
Now it's glaringly obvious. Just not easy.
This is incredibly incorrect! The examples you've pointed to illustrate the smiling curve [1].
Publishers still have an enormous amount of leverage and power, and that is extremely important for other businesses operating in that space. Not everybody is an individual creator, and some creators prefer to work on small teams. You're describing this incredible transformation of the value chain (who provides value, who captures value) while missing the point!!
> It's just that the power asymmetry is disappearing
This is so fundamentally untrue. Do individuals have more power? Yes! Their BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is now "fine I can self publish and survive." That doesn't mean there's not a huge power asymmetry still. Without the blessing of Microsoft, Sony, Apple, valve it is hard to get my game featured. Can I still go viral? Of course! But listen to Zach Gage talk about the funding difference for making a game for Apple Arcade. It prefunds development and allows him to hire a team.
As for rights negotiations, even Taylor Swift had some difficulty reclaiming ownership of her masters. The power asymmetry is alive and well.
> Would you rather I delete my comment
No, I want you to read more carefully and engage with the things people are actually saying and not what you think they are saying from briefly skimming what they write.
[1] https://stratechery.com/concept/aggregation-theory/smiling-c...
Yikes. I really do not appreciate your unkind tone in these last few messages.
There's a really big trend you're missing by focusing on old anecdotes.
The creator economy is on pace to exceed the size of Hollywood and the music industry combined.
There are kids on Roblox making six figures while still in school. The next generation knows what's up - they want to be YouTubers and not movie stars, because they know how fundamentally the world has changed. How a world that once relied on nepotism is opening up more opportunity. (It's still hard, but you don't need the "right parents" anymore.)
$100M brands and franchises are launching on YouTube.
Publishers and distributors will take what they can get. They make money on volume now, and if they screw over publishers, new players enter to fill the gap.
You could even go raise capital on that narrative of servicing the creator economy. The VCs I've talked to are excited about it.
> But listen to Zach Gage talk about the funding difference for making a game for Apple Arcade.
It's becoming easier than ever to raise funding for video game development. There are now dozens of funds specially for this. Including funds that give you six figures without a demo if you've already worked in the industry.
> As for rights negotiations, even Taylor Swift had some difficulty reclaiming ownership of her masters.
Taylor Swift is a billionaire and she negotiated her early contracts two decades ago. Before steaming, ie. ancient times, ie. when dinosaurs roamed the earth. And she's found ways to wiggle out of them.
We're talking about the same trend: the transformation of the publishing industry across all different types of media.
I'm not missing it. I'm paying attention to the context of this transformation and what it implies for all of the participants, not just individuals.
The point I was making in my original post is that an author in the 80s did not have the same options as a creator today. You have repeatedly responded by talking about how creators today have so much power.
Please, go read a piece about the smiling curve from Ben Thompson, because it's important. This trend implies that margins accrue to the two ends of the spectrum. Yes, individuals with low costs win, but also there is another side to the smiling curve. While life can be good as a YouTuber, TikTok, Meta, and Google are not taking risks on content like the publishers of old but they still reap the profits from media production. It is the creators who now bear the risks.
This also means that the traditional mechanisms of funding your book through an advance are fundamentally different (they exist, yes, but they're different)
And because the smiling curve implies a hollowing out of the middle, it is harder to survive as small publisher (see the transformation and aggregation of magazines, newspapers, tv stations)
Am I excited about this future? Yes! But it's not an unmitigated good. And one can't understand it if they don't know any of the historical context or see what's happening to other players in the industry
He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection. Resulting in twice compressed 128k MP3s and innumerable blog posts.
What are you referring to here?
I see. When I hear "record collection" I think of vinyl records, so I was quite confused how DRM was relevant there.
I think the best thing that Doctorow could do is set up his own publishing business and show the big companies the right way to do it. If he's right, he'll get the best new talent and quickly succeed.
But I'm guessing he'll discover what the major companies know: the consumer is fickle, developing a new book/movie/song is expensive, and only a few hits pay for the rest.
That's how I read them as a kid with no money.
In fact even a mediocre university press likely has higher standards, in just about every conceivable quality aspect, than even the best imprints of the big 5.
Why would anyone, excluding authors, even want low quality books to have any ROI?
Indeed. What are the relative statistics on authors who have managed to bootstrap themselves vs. authors who make a comfortable living through the Big Five?
"The median income of full-time self-published authors in 2022 was $12,800 from books and $15,000 total from all author-related activities. Full-time self-published authors who had been publishing since at least 2018 reported a median income of $24,000 compared to $13,700 in 2018, a 76 percent increase."
Traditionally published commercial authors made about $10,000 more.
https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author...
But Doctorow also says:
> or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks
And this is largely true. I don't think there's any viable path for self-publishing success right now that doesn't go through Amazon.
Are there many small press distributors? How's SPD doing these days?
With enough forewarning, suppliers could anticipate the increased demand and prepare for it.
Landlords are, by and large, not the ones who create new housing units, and "lack of profit potential is" also generally not the main impedance to creating new housing in most locations either.
It somewhat is. Housing builders can only do so many projects per whatever cycle they run. They will optimize towards building fewer projects that are highly profitable rather than building tons of low income housing or starter homes that each have much lower profit.
Builders don't want to scale up, they want to make money. Building would also be abysmal to scale up anyway, because it's somewhat skilled labor that you pay peanuts for.
This is just one of the ways that wealth inequality results in market failures.
People with lots and lots of wealth value each individual dollar significantly less, and are therefore willing to part with significantly more dollars per unit of service or product. That means you always get a much higher profit margin targeting stupid rich people than anything else. So everything is built around bilking these dumb but wealthy people for everything you can, and nobody builds or sells much to the poorer people. This drives prices for things up in general, and starves the market of oxygen for meeting the needs of less wealthy people.
Ask any developer, big or small, who their target market is, and they will not say "poor people" and this has been true for decades, and the difference between "poor" and "not poor" has only continued to grow.
> when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.
Beautifully explained the complex situation and its kind of scary how it applies to tech as well in some areas.
The second point is also true w.r.t big tech & privacy regulations.
Having to compete with a billion other content creators (including hits from the past) is inherently hard. The most valuable service the big media sellers provide these days is curation.
Reducing copyright length would be the best thing to reduce the big companies’ power though. That way, they can’t sway buyers to their silos using content from the past, and therefore have to invest in the future.
Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content), which would then reduce the number of buyers for new content, increasing the monopsony effects.
Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator.
You seem to be thinking of copyright purely in terms of vast media conglomerates, but it affects literally every work created by every human in the country. That includes these HN discussion posts!
Additionally, I find it hard to see how your second paragraph holds. If the amount of exclusive content a given entity holds affects their odds of being bought by a larger conglomerate, I would think it would be in the opposite direction: having more exclusive content would make them more likely to be a target for acquisition, so that the larger company could then hold all of that exclusively.
If everything older than, say, 35 years were suddenly in the public domain, available to be distributed by any of the distribution companies, and Hypothetical Media Corp had half the back catalogue that they used to, then surely that would make big conglomerates less interested in buying up Hypothetical Media Corp?
> If everything older than, say, 35 years were suddenly in the public domain, available to be distributed by any of the distribution companies, and Hypothetical Media Corp had half the back catalogue that they used to, then surely that would make big conglomerates less interested in buying up Hypothetical Media Corp?
Doesn't your first point contradict this? If almost all the value of copyrighted works comes in the first few years, then no, curtailing copyright terms doesn't discourage buyouts, because the buyout is going to be mostly justified on the recent works held by the purchased company, not the residual value of its old works.
In the 1800s, musicians would freely write new lyrics to existing tunes, which is why folk music has various songs that share the same music. (There is the satire loophole, but that's creatively limiting.)
In the 1980s, musicians would record short slices of chords from records (or breakbeats) onto sampling devices and make new music from them, giving rise to an incredible number of musical genres.
Copyright came for all of them and created a new status quo where exercising that sort of creativity is legally cumbersome.
And now the paperclip maximizers are trying to chip away at fundamental music theory, with lawsuits over chord progressions (of which there are very finite possibilities) and other attempts to grab slices of other pies. (See: the recent suits against Dua Lipa, Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran.)
We wouldn't have Wicked, one of the most beloved twenty-first century musicals and now a high-grossing film, if Oz were still legally encumbered.
It's important to recognize why this is the case - a lot of the hubbub around posthumous copyright comes from the fact that a large amount of classic literature often went unrecognized during an author's lifetime (a classic example is Moby Dick, which sold and reviewed poorly - Melville only made 1260$ from the book in total and his wife only made ~800$ from it in the remaining 8 years it remained under copyright after Melville died, even though it's hard to not imagine it on a literature list these days). Long copyright terms existed to ensure that the family of an author didn't lose out on any potential sales that would come much later. Even more recent works, like Lord of the Rings also heavily benefitted from posthumous copyright, as it allowed Tolkien's son to actually make the books into the modern classics they are today, through carefully curating the rereleases and additions to the work (the map of Middle Earth for instance was drawn by Tolkien's son.)
It's mostly a historic example though; Copyright pretty blatantly just isn't designed with the internet in mind. Personally I think an unconditional 50 years is the right timeline for copyright to end. No "life+50"; just 50.
50 years of copyright should be more than enough to get as much mileage out of a work as possible, without running into the current insanity where all of the modern worlds cultural touchstones are in the hands of a few megacorporations. For reference, 50 years means that everything before 1975 would no longer be under copyright today, which seems like a much fairer length to me. It also means that if you create something popular, you have roughly the entire duration of a person's working life (starting at 18-23, ending at 65-70) to make money from it.
And I also understand Disney's point of view. Imagine you invested a lot of money into a franchise and the original author suddenly goes crazy and makes Roger the Rabbit a Klansman.
Although personally I would put the protection at 10 years.
Currently, people give a ton of money to Comcast/Disney for stuff made decades ago, which in turn gives Comcast/Disney more power, since people are far likelier to stay within those silos.
If friends/seinfeld/whatever could be accessible via multiple sources, then other groups of content creators could emerge, offering $15 to $25 per month of new stuff, rather than compete for a smaller portion of the budget since the old content takes up so much.
The creators of new work don’t earn much from 130 year copyrights anyway, to fund any decent production, they will need outside investors such as Disney or Apple or whoever to make the gamble. In exchange, Disney and Apple are going to want the ability to sell it for 130 years, but few if any new content creators is able to negotiate gross royalties, those days are long gone.
>Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content)
This is the opposite of what would happen. If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.
Because this syllogism doesn't hold. There's not a fixed pot of money that must be spent on content. If now every streaming service has access to a bigger pool of old hits, then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.
> If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.
Each service will just become sameier and compete more on their UX than their exclusive content. You can see this in music, for instance, where the big streamers already have more or less identical catalogues. Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.
This is an incredibly good thing.
Why would they have customers in the first place if all they offer is reruns, which everyone else also offers? Streaming only old content will be a very, very low profit margin business.
> Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.
Creating and streaming audio is not a comparable business to creating and streaming video, due to the vastly different sums of money, and hence risk, involved.
But, also, people have to pick only Spotify/Apple/Amazon/Alphabet and a couple others because of excess copyright terms. All the old hits people want are controlled by Universal, Sony, and Warner, and so if your audio streaming business does not contract with those 3, then you’re dead in the water. Which means every audio streaming business, and hence every audio streaming customer, is always paying rent to those 3 businesses that own copyrights.
That means there is less money available for new audio creators. And this holds true for all rent seeking. If it weren’t for excessive copyright, there could be much more variety in audio streaming.
You can ask the same question for cable TV, but it's not dead. Netflix also started as purely "reruns" and was still quite popular.
> Creating and streaming audio is not a comparable business to creating and streaming video, due to the vastly different sums of money, and hence risk, involved.
If anything that extra risk should make studios more shy of investing in new content vs just serving up old hits. It's noticeable that film leans way more heavily on franchises and remakes already, which agrees with this hypothesis?
> That means there is less money available for new audio creators. And this holds true for all rent seeking. If it weren’t for excessive copyright, there could be much more variety in audio streaming.
You assume this, but I really don't think it's true! Most people don't seek out new music; their tastes are set in their youths and then they happily listen to the same music for the rest of their lives. The choice is to make them pay to listen, generating at least some stream of royalties, or let them listen for free, in which case they will be happy to.
I mean, given that Disney wasn't doing anything new with Roger Rabbit, I'm glad he got the rights back. But I think part of the reason that very little new material got produced is that the first movie was kind of lightning in a bottle. It's possible other production companies would have had to be involved to get something new done, depending on how the rights were parceled out. (We're all talking about Disney here because that's who Doctorow focused on, but it was a co-production with Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment.) And I think you're right that he's unlikely to have the rights to do a sequel that's too close to the original.
Yeah, isn't that the central gag of the movie though?
Not to mention some of the actors have passed like Paul Reuben who really sold the cartoon aspect of Roger Rabbit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDKfLZNMtmU
Paul Reubens wasn't great. With the right direction he could easily have been as good as Fleischer, but I'm sure he was (incorrectly in this case) trying to show he could be less over the top than Pee Wee Herman, who was a known quantity in LA at that time.
What fascinated me is how I reacted to the Jessica Rabbit pencil test, where she snuggles up to the live actor. Even in that low resolution, lousy video transfer, I had a visceral reaction to her character. Those animators were all kinds of good even for a minor demo.
often big media companies aren't interested in exploiting specific properties if there is ongoing litigation regarding them.
It's a long-winded article, even for a lawyer, but the payload seems to be a crack at the head of the RIAA, which is suing Midjouney.
"In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods."
Mainly that creatives are being screwed because every time they get given extra rights they’re bullied into selling them for nothing.
So this right that they get the copyright back after 35y is different - because you can’t be forced to sell it for nothing.
We need more laws like this to help creative people make the money they deserve. Most creative people make a pitiful amount of money while studios / publishers / labels do better and better. It’s not sustainable.
That's how you can tell that the RIAA/MPAA propaganda campaign against AI to protect its racket is working.
The RIAA is a cartel monopsony that demands songwriters and singers negotiate away all equity in their work as a condition of market entry. But there are alternative markets for music, and successful musicians that have navigated them. This is why, for example, mainstream music has been so strangely stagnant while the independent space is a lot more innovative. The labels don't pay good money for innovation; hell, they don't even want it. They want a sure hit saleable product every time.
As nerds, we're predisposed to look at generative AI through the framing of the Napster Wars. Except file sharing wasn't doing what generative AI does. P2P gave you a more or less faithful, if lossy, reproduction of a specific work. It might have missing or wrong metadata, but it was still clearly identifiable as that work. A generative AI system is instead producing legally distinct work - which is why all the AI training lawsuits are failing - using the creative input of the data the company scraped to train on. It infringes on the moral grounding of copyright but not the copyright itself.
The threat that generative AI systems pose to artists is twofold: spam and standardization. Generative AI makes it far easier to churn out samey-looking outputs, while losing utility as you try to get more interesting or innovative styles out of it. It's a slop machine. And, notably, these are exactly the sort of things the RIAA wants out of mainstream music:
- AI music is safe and approachable. If you ask it for jazz, you're getting a stereotype of the jazz genre.
- AI music can be mass-produced at scale without needing to advance an artist royalties. That means you can spam it on Spotify and destroy the discoverability of independent musicians.
- More importantly, generative AI turns the act of music production into ownable equity. The artist is cut out of the picture completely, there is not even the need to find a naive artist that will sign their life away in a 360 deal for peanuts.
The ideal world that the RIAA wants to live in is one where each label sues and then buys out an AI music company, and then has that company train a fully-owned "house model" on their back catalog only. No other entities will be allowed to train models, either through aggressive copyright litigation or through some new "AI safety law" that conveniently exempts them. They'll own the streaming sites and digital marketplaces, and any independent musician making real music will get crushed under the weight of AI slop.
Real talking head videos do way better than AI videos though (there's a huge authenticity movement), and a lot of what people like about consuming content is the connection with the creators, so I don't think creators are really threatened by AI.
Generative AI is dangerous to pop, but for subculture fans, the uniqueness of the art means a lot more, because subculture people tend to be discovery motivated.
I wish we would go back to that.
The simplest interaction would be "it's practically impossible to renew copyright on something created by a large number of employees", but IMO, that's not a bad thing.
> The media industry isn't just a monopoly, in other words – it's also a monopsony, which is to say, a collection of powerful buyers. The middlemen who control access to our audiences have all the power
I'm happy to see apps included here, I feel sometimes folks forget these are also a form of creative works and having the two gatekeepers constantly filter and influece what can and can't be released is absolute nightmare for both developers and consumers (who don't even know the things they could've had but were denied by big A or big G).
That's an interesting framing. I know why Doctorow wants to import the boss/worker concept here, but it just doesn't apply. Disney wasn't Wolf's boss in any sense that is usually understood, and it just obscures the picture with a bunch of class-based chaff.
Much reform is needed, seems to apply to everything...
One of the reasons I still love it is that it hasn't fallen prey to the usual Hollywood practice of taking something you love and shovelling it down your throat until you're sick of it. It saddens me when you see a really good movie with a bunch of bad sequels, or TV series that were once great but ran for 10 seasons too long.
”Giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. You're just enriching the bullies.”
The big “5,4,3,2,1” is also a powerful piece of rhetoric. Who is this Doctorow person? He has my attention! :)
It's sentences like these that make it hard for me to take Doctorow seriously.
No media company is "forcing" anyone to do anything. They're paying creatives for their work. Every creative is free to say no. Musicians are free to shop their music to different record labels for the best deal. Authors pitch their books to different publishers to see which one offers the best deal. And there's always self-publishing as well.
We can have a reasonable conversation about copyright without saying silly untrue things like media companies are "forcing" creators to take deals.
Taking half your life to get your stuff back?
On the one hand, imagine they could only negotiate rights to monetize that hit for, say, one year, and then this termination right kicked in. What do you think would be the top offer they could make an author?
The fraction of creatives that are great creatives and also great marketers/producers/runners of media companies is small, really small. So, creatives have an incentive to have a system where some amount of time is contractable. And media licensors rely on this hits-based model to fund all their development and betting on things that don't work out. And also to fund their jets and cool Bel-Air homes.
This quote sums up a lot of the issues with current copyright laws in a very elegant way.
Little Samson, a late-era NES game that because of its rarity can sell for thousands, was developed by a now-defunct company and is getting a re-release next year using this process.
https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/10/daunting-limited-...
If the developer licensed the game to a publisher then maybe.
Roger Rabbit was actually played in 35mm just last Thursday in Central NJ. What a treat it would have been to known that the original author got his characters back. I was lamenting on all the time that had passed since release. This cheered me right up! Will we see a whole Roger Rabbit universe now?
There’s a timeline where big media publishers at least accidentally defend the rights of small-time IP holders (individual creators)—they’d go to court with the likes of OpenAI and Midjourney and put an end to training commercial ML solutions on unlicensed material. Specifically, if they would owe a large media company for training on their original works, presumably they just as well owe an average Jane. (Granted, assuming that Jane has not signed away her rights to a large media company she works with, but that would not apply to a massive number of small-time creators.)
How exactly could that be the case? Assignment isn't automatic. Creators have to agree to assign to publishers. It's not clear to me how this doesn't make them strictly better off. Assignment of renewability, in Doctorow's framing, is valuable. How are creators made better off for not being able to sell it?
†(he refers to the framer's original term of 14 years + renewability for 14 years, leaving out that the term was extended to base 28 + 14 year renewal in 1831 --- he also leaves out that assignability predates the modern media industry by decades).
To play devil's advocate, this provision probably lowers how much media companies are willing to pay when acquiring copyrights.
Otherwise ("creative works" based on the original material also transfer to the author of the original material) would mean that the author suddenly owns the MOVIE as well...
This nightmare scenario involves selling the rights to your character to a company that has the ability to produce, advertise and cast a movie with talented actors.
I'm certain I never would have heard of Roger rabbit had it not been sold.
Bonus if it randomly starred or was directed by someone who later became famous, or if there are blog posts calling it an unknown masterpiece.
Nice to hear that didn't happen in this case and the author gets a second chance!
Isn’t that most of the work?
You get: A lumpsum for your initial research that ended up as a character that people like,
They get: The idea of a character, but then they have to invest billions, build projects that work, tie relationships with cinemas and actors, advertise worldwide and maybe they make billions if they worked properly, but sometimes they make losses. Sounds like they worked for it, and building the initial character is like 0.0…1% of the talent involved.
Unionist gets: A nice story about how it’s always multibillion dollars companies that have all the money.
Maybe ideas are free and implementation is everything?
That tells me that ideas aren’t free. There’s a value to a fully cooked, ready to wear, tried and tested ideas.
As a second point, many good Hollywood pitches remain in development hell, unable to get a satisfying script, or a “second act that works”.
Plenty of people earn lots of money licensing their art to Hollywood. Some people just have more business acumen than others.
And yes if you are selling art for money you are a businessman. Get an agent if you cannot hack it for crying out loud.
Is there evidence this is true? It doesn't sound very true.
- Ghostbusters (he was filming Beverly Hills Cop at the same time)
- Rush Hour
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Should be 3.5
This is drivel written by someone who doesn't understand the mechanism of supply and demand. If you don't like the price, don't sell. If you don't like the terms, propose alternative ones. The real risk to creators is artificially suppressed demand through industry consolidation, not nuances to copyright law.