As someone who has loved going to see "classic" movies in the theater, it's a different experience than watching them at home. I'm not going to the theater because I don't have the movie, but because I want to see it on the big screen, with other people, and get that movie experience. For movies that came out before my time, it's been amazing. For example, I've seen Wrath of Khan so many times at home, but it was nowhere as good as seeing it on the big screen. I wonder what the numbers say on how many people won't buy a movie or stream it just because their theater decides to show it (and usually it's a very short run, like a one night or weekend).
Have you ever considered simply buying an HD/4K projector, a decent-quality screen, and a surround-sound setup? If you have a good-sized living room, then the resulting experience is so comparable to a cinema that I personally have never felt inclined to pay for a film at the cinema for the seven years now that I have owned this home setup. Yes, you won't be able to watch it with a set of strangers around you, but I imagine many people would consider that a downside of the cinema, not a plus.
You just described something that costs thousands of dollars to set up and thousands of dollars of added rent. Or we could just go to the movie theatre every couple weeks.
Basic 4K projectors are down to 1,000$, you can add a screen and surround sound for another 500$. Assuming you would watch any other video like Sports, Netflix, or YouTube it’s a significant upgrade for both.
As to space, you can put your collapsible screen in front of bookshelves, windows, doors etc So they take up less useful space than a large TV.
RE Space, you do need quite a lot of open area to give the projector space to fill a decent area too though (less so if you've permission to mount it on the ceiling).
I'd be surprised if a good short throw 4K projector is $1k (but if you've got recs within that range I'm very interested)
That’s an ultra short throw which is different as it’s aiming for around 2 inches from the projector to the screen. Short throw is more in the 4 foot range while producing an image several times that size. https://youtu.be/Fu_U0HS7axk
A normal projector is 11+ feet from the screen. The diagonal being approximately the same as the distance from the projector to the screen.
I have seen short throw 4K projectors from around 1,500$ but IMO they are a poor fit for home theater as the screen ends up as a bright object in people’s view.
> You just described something that costs thousands of dollars to set up and thousands of dollars of added rent
The cost of projectors and surround-sound speakers has dropped so significantly in the last decade (and you can use a Raspberry Pi as your media center) that I suspect it is within a lot of people’s means here and that this audience has splurged on other high-end electronics from time to time. I mean, I live in Eastern Europe on a local middle-class salary, and my setup was still achievable after a few months’ saving up.
Definitely, the real limitation to this setup is whether one can rent or own a standalone home. As the other person mentions, this is not an easy option for that portion of the HN readership who has moved to NY or SF. But for cinephiles elsewhere, they ought to think about such a setup and see whether they could make it happen.
Yes, I have a decent home theatre, and my partner and I enjoy watching shows and movies on it most nights we're home.
But going to a beautiful old cinema to watch a classic movie on a huge screen, is a whole different experience, and one that most movie enthusiasts relish from time to time, regardless of what setup they have at home.
No matter how affordable/practical it is to build a home theatre for many of us here, it still won't be for many people, and we can still find it sad that the ability to experience old movies in the kinds of theatres where they were originally shown is being wound back by changing corporate interests.
How much is a HD projector nowadays? A few hundreds bucks maybe? You will be spending more than that over 1-2 years going to the theater every few weeks.
Also, when going with girlfriend or children, the cinema is twice or triple as expensive.
> Have you ever considered simply buying an HD/4K projector, a decent-quality screen, and a surround-sound setup?
I think you're missing the point. I have a fairly decent home cinema setup and rarely go to the cinema but there are some films that deserve viewing on the big screen. For me these are films such as Casablanca, Apocalypse Now, Alien, 2001:A Space Odyssey, Star Wars (original), Close Encounters. These were movies made where the "cinematography" had the cinema in mind, not a home cinema system (because they basically didn't exist unless you were extremely well off). Seeing these films in the cinema is, for me anyway, a genuinely different experience.
I had all of that in my last place (quite hackily assembled). Honestly though you'll still have issues with the walls reflecting to much light and stuff like that.
HOWEVER, the major downside in comparison to a cinema is that there's nothing stopping me from pulling out my phone, or keeping my notifications on, or pausing it to go do something else. The level of immersion in a difficult to watch film can be totally destroyed (e.g. good luck trying to sit through the Turin Horse in your living room, the mood of the film will be totally destroyed by a few pauses).
As someone who has watched The Turin Horse on his home cinema about once a year since it came out (glad to see another Tarr fan here on HN), I have never had to pause and ruin the mood. I definitely understand what you mean when you say phones can be a distraction, but then why not just leave your phone in the kitchen or bedroom for the time you are watching the film?
The walls won’t reflect too much light if you take adequate measures so that they are not pure white and uncovered. For me, the challenge of setting up the home cinema was not the reflecting light of the walls, inasmuch as they could be covered with bookshelves. Rather, it was the acoustics when I have large windows in the room – I could cover them with Ikea’s fully opaque curtains so that light isn’t a problem, but the glass of the windowpanes still has a detrimental effect on the sound.
My point is that a lot of people may not even be aware that that's a benefit they get from a cinema. If you're not neurotic enough to notice how much your regular distractions can take away from a film you're going to get a better experience from a theatrical viewing without fully even knowing how and all the gear in the world isn't going to make up for a lack of discipline.
In my case, I've a timed lock I put my phone away with ("just stop doing it" doesn't really work with me, 100% addicted) when I watch a film I actually want to pay attention to at home. No way my attention span could handle something like Bela Tarr at home (I'm a fidgety unfocused person and always have been), but for the most part it done the job.
RE: the space, it's hard to get a good setup with rented accommodation, or small accommodation (currently in a studio apartment). I'm sure I'll eventually have a place where I can set up an amazing system.
super envious of your setup btw! I'll love setting up that kind of thing whenever I get a chance.
My current apartment has woodchip wallpaper and nowhere to hang a screen from, so I'm hacking together ~80inch screen project (have an old bed frame I chopped up and repurposed as a room divider that I'm gonna add a roller blind and curtains onto that I'm pretty sure will kind of work...)
the major downside in comparison to a cinema is that there's nothing stopping me from pulling out my phone
That doesn’t seem to stop the people I’ve seen at the cinema, tapping away on their phones for the entire movie. I would love to go to a movie theatre that is:
1) tastefully decorated like an old-timey cinema and spotlessly clean
2) reasonably priced, both in food and ticket prices, so that families can afford to go
3) strict in its policies of restricting technology (no phone use in the theatre whatsoever) and mandating parental accompaniment for children
4) offers both healthy snacks and classic ones like popcorn, and does not use any fake butter or garbage like that
I have never been to a theater that would not swiftly eject anyone disturbing the movie in the united states. Where exactly do you see films? Are you not reporting it and expecting things to magically be resolved?
I think if you’re going to see “films” this is not a problem. If you’re going to the movies that the average person is seeing at the average mega theater, it’s a different story. Where I live it’s extremely common for people to text message during movies and even answer their phone and chat with some friend about the movie they are seeing. If you were going to try to get all these people kicked out you would be spending most of the movie going back and forth complaining to management. Not really worth going in the first place.
I live in Manhattan, so I at least don't have anything close to the space required for this (not would my adjacent neighbors appreciate the sound setup). I expect this is true of most tech workers on here who've been drawn to cities like SF or NYC by top salaries.
Fortunately there is a theater near me in the East Village that sometimes shows older stuff, and I saw 2001 in 70mm there and it was awesome.
I used to live in a studio (high ceilings) in Chelsea, Manhattan. I paid 500 for a projector and you can use almost any speaker. You can get a good one for 500 these days. So the whole cost is 1000. The speaker need not be very loud and one empty wall (or a white screen) is all you need. The image was amazing and the size huge. The projector was in my bookcase, on one of the shelves. Sometimes I'd get lazy and use the projector speakers and it was fine.
The projector-wall distance was no more than 5m. A short throw projector can work with even less distance.
Last movie I saw in theaters was a markedly worse image than what I get at home: overly dark (2D->3D lens?), yet still some scenes washed out to white. My 1080p DLP projector onto a 10' white vinyl screen seated ~5' away is better than any picture I've paid for in the last 5 years. Though, I haven't seen an IMAX in a long time: the sheer field-of-view and bulb intensity are unmatchable in my house.
Audio at the theater was better, but I haven't invested much beyond a 2.0 setup.
At $11/ticket (pretty normal around here), the break-even point is ~200 movies. You have to B-Y-O-BluRay but at least you can rewatch those for free.
EDIT: oh and I don't have to smell buttery nacho cheese from the person sitting next to me, and fight over the cupholder
They are preparing for their Disney+ streaming launch, so that they can sell their assets over that platform, to punish commercial screenings. Or better, to enhance their value there.
Normally it would be a stupid idea, because their Fox archive which is worth several billions is suddenly worth nothing,. It's about a fifth of the worlds films disappearing. But they are betting big on streaming, to kill Netflix. Which will not happen, it just hurts users.
And this is where it gets into competition law. If Disney won't allow Amazon and Netflix to screen Disney and Fox films I would hope they are big enough to litigate...
I would feel it had no chance of succeeding. If both those organisations closed shop there are still other pieces of software to sell. It would be more akin to stoping them have Linux.
And if Disney closed shop Netflix would still have content to sell. Do you think Netflix is going to go out of business once all Disney content is removed?
If others follow suit, bailing out to their own proprietary online streaming services, and Netflix is left with only its original content, I would indeed see dim prospects for it. Netflix's own content is IMO not strong enough to sustain it.
I have to agree. The problem is Disney (a very large provider) purchased Fox (another larger provider), and then proceeded to stop supplying third parties. Perhaps not in present day USA, but in Europe this may be seen as monopolistic behaviour.
Take the example of Rupert Murdoch himself, he tried to purchase the remaining stake in BSKYB on several occasions and was blocked by the reglator who felt that plurality in the media is important. Often you make unterakings to the regulator that you will not shut out third-parties like Disney alledgedly have, in order that you can get the merger sanctioned.
I thought the entire idea of the Internet was “disintermediation” where you could go directly to the consumer? Now we want to force middlemen into the equation? Would you also be okay of indie artists couldn’t exclusively sell their own content on their own website? Should Netflix also not be allowed to have Netflix exclusives? Let’s take it one step further, should Apple not be allowed to sell their OS only with their own hardware? What about the consoles?
Do you really want the government to get involved in all of those situations?
The "entire idea" of the Internet, as far as I'm concerned, is computers talking to each other over a common network. The rest is all crap we made up to layer over it.
Both disintermediation and aggregation have been essential forces in the information culture built upon the Internet from the early days. Both serve an useful purpose, and both have their dark sides as well.
Netflix is of course free to make and sell their own content how they wish, as is Disney. But the value proposition of Netflix started with syndicated content, and that proposition is diminished the less you find such content on it. At some point, you have to ask whether it's still worth the monthly subscription, or if you should take your money over to the other streaming services instead – each with its own slightly different and uniquely-broken interface, I should add.
People bring up copyright, and its length, here but one critical point is that even if the movies would transition to public domain, that still would not release them from Disneys vault. Instead it would likely mean that Disney would exhort even tighter control over the copies. And make no mistake thinking that Disney would be completely clawless without copyright.
People can already free use their existing copies under the first sale doctrine which has been around for several decades.
Copyright simply means you can't copy your DVDs of Disney films onto other DVDs and sell them for a profit without getting permission (aka a license) from Disney first.
Thanks to lobbying by Disney, this has long been a continuously moving target[0].
Thankfully, efforts to extend the period yet again have failed[1], so the original incarnation of Mickey will enter the public domain in 2023.
But the damage has been done. After a certain period, older works just naturally loose their cultural relevance. Disney's main characters being the obvious exception but there's been (and will be) tons of collateral damage.
Indeed. Even if they lended you their copies, they'd add clauses to the lease contract banning you from creating copies. Similar to how China lends its pandas to zoos all over the world but any babies must be sent to China. Another example is museums which ban you from taking pictures of paintings that are already out of copyright. There is a story about someone who has taken pictures anyways and uploaded them to Wikipedia. The museum sued Wikipedia and the court ruled in favour of the museum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiss_Engelhorn_Museum#Wikimed...
Disney has always been a corrosive force on our culture. They've taken our cultural myths in the form of fairy tales and damaged them beyond repair. Profit over everything is Disney's approach. The more they own the worse it will get.
There's no precedent for breaking up a media company for monopolizing popular culture. But perhaps there should be.
Disney owns way too much. They can bully theater chains to show their films on as many screens as they want for as long as they desire, and then they take a lion's share of the revenue.
Disney can print money from all of the licensing, which isn't a problem save for the fact other entrants have a huge hurdle to overcome to get shelf space.
They water down their content for mass appeal, so it isn't artistically interesting. They also appease foreign governments like China. Again, it wouldn't be a problem if they weren't strong arming others out of the limited theater space.
Disney+ kicked off the streaming wars. Which is going to be fantastic as a consumer... :(
Disney is ridiculous. I say this despite the fact that I have a good bit of stock in the company.
> Disney+ kicked off the streaming wars. Which is going to be fantastic as a consumer... :(
It actually is going to be fantastic as a consumer. Since people are cutting cable and going to Netflix, the money for content has to come from somewhere - it’s not sustainable to get unlimited quality content for everyone for $12/mo. If new streaming services didn’t appear, the only new content we would eventually have would be Netflix Originals - and if that’s all you want, you can continue just subscribing to Netflix! With Disney+ and others, it gives companies incentives to create great new content. There’s no chance we would have gotten say, the Mandalorian, on Netflix
My primary is the lack of central distribution. I agree, $12/mo is probably too low to provide new content. I would generally be fine with paying more.
What I dislike is playing whackamole with what service I can get certain content from. Is this show on Hulu? Or is it Netflix? Oh, right, Disney pulled it from Netflix and now it's on Disney+. Continue ad nauseam. Getting notifications that new content from a series is available is likewise disparate across platforms.
There needs to be a central management point. Similar to how Amazon aggregates physical goods from many vendors, offering me a central and familiar interface to provide search, discovery and payments. They then handle distributing payment and providing the actual content.
Amazon's Fire TV provides me with some of this (i.e. I can say "play such and such show" and it will provide me with an interface that lets me open a provider that has the content), but the fact that it's not available on my computer and that it doesn't manage the subscriptions is somewhat painful.
Not if you like just one show on each streaming platform. Pay five times and navigate between five different interfaces. And they will have different scroll directions and organizational paradigms.
And the ability to cancel anytime is not a perk. For people with ADHD it's a nightmare.
Disney, even before the Fox acquisition, had multiple studios.
Films released under the Disney brand were mainstream, fairly tame films intended for mass family consumption.
Films released under the Touchstone label (Buena Vista before that) were a bit more adult, and featured various states of undress, coarse language, and significant amounts of (non-bloody) violence.
Films released under Miramax were for adults: any content that would be R-rated or less was acceptable. Until recently, Miramax held the record for most total Oscars earned by a studio even though it has been defunct for 9 years.
> "Disney is ridiculous. I say this despite the fact that I have a good bit of stock in the company."
I don't want to make this personal and/or sound troll-y but where do their ridiculousness end, and you being hypocritical begin?
I'm not defending Disney. But if they're obligated to serve shareholders, and you feel they're failing then sell. But to finance them and in turn mock them, well that's why Disney, Amazon, et al continue to do what they do.
Boycotts prevent money transfer to a company (or other entity). Which can be successful, depending on market forces.
A divestment (almost universally) does not; it's just a transfer of ownership to people with a bigger priority on making money vs whatever moral objection you might have.
In the case of public stock, "cashing out" doesn't require the company to return the investment dollars to you. There is no money coming out of their pocket, only someone else purchasing your shares. (Except stock buybacks, which are voluntary, and in those instances, beneficial to the company.)
Done on a large scale, it artificially deflates the stock price of a company below it's true market value, enabling people who have less philosophical opposition to obtain stock that's essentially subsidized by the divesting parties. (There are a few very obscure exceptions, that might initially look like divestment kills a company, but it still ends up only being an ownership transfer, just to more powerful stakeholders.)
If anything, these orgs should be doing the opposite. Becoming more invested buys you more say in how a company is run. Encouraging divestment is like telling those "divestors" not to vote.
If your really hate something enough, you would buy (enough of) it in order to destroy (or at least change) it.
- To support that you'd have to show what the myths would look like today without Disney's involvement. Just as likely, they would have been forgotten.
- This isn't a zero sum thing. If you prefer a different telling of a classic story, spread it! No one's stopping you.
- I'm also not buying that the myths existed in some ideal state in the past that we've now fallen from. Stories always evolve.
I don't know how this is the top-rated comment right now.
Most Disney films are not based on fairy tales. Their biggest animated films are original works. Even their biggest live-action franchises are all original works created within the last 60 years.
Indeed, one of the reasons the Marvel films do so well is because Disney has given their directors a degree of artistic control that DC would not (even though DC had the far more well-known stable of heroes) and lets the directors create other types of stories within the framework of a comic book movie (i.e., espionage thriller for Captain America, coming-of-age comedy for Spiderman, heist movie for Guardians, Shakespearean drama for Thor).
> Most Disney films are not based on fairy tales. Their biggest animated films are original works.
Since 1990, Disney has produced (in terms of animated works):
* 14 films clearly based on classical mythology, fairy tales, or literature.
* 7 films clearly original works
* 4 sequels
* Pocahontas, which is (loosely) based on historical events
* Moana, which I'm not sufficiently well-versed in Polynesian mythology to know if it's based on an actual mythical event or merely draws inspiration from it
* The Lion King, which is allegedly inspired or directly ripped off of Kimba the White Lion (although Disney vehemently denies it)
* Wreck-it Ralph, although technically original, relies on a lot of explicit video game references.
They sure milked the premise during the early days.[0]
My biggest 'Disney problem' is their abusive use of copyright, and the fact that they got away with it largely due to the use of Disney material as pro-National propaganda.[1]
There needs to be an end to copyright on this historical material. If I was going to be very generous, I'd make copyright have a maximum of 50 years. Twenty is probably more reasonable.
It's ridiculous that Steamboat Willie is always going to be the cutoff between public domain and oblivion in dusty forgotten copyright hell.
The U.S. Copyright Term Extension Act, aka the "Mickey Mouse" Act, is an outrageous piece of legislation. The law effectively denigrated the public welfare and reduced the public domain for the benefit of a few corporations. It should be undone.
The article isn't about copyright. It's about a change in distribution and access rights to Fox's back catalogue of movies since Disney bought Fox which is harming smaller cinema house operators.
> so copyright is a root cause even if it isn't the root cause.
That assertion makes absolutely no sense. Fifty years isn't a huge amount of time and the bulk of Fox's catalogue (that's actually interesting, well for me anyway) is younger than that so your copyright argument doesn't stand up.
To re-iterate, this article is about restricting access to cinemas to play these movies in their theatres. The distribution format for cinemas and their equipment is, as far as I know, somewhat different from buying a DVD or BluRay off of Amazon. Even a ten year copyright period wouldn't solve the problem of the studios withholding the technical formats that are needed for their content to be played in a theatre. They simply don't have to give that up.
Personally I don't have a problem with studios owning the copyright for say 75 years, that seems like a fair amount of time...provided the studio's play fair with access to their content.
Sure what Disney are doing is a shitty thing, but it's certainly not as simple as claiming that reforming the copyright rules would solve this.
Also, just because copyright is up, one still needs physical access to the media to copy it. I'm not sure how that is (or should be) handled with film.
I believe Mickey Mouse law must be curtailed. Copyright is retained for no more than 20 years after movie is released, then it transitions to public domain. In return, I can agree for a copyright for different merchandise to last indefinitely.
Then, there are books. I don't really know what to do with them. Since books are work of a much smaller group of people (most often, 1 person), maybe it's ok for them to retain rights till their deaths.
I've never understood what the creator's death has to do with copyright anyway. You've already written the work; why should it matter to copyright law if you were young or old when you did so, or whether or not you got really unlucky immediately afterwards in getting run over by a bus?
Because copyright is artificial, and the only reason that we grant it to artists is so that the artists may make money and thus more art. The interest of the public domain far outweighs any imagined right of relatives of the artist to make money; it's not like they're automatically artists themselves.
This strikes me as a particularly mean and grasping attitude I’m afraid. My children aren’t IT engineers, but they still benefit from my savings, life insurance and the proceeds of my investments. The property rights you exercise over the things you own are artificial.
It’s in the interests of the public to encourage the production and publication of new ideas and art. The vast majority of authors make very little for their efforts, and the majority of the benefit to society is gained simply by its publication and broad distribution. The additional benefit from derived works IMHO is much lower.
Look at your mewling phrasing. You're "afraid" that I'm "mean"? My viewpoint is not a "grasping attitude". To quote the relevant part of the USA's Constitution [0]: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Copyright is not for your children. It is a limited right given specifically to you, the author or inventor. How did you confuse it with property rights? You are free to invest the earnings that you make from exercise of your copyright, and to give those investments and savings to your progeny; you are not free to so invest your works, because upon your passing, they are no longer yours, but enter the public domain. You chose to share those works with the public, taking their money with the understanding that the money would support you in your artistic efforts; the public, in turn, has a shared cultural knowledge which incorporates your art.
Your second paragraph is a bland restatement of the basic reason why copyright exists: Copying is easy, art is hard, so copyright is necessary to ensure that artists get paid enough to live on and create more art. However, art only happens within a cultural context, so it's also necessary to have a large and robust public domain. This balance between copyright and the public domain is reflected in the legislative history of copyright [1] around the time of the drafting of the Constitution.
To paraphrase a popular lyric, when you go knockin' on heaven's door, please leave your tools; you won't need 'em anymore.
Being in the public domain doesn’t automatically mean material is published, promoted and distributed. Those activities take a lot of effort, they are full time jobs for an entire industry, and they are the only way martial gets to be widely read.
I love project Gutenberg, I have several of its books on my iPad right now, but a single book shop selling copyright works probably does more in a week to promote actually reading stuff than Gutenberg does in a year.
I think a major issue is the lack of distinction between individual works and derivative works. I don’t have a great answer, but I think derivative works need to have a policy closer to trademark (indefinite but very narrow and bounded by continuous use) while copyright should retain its current core properties and but be shorter (I’d say 20 years, but renewable for up to 60 or 80 with registration and escalating fees.)
I find out entirely reasonable for Disney to retain control of Mickey Mouse or DC to retain control of Batman as they’ve been continuously using and improving those ideas for almost 100 years. Otherwise unused aspects of culture need to be allowed to emerge (if after 30 years no one has put Mara Jade on film someone should be allowed to do it.)
Of course the Berne convention makes all this way more difficult than even normal law making, but c’est la vie
> Otherwise unused aspects of culture need to be allowed to emerge (if after 30 years no one has put Mara Jade on film someone should be allowed to do it.)
Nice idea in principle, but how are you going to prevent the Mara Jade et al. Trademark mmMintenance Holiday Special – directed by our janitor, starring a bum off the street?
> Of course the Berne convention makes all this way more difficult than even normal law making, but c’est la vie
Dress up as Mr. Duck and tell Mr. Trump that you're the better Donald. He'll get angry at Disney and resign from the Berne convention.
Alternatively elect someone that actually wants to renegotiate it. The USA doesn't have to take international treaties as decided by the powers that be, it's part of them.
As for the “fantastic four” solution, you don’t prevent that- as long as it’s actually distributed and available to interested parties for consumption. Creating and distributing a “keep the IP alive” production is still a significantly higher barrier then we have today.
As for the US abandoning the Berne convention- it was ratified by the senate, so the President, even this reality tv drama of an administration, can’t just drop out (unless their is some detail of the ratification instrument I’m unaware of.) I thankfully still believe there is enough left of the constitutional apparatus that there remain some bounds on Presidential power, even when the president might be doing what I want.
Making something that technically qualifies as a movie isn't a real hurdle. Get some people with a pulse (they don't have to be able to act), give them some costumes (amateur theatre groups can easily afford renting costumes) and a script (it doesn't have to make sense). Let them recite it and film them with your phone for 10 minutes. Done.
If someone actually wants to watch this, they can rent a DRM'd Betamax tape (inventing this is certainly the most expensive step) for $999999/day.
You could of course make sure the "movie" is actually available by regulating distribution and prices. But you can't regulate how movies are supposed to be made without seriously restricting freedom of art.
It's enough of a hurdle to open up a lot of culture. Maybe not Mara Jade since she is probably the most popular Disney owned character to never appear on film or TV, but the act of having to itemize, describe, track, and actively protect a "derivative work mark" is not going to be pursued for every minor character or box office flop. I doubt even Disney would find it worthwhile to create, produce, and distribute non-trivial content to protect every minor character listed in Wookiepedia from the Legends canon. The reason I picked trademark law as a metaphor was exactly because some formerly profitable brands have been abandoned and then revived by third parties over the years, so there is precedent.
What constitutes abandonment of a "derivative work mark" ultimately would probably be a delineation the courts would make. I'd hope that in a sane implementation of this scheme your strawman wouldn't hold up. It would be pretty easy to demonstrate that next to no money was spent on the creation or marketing of the product, and no one bought it, so that could still be considered abandonment. That being said, it wouldn't take much to produce new IP the keeps the mark alive so long it as it was 1) actually the same concept as the original mark (Mara Jade can't star in a rom com set in New York City without lightsabers. (Also Disney should call me about putting Mara Jade in a Rom Com set in NYC WITH lightsabers, because that would be amazing.)) and 2) gets some limited degree of public recognition.
One proposal I once read: Copyrights are renewable with a nominal fee. Say $1 per entry. Feels like a renewable lease. I'd like someone try this, or model it, and report back.
It just now occurred to me that maybe trademark might be a better form of (long term IP) protection for stuff like Mickey Mouse.
I'm okay with Disney owning Mickey Mouse (and so forth) forever. I'm not okay with the toxic side effects of them hacking legal protections to serve their own narrow use cases.
I propose a different approach: the copyright owner can retain copyright indefinitely, as long as they make the work available, in a reasonably practical way, and for a reasonable price. I can't tell you exactly what reasonable means here, but it isn't beyond the wit of man to make some sensible rules about that.
So, as soon as they lock it away like this, they lose any rights to it. Whereas if they keep making it available, they can keep those rights forever!
We need compulsory licensing at a statutory rate for movies and tv shows. Fine, give them absolute control and negotiated rates for the first decade. But after that, let anyone show them for a reasonable fixed rate without needing to arrange explicit permission. It works for music.
That way, all streaming services would have full access to all back catalogs, and could compete on price, features, catalog size, etc. Not the current situation where they need in-house originals and exclusive arrangements, and many many shows are simply unavailable for any price.
Every citizen should be taught the history of anti-trust and labor law in the United States. These events have already unfolded in our past. Their consequences have already been dealt with by American society in 1946 - 1948. In two landmark anti-trust cases, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. and Bigelow v. RKO Radio Pictures, Inc.
The first one is more famous, but the second one is directly applicable as it dealt with the inverse of Disney's current modus operandi - the restriction of first-time screenings to theaters owned by the studio,
The gist of the complaint was that, by reason of an unlawful conspiracy of the respondents, petitioners were prevented from securing pictures -for exhibition in their theatre until after the preferred exhibitors had been able to show them in earlier and more desirable runs, and that petitioners were thus discriminated against in the distribution of feature films in favor of competing theatres owned or controlled by some of the respondents.
The matter before the court was the lower courts judgement and the damages awared to the petitioner. The lower court had found that an unlawful conspiracy existed and used a rough approximation to derive the damages,
...evidence was introduced in the course of the trial tending to show that respondents conspired to maintain the release system as part of a conspiracy to
maintain minimum admission prices to be charged by exhibitors generally. This proof indicated that the object of this conspiracy was to make it possible to maintain high admission prices in the Loop theatres by restricting the price competition of the subsequent-run theatres.
The distributors' contracts with the Loop theatres provided for film rentals based on a percentage of the admission fees collected. It appeared that the rental contracts entered into between respondent distributors and the Chicago exhibitors, including respondent exhibitors and petitioners, uniformly contained schedules of minimum admission prices fixed on the basis of the playing position assigned. There was thus evidence tending to show that the release system and the price-fixing system were each an integral part of an unlawful conspiracy to give to the Loop theatres the advantages of a first-run protected from low-price competition.
The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this as being too vague, but the Supreme Court reversed this decision because,
...it is impossible to establish any measure of damage, because the unlawful system which respondents have created has precluded petitioners from showing that other conditions affecting profits would have continued without change unfavorable to them during the critical period if that system had not been established, and petitioners had conducted their business in a free competitive market.
Disney should be held to the same standard. They have caused irreparable harm to the industry through their predatory actions and monopolistic behavior. A future where Disney controls the entertainment industry is a future without a free, fair and functioning market.
It’s not really worrying. Disney owns the films. They don’t have to distribute them at all, and in this case, they’ve determined it that the money they’ll make from an independent theater is smaller than the money they’ll make distributing another way, or perhaps not distributing at all for the time being.
I recently contacted a student artist to ask to buy a print of a work they posted on an art forum. I had no particular limit to my budget. The artist said no.
You know what I can do about it? Absolutely nothing. It doesn’t matter how badly I want that piece in my home.
If they own the rights they can do whatever they want to, but that doesn’t mean we cannot consider it worrying. In fact, if we consider some of their actions too worrying, we can change the copyright law to better benefit the society.
You seem to be confusing what is legal with what is reasonable. It's entirely justified to criticize a company for doing entirely legal things. Indeed it is impossible to make illegal everything for which a company might deserve such criticism.
You’re saying that if I make my own movie with my own funding and time/effort, if enough people like it and the culturally relevant switch gets flipped on they get to take it from me while I’m still alive and I don’t have any say on whether my work is duplicated or screened?
What if I run a SaaS product, people have been using it for 30 years, and they’ve determined it to be culturally relevant. Do they get to copy my source code and run it for themselves?
These are 70s and 80s movies. Many of those who contributed to them are still alive. It’s entirely reasonable for those people to determine how/whether to distribute their own art.
If you believe in that level of public ownership I can respect that you hold that opinion, but I don’t agree with it. At the same time, I do believe that copyrights expiring a lifetime after the creator dies are unreasonable.
To me, the right balance of copyright law is somewhere in between the extremes of Mickey Mouse ownership in perpetuity and complete public ownership.
I am pretty sure if you asked the creators of these films, they’d want them still shown. We’re talking about the actions of Disney, which wasn’t even the studio for the Fox films.
The “creators” wouldn’t have been able to create anything without the financial backing of the studios. You have a few like Lucas and Spielberg who owned their own production companies.
You're right, those uppity "creators" should be thankful.
Joking aside- This will become less true as technology makes film-making and distribution more accessible. Studios know this, so they've switched focus to tightly controlling distribution. Hurray for cultural gate-keepers.
How are they controlling the “distribution”? There are so many streaming services and cable channels hungry for exclusive content that if you make something halfway decent someone will buy it from you. On top of that, you can sell directly to consumers on iTunes, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Redbox VOD, etc.
What do you mean? The very article we've been discussing is about Disney's attempt to control distribution.
I agree that for now there's a healthy ecosystem of distribution channels for newer, lower budget content - I said as much. What's happening is that the studios are countering that by tightly controlling valuable legacy content. The kind of stuff we see as part of the cultural zeitgeist of the last several decades (again, see the article for examples).
Disney is controlling access to their content not content you create yourself. Disney isn’t stopping any of the content distributors I named from distributing anyone else’s content.
You would have strictly fewer rights if the code did not include the GPL. It lets you use the code with no restrictions whatsoever, provided you place no restrictions on your users. And if you don't like that, you're still free to negotiate different terms with the owner of the GPLed code.
Really, you're complaining that the GPL takes away your right to take away rights.
The author of that software has the right to distribute software as they please because of copyright law. The government/copyright protects creators and allows them to dictate terms of distribution just like it protects Disney.
The GPLv3 doesn't do that. The GPLv3 allows any company to use the code, provided they're willing to abide by some reasonable terms (which they are free to view as unreasonable, just as I am free to view them as unreasonable.)
The GPLv3 is not being used to create artificial scarcity of popular culture for corporate profit. That might be a difference you're keen on abstracting away, but I think it's a pretty big difference.
Disney uses copyright to control distribution to commercial entities and those commercial entities - cinemas - think the demands are unreasonable for their business model.
TiVo and I am sure other commercial entities think that the GPL has unreasonable demands.
This attempt to morally equivocate an international corporation denying people access to popular culture, and volunteer developers giving away source code for free on the condition that anybody who wants to sell it also distribute the source code, is absurd. Bordering on offensive.
Disney's legal right is not in dispute. A morally equivalence is the matter disputed. You can only hope to equivocate the two by abstracting away "minor" matters like the vastly different power dynamics involved, or the nature of terms of the licenses in question.
>authors of GPL software didn’t whine about Microsoft not open sourcing Windows
We both know that's not true, but it's also not relevant.
The entire software market was about proprietary servers running proprietary servers backed by corporations. Open source software took over the server market.
Blumhouse and Tyler Perry Studios are evidence that you can be successful without budgets of $100 million budgets.
None of that comes anywhere close to justifying your equivalence of Disney and free software developers. Rather you seem to be trying to walk that back by instead talking about other things.
The simple fact of the matter is the nature of the licenses in question are very different, and the nature of the licensers in question are very different. They share little other than a relation to copyright. The social impact of their use of copyright, which is the matter of contention, is worlds apart.
No, I think that any time posters on HN want the government to intervene and dictate what others can do with their content would be horrified if the same policies applied to their sacred cows. Whether it be GPL or the right for companies like ElasticCo and Mongo to forbid cloud providers from offering their software as a service.
What’s the difference between Disney not allowing their content on Netflix or in theaters so they can exclusively use it on Disney+ and ElasticCo not allowing third party cloud providers to allow their software to be sold as a service so that they can exclusively offer managed services?
Do you want the government to step in and tell you how you can distribute your work?
It’s worrying because Disney lobbied over the years to increase the length of copyright.
They perverted the intent of copyright, which is to encourage the arts by providing a temporary monopoly: After which artists are expected and encouraged to freely borrow any bits of the work and create their own.
Now they’re outright restricting even viewing of famous works. Disney is terribly corrosive.
While true, Disney has nothing compared to European authors, who lobbied the EU to create significantly stronger copyright protections than even Disney was able to lobby for in the US.
So stop blaming Disney for the state of copyright, and start blaming all the European auteurs who tried (and nearly succeeded) in getting indefinite copyrights that passed down from the creator to his estate in perpetuity.
A business practice of refusing to make key cultural works available to the public-- this is on par with patent trolling. I don't debate their legal right to do it. It's still surprising and another reason to criticize both their business model and the current incarnation of copyright law, which this company had a significant role in creating.
Patent trolling, for example, is less profitable due to reforms around the edges. We've seen an almost shocking level of legal innovation in many backwaters, from pot to legal opiod to climate change. The ground is shifting and a company that controls 40% of the nationwide market for anything is (or ought to be) subject to a higher standard.
And the reason they own some of them instead of the public, is that they are large and rich enough to have laws changed to allow them to continue to own them.
