#disney are all about the copyright ownership

[feltpool]

Copyright cash grab

I think the thing that bothers me most about current Star Wars is that it lies so hard about what it’s really doing, like we’re not going to work it out anyway.

Fandom cannot create new canon, it can only work with what it has, open up the cracks, fill in the plot holes and put a new spin on things. But the show creators don’t have that limit, and yet have devolved to reusing the same old plot and structure we’ve seen before and hiding it under a different set of faces.

I suppose it’s meant to be clever, but fanfic has been re-spinning these stories for literal decades now so it just feels like a pallid and obvious cash grab as well as a way for Disney to lay claim to the older Lucas-made canon as now belonging to them.

Personal opinion and potential spoilers behind the cut

Mando spins its story around the core structure of the OT movies while doing its utmost to pretend that it isn’t doing that. Instead of starting with the feisty space princess whose home has been destroyed by the Empire it sneaks in via Solo and focuses on a lone gunslinger doing any dodgy job for money while throwing him about in the mud a lot, role flipping Yoda and Luke, and hiding it all under a layer of Mandalorian armour. But the constant references to other parts of SW get old fast, and they leap right in there from the very start regardless of people only majorly starting to complain about that from Season 3. It was always there, we just weren’t so overloaded by the constant stream of really obvious ones back in Season 1.

And The Bad Batch follows this exact same pattern, the only major difference is that it’s framed around the core plot of the prequel movies and overall tends to bury its true purpose under fewer Rebels references. Sure it’s tying up a bunch of loose ends from multiple seasons of TCW, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to like it.

Add to this the other shows that only got made in order to support these^ two shows.

TCW Season 7 sets up everything the other shows need to have already been established in order to work. The Bad Batch setup is established, Trace, Rafa, and their convenient little Coruscant hiding place gets laid down for later plot use, and the Mandalore arc sets up the rest.

Tales of the Jedi explicitly covers how Anakin treated Ahsoka behind closed doors and how he used others to actually carry that out so that it can be reused later. Amongst other plot relevant details it showed us the relationship between Dooku and Mace, how Dooku was pissed when Mace got a promotion he hadn’t even been trying to claim, and how Dooku was directly offered the chance to drop all of what he was doing and to walk away with the Jedi – and still chose not to.

Half of The Book of Boba Fett was just a dumping ground for anything that didn’t conveniently fit into either of the other two shows but that they didn’t want to leave out (you can’t claim copyright over something you haven’t put onscreen), and boy did it show that they didn’t waste any money covering that part if they could help it. Orphan Boba gets to re-enact Luke’s back story of getting and losing a new family out in the sands of Tatooine, while Vanth gets to lose his arm and get a robotic replacement, it covers the question of what happened once Jabba was dead, drops in a much cuter version of the scene where the Luke defeats the rancor, features a cantina complete with familiar players, and shoves not-Chewbacca in there because having a Wookiee in the main story would be way too much of an obvious nod to the OT setup they’re still trying to pretend isn’t happening. However, it was permitted to drop in a couple of future plot points such as what happens to your brain/memory once you get a deep tissue, full body, bacta treatment, and giving Boba his 3 seconds of playing both Solo getting thrown wetly around by a Wookiee, and the Emperor as he rescues Fennec from certain death by having her Vaderized.

In all fairness this has taken a certain level of effort to re-spin. Aspects of one movie or TCW have been given to the other show, roles have been split between characters to make things less obvious. Hunter gets Anakin’s wig, while Hemlock gets his hand, and Echo gets to play Vader but in reverse order (starting as a cyborg and not becoming one). Or things have been approached from a different angle (usually reversed), like how Bo rescues Din and Grogu from the dianoga pit on the boat instead of getting them into the garbage masher in the first place. Pieces have been recycled from all prior SW visual canon as well as many games, books, and comic books, in addition to many references to non-SW movies.

But some things have been lifted straight out of fanfiction. The outfit that Riyo Chuchi wears when we first see her in TBB mimics Fox’s armour as closely as it possibly can without actually being clone armour, and Foxiyo is a small ship that has zero canonical basis – so far at least. Not that this would be the first time that SW has blatantly ripped off someone else’s work for their ideas or spaceship designs, but being able to data scrape AO3 must make this a lot easier to do than back when you had to pay people to manually cruise the internet.

Whether the Ahsoka show will continue this pattern and frame it around the plot of the sequel movies while pretending it’s nothing more than Rebels Season 5 remains to be seen, but having Jacen Syndulla reframed as the new Kylo Ren is definitely nothing I will ever need to see.

.

Obviously I’m glossing over a lot of the finer detail and references here because I’d be here all day otherwise and I’m trying to limit potential spoilers.

[batboyblog]

Copy Right and Public Domain in 2024

Happy 2024 all! its also Public Domain Day! a magical holiday here in America where things enter the public domain. Works published in the year 1928 (or 95 years ago!) have entered the public domain, which means they belong to us, all of us, the public!

Mickey's Back!

Yes! I'm sure you've heard, but Mickey Mouse (and Minnie Mouse too) is entering the Public Domain today. This has been news for a few years and indeed Disney's lobbying in the late 1990s is why our copy right term is SO long. So what exactly is now public domain?

Most people know about Mickey's first appearance Steamboat Willie, but a second short film, Plane Crazy was also released in 1928 so will also be public domain. So what's public? well these two films first of all, you're allowed to play them, upload them to YouTube or whatever without paying Disney. In theory you'll be allowed to cut and sample them, have them playing in the background of your movie etc. Likewise in theory the image of Mickey and Minnie as they appear (thats important) in these films will be free to use as well as Mickey's character as he appears in these works will be free to use. Now Mickey's later and more famous appearance

will still be protected. Famously the Conan Doyle Estate claimed that Sherlock Holmes couldn't be nice, smile, or not hate women in works because they still held the copyright on the short stories where he first did those things even though 90% of Sherlock Holmes stories were public domain. It's very likely Disney will assert similar claims over Mickey, claiming much of his personality first appeared in works still copyrighted.

Finally there's copyright vs trademark. Copyright is total ownership of a piece of media and all the ideas that appear in it, copyright has a limited set term and expires. Trademark is more limited and only applies to things used to market and sell a product. You can have a Coke branded vending machine in your movie if you want, but it couldn't appear anywhere in the trailer for your movie as thats you marketing your movie.

Where trademark ends and copyright begins and how trademarked something in the public domain is allowed to be are all unsettled areas of law and clearly Disney in the last few years as been aggressively pushing its trademark not just to Mickey in general but Steamboat Willie Mickey in particular

Ultimately the legal rights and wrongs of this might not matter so much since few people have the money and legal resources of the Walt Disney corporation so they might manage to maintain a de facto copyright on Mickey through legal intimidation, but maybe not?

And Tigger Too!

All the talk about Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willie has sadly overshadowed other MAJOR things entering the public domain today. Most people are aware Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain in 2022, but they might not realize his beloved friend Tigger didn't. Thats because Tigger didn't appear till A. A. Milne's second (and last) book of Pooh short stories, The House at Pooh Corner in 1928.

Much like Mickey Mouse only what appears in The House at Pooh Corner is public domain so the orange bouncy boy from the 1960s Disney cartoon is still on lock down. But the A. A. Milne original as illustrated by E. H. Shepard is free for you to use in fiction or art. His friend Winnie the Pooh has made a number of appearances since being freed, most notably in a horror movie, but also a Mint Mobile commercial so maybe Tigger too will have a lot of luck in the public domain.

Other works:

Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up

Peter Pan is a strange case, even though the play was first mounted in 1904, and the novelization (Peter and Wendy) was published in 1911, The script for the play was not published till 1928 (confusing!) meaning while the novel as been public domain for years the play (which came first) hasn't been, but now it is and people are welcome to mount productions of it.

Millions of Cats

The oldest picture book still in print, did you own a copy growing up? (I did)

Lady Chatterley's Lover

The iconic porn novel that was at the center of a number of groundbreaking obscenity cases in the 1960s and helped establish your right to free speech.

All Quiet on the Western Front and The Threepenny Opera in their original German (but you can translate them if you want), The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie, and Orlando by Virginia Woolf will also be joining us in the public domain along with any and all plays, novels, and books published in 1928

for Films we have The Man Who Laughs who's iconic image inspired the Joker

Charlie Chaplin's The Circus, Buster Keaton's The Cameraman, Should Married Men Go Home? the first Laurel and Hardy movie, Lights of New York the first "all talking" movie, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Wind, as well as The Last Command and Street Angel the first films to win Oscars for Best Actor and Best Actress respectively will all be entering public domain

For Musical Compositions (more on that in a moment) we've got

Mack the Knife by Bertolt Brecht, Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love) by Cole Porter, Sonny Boy by George Gard DeSylva, Lew Brown & Ray Henderson, Empty Bed Blues by J. C. Johnson, and Makin’ Whoopee! by Gus Khan are some of the notables but any piece of music published in 1928 is covered

Any art work published in 1928, which might include works by Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alexej von Jawlensky, Edward Hopper, and André Kertész will enter the public domain, we are sure those that M. C. Escher's Tower of Babel will be in the public domain

Swan Song, Public Domain and recorded music

While most things are covered by the Copyright Act of 1976 as amended by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, none of the copyright acts covered recordings you see when American copyright law was first written recordings did not exist and so through its many amendings no one fixed this problem, movies were treated like plays and artwork, but recorded sound wasn't covered by any federal law. So all sound recordings from before 1972 were governed by a confusing mess of state level laws making it basically impossible to say what was public and what was under copyright. In 2017 Congress managed to do something right and passed the Music Modernization Act. Under the act all recordings from 1922 and before would enter the public domain in 2022. After taking a break for 2023, all sound recordings made in 1923 have entered the public domain today on January 1st 2024, these include.

Charleston by James P. Johnson

Yes! We Have No Bananas (recorded by a lot artists that year)

Who’s Sorry Now by Lewis James

Down Hearted Blues by Bessie Smith

Lawdy, Lawdy Blues by Ida Cox

Southern Blues and Moonshine Blues by Ma Rainey

That American Boy of Mine and Parade of the Wooden Soldiers by Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra

Dipper Mouth Blues and Froggie More by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, featuring Louis Armstrong

Bambalina by Ray Miller Orchestra

Swingin’ Down the Lane by Isham Jones Orchestra

Enjoy your public domain works!

[queeranarchism]

With so many left wing artists, it's weird how solidly the idea of 'being an artist' is formed by individualism and capitalism.

The idea of the artist as an 'individual with a vision', results in the vast majority of art being produced alone and the idea of collective art just not occurring to people. Writers groan about being stuck on a rough part in their novel for months and the idea of getting another writer involved to fix it never even crosses their mind because they're so hung up on the idea that their art has to be uniquely their own.

The idea of art as the 'capital' of the artist. Some artists will admit that copyright is just an annoying necessity under capitalism (and as it is, copyright rarely protects small artists and only protects Disney) but many artists hold a deep emotional investment in the idea that they 'own' their art and that they should be allowed to limit what others do with it. 'My property'. You wouldn't download a car etc. The idea that all art could be the collective property of all to freely reproduce and rework into amazing new things is (horror voice) 'anarchy' to many.

(Meanwhile many artists, especially writers, learned their craft through fan fiction, this deeply collaborative space that recognizes no ownership, revels in the freedom to remix everything and produces incredible volumes of free art that is once again available for all to rework. And yet moving away from that and creating something Uniquely Your Own is seen as somehow superior)

And finally, the idea of the creative genius that's superior to everyone else because they create. This one isn't explicit very often but scratch the surface and you'll find a lot of high minded ideas about creativity being this uniquely precious force in a way that invalidates stuff like care work. It'll also show up in it's other equally individualist form: the idea that producing art is deeply fulfilling and meaningful in a way that raising a child or caring for your elderly neighbor isn't.

I could go on about subculture details like the romantic love of books as things you need to physically own on your bookshelf as a thing that makes loving stories into a consumer's profile which simultaneously signals your middle class status, instead of just a free hobby. But I'm more interested in the question: what do we get when we question all this shit?

[ot3]

Hey! The link to your FAQ wasn't working for me so I don't know if this question has been asked before. I really appreciate your perspectives on AI art. Do you happen to have any resources that you read/listened to on intellectual property rights and the issues with it? I just don't really know where to start with it.

[heres where i cut out a big paragraph of me, once again, bitching about how blog pages don't work on the tumblr app and i think that's fucking stupid]

anyway i dont have any generalized sources on the subject but the tl;dr of it is: intellectual property rights exclusively benefit people who have the resources to pursue sustained litigation. 99% of the time, what IP law is being used for is to reinforce corporate ownership of work that was done by their employees.

the whole disco elysium debacle is a great case study.

The shareholders of ZA/UM accused the trio of, among other things, intending to steal intellectual property (IP) from the company — a curious accusation, considering that the world of the game is based off of a novel written by Kurvitz himself. The case of Disco Elysium illustrates the shortcomings of IP rights as protection for artists. Consequently, it contains a lot of lessons for the labor movement when it comes to the arts, and serves as a reminder that creative workers are, at the end of the day, workers. But this is not just an academic exercise. It’s a human story about the intimate consequences of capitalist exploitation. “I got my soul ripped out of me,” Kurvitz told me over Zoom in April of 2023. “I got my skull cracked open and my brain lifted out of it by a fifty-five-year-old financial criminal.”

another example: alex norris of webcomic name, which you will probably recognize when you see it, has been raising hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past several years to try and keep up with the protracted legal battle over maintaining ownership of his own work.

I have been fighting this case since 2019. It arose out of an agreement to make a boardgame based on my webcomic in 2017 but the publishing company has used this as an opportunity to take all of my intellectual property, and has even claimed ownership of Webcomic Name as a whole. I can't go into more detail here, but the details of the case are publicly available to read online.

Then, in a 2024 update:

I have essentially won the main case based on the decisions made last summer. The Judge has clearly stated that I own my comics, and that the other party has infringed on my copyright. It is not over yet, as there are still a few things that need to happen. Hopefully things will all be wrapped up this year. After 6 years of legal battling, I can’t wait to be free of all of this. Hopefully, this second case will backfire, and they will be sanctioned for filing it. But to get to that point requires a frustratingly large amount of work, time and money.

An interesting thing about both of these two specific instances is that they involve creators who had entire bodies of work produced around the specific IPs that were stolen from them before they even began partnering with corporate entities to produce works. which is insane! you can spend years writing novels, drawing comics, and if a company comes in with enough lawyers they can own those ideas.

this is pretty distinctly different to me than instances of work you do while being employed by a corporate entity being owned by that corporate entity, because at least you know what you're getting into there to some degree, but i still think that's bad too. consider stuff like the owl house and gravity falls, two disney shows made by people who very very clearly did not like working for disney. disney owns their ideas, their characters, their worlds, because that's the price you pay for having an animated show produced.

essentially it's very very clear upon even the slightest examination that intellectual property in no way exists to codify who the creator responsible for specific creative concepts or works is. it exists to turn nebulous things like 'ideas' into market commodities, and to funnel the profits made by the labor of individual artists and writers into corporate bank accounts.

the only person who has ever really benefited from IP law as an individual trying to lay claim to their own work is ken penders, who notoriously won his suit to have ownership of characters and storylines he created. heartbreaking: Worst Person You Know Gets An Unequivocally Deserved Legal W.

The comics continued under Flynn’s direction as if nothing happened, but things started looking grim in late 2012, when Archie suddenly fired its entire legal team. The company had been unable to produce Penders’ work-for-hire contract, which would have given control of his creations to Sega. Penders claimed the contract had never existed. A heavily circulated Tumblr post outlining the case (which has been corroborated as a reliable source by Penders) explains that while Archie did provide a photocopy of a contract allegedly signed by Penders in 1996, Penders claimed that the document was a forgery. That it was neither an original copy nor a contract from the beginning of the writer’s tenure at Archie meant that its validity was questionable. Making things worse, Archie couldn’t produce an original copy of any previous contributor’s contract, meaning that any writer or artist who had worked on the Archie Sonic line could potentially follow in Penders’s footsteps and reclaim their work. “So are you saying prior counsel blew it?” the presiding judge asked Archie counsel Joshua Paul in a May 2013 court session. His reply was unequivocal: “Absolutely, your Honor.”

So yeah. Owning the work you do as an artist is only something that happens when the people trying to profit off of it show unprecedented and staggering level of incompetence in their legal teams.

Then, alongside not owning the concepts and ideas you produce while working with corporate entities, there's the issue of NDA regarding specific pieces you've produced. This causes a LOT of trouble for freelance illustrators/character designers/concept artists, etc. Looking for work is very hard when the past three years of pieces you've drawn can't be added to your portfolio. Some people have password protected pages on their portfolios that they use for NDA work, but I believe the right to do this varies depending on your contract. I'm not 100% sure. In cases where the project you worked on eventually comes out, that's one thing, but there will be instances where the entire project gets canned after all the work is done, but is still under NDA so essentially all of your work has been taken from you, crumpled up into a ball by a studio executive, thrown in the trash can, and legally you are not allowed to go pick it out of the bin and try and flatten it out again.

This has all been pretty art-focused because that's the kind of circles I run in and where a lot of my interests lie but the truth is none of this is even remotely close to as evil IP law gets. I've saved the most egregious for last: The Lakota Language Consortium

The Lakota Language Consortium had promised to preserve the tribe’s native language and had spent years gathering recordings of elders, including Taken Alive’s grandmother, to create a new, standardized Lakota dictionary and textbooks.  But when Taken Alive, 35, asked for copies, he was shocked to learn that the consortium, run by a white man, had copyrighted the language materials, which were based on generations of Lakota tradition. The traditional knowledge gathered from the tribe was now being sold back to it in the form of textbooks.

When you're in defense of IP law, this is what you're siding with. This is the rational endpoint of IP and it is neither a fluke nor an example of the concept being twisted against its original design. Art, culture, language, it belongs to whoever is most capable of turning it into a product. The economic incentives of producing and distributing arts and culture demand this is how things be.

Meya says his work is a vital tool in preserving the Lakota language, which did not previously have a standardized written form. He estimated that there are fewer than 1,500 fluent Lakota speakers left and that over the last decade and a half, the organization has helped add 50 to 100 more. “Just because money is involved in it does not inherently make it an evil thing,” Meya said in a recent interview with NBC News. Most of the products his organizations make are free, he said, but the cost of printing textbooks has to come from somewhere. “That tends to be sometimes part of the rhetoric, ‘Oh, there’s money involved. It must be, you know, part of the overall colonization effort.’ Well, you know, that’s just not realistic.”

Artists looking to force their way into the class of people who gets protected by these laws are not looking out for their community. They are not protecting anything but their own perceived financial interests. Intellectual property will never, ever benefit the most marginalized members of creative communities and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is huffing some serious copium.

Frankly, I don't believe anyone can or should 'own' things like Ideas or Specific Aesthetic Flairs. But even if you do believe in that, IP law isn't the framework for handling it.

[txttletale]

My apologies for bringing back the AI discourse once more, lol, but while I understand and agree with a lot of the ideas you’ve brought up about AI generated art, I still can’t fully get behind it because, I dunno, isn’t it messed up to have taken someone’s labor to create the datasets capable of making AI art happen? If you don’t have the consent of the people whose content the AI is being trained on, isn’t that wrong too? As far as I know, a lot of these AI generators just scrape the Internet, even copyrighted material (lol) for datasets— that makes me really uncomfortable to know that my work is probably floating around some dataset somewhere, and while in the end it’s just a picture that someone generates for fun, the lack of consent to that is very discomforting. I don’t quite know what I’m asking here, I just feel like that has always been my biggest qualm with AI art. Is the solution just ethical AI generators with the consent of the people whose data is being used? Is that possible?

i guess i just fundamentally disagree with you on how ownership or art should work and how far it should be extended & think that following your stance to its natural conclusion would make the world a worse place. i think someone using art posted online in a collage is cool and good and that seems like much more straightforwardly 'using someone else's art without consented' than using that same piece of art as one datapoint among millions in a training set that teaches AI what things look like. & of course all the practical real methods of increasing that sort of post facto artistic control include strengthening IP laws and by that token strengthening large media corporations -- imagine a world where AI can only be trained on images you have the legal rights to, that would mean getty and disney could train away on their massive catalogues to the detriment of independent artists!

my one contention with AI dataset gathering is that private datasets are precipitating an arms race where platforms try to lay legal claim to their content so they can get a slice of the pie that is appropriating and privatising what should be publicly available.

[firespirited]

It's always funny to me how a company says "we own everything an employee makes even on their own time" when the employee can just...

not tell them. Sit on it until they're unemployed.

well... about that... Carter Bryant waited until his contract was over before pitching the full Bratz concept while trying to get work elsewhere.

When Bratz made it big, someone at Mattel did manage to remember he had at some point vaguely tried to pitch a teen doll line and it'd been rejected and they went digging. In court, they used the fact that he'd done some sketches on the free notepads they hand to their designers as evidence it probably wasn't done on company time but on company "property".

For a while there Mattel owned Bratz until the decision was reversed. And you might be thinking like I did, ah good the property reverted to its original owner.

Nope, Bryant gets nothing. MGAe are using the work he did in the early 2000s on the repros and he gets nothing. Both big doll companies won't employ him. Same for Garrett Sander: he sells artwork of "teen monsters" and does conventions.

It was part of their job to keep coming up with ideas and pitch as many as possible but it's also part of their job that they're disposable as designers... but if they pitch old ideas there's a chance it could result in litigation. I can't be certain but I think Sanders is hamstrung by having worked extensively on the (non cartoon) She-Ra: he couldn't pitch a warrior princess, magical girl or superhero line to any company without Mattel saying they own it or some design elements like a cape and sword combo, look they have these files in their vaults!

This, from companies that copy liberally from each other, from celebs and from fashion. The whole thing is absurd. These two designers have less ownership over their work than your local painter.

So a doll designer can't sit on anything unless they keep their ideas in their head and it's literally their job to be not just spitballing but sketching ideas all day and the company will only produce a few (but own them all).

I don't know many many industries this spans but it's wild: imagine Disney suing Taika Waititi for a new film he wrote the super basic outline for while he was bored on a plane for a press conference for Thor 4 because he used a company rental tablet to rehearse for questions and send himself an email, what if it had jokes he pitched in a writers' room at some point not knowing someone was keeping minutes?

Steven Sumners currently works for MGAe but I've been following on flickr since the 2010s and he's worked at Spinmaster, Mattel and Hasbro. They're expected to bounce around the industry as doll lines come and go but somehow keep the ideas flowing but also locked in their heads? Also no royalties, no copyright. Baffling.

[centrally-unplanned]

Since I myself have often been a counter-critic to the AI art critics, lets flip that around. Was some of the "IP law hypocrisy" discouse floating around today, you know the stuff - oh everyone hates on Big Brother Nintendo or Disney or w/e for their machine gun copyright lawsuits, but now that generative AI is out its all about IP-senpai being a dashing prince coming in to save them. Either you like it or hate it, right? Pick a lane.

Which, for sure btw this describes some of them. Those who pretty much want AI dead for essentially spiritual reasons, yeah. But I think those are the weakmen, because the rub is that IP law is not gonna change any time soon. Those reform efforts seem pretty dead in the water, the artistic socialist utopia isn't happening. Which means you need to live in the world you have, which means you need to play the game that everyone else is playing.

OpenAI is gonna use copyright law to its advantage! As will Disney and co when fighting/balancing/dealmaking/collaborating with OpenAI and its slate of competitors. Every AI company is going to work as hard as possible to train models as cheaply as possible and sell them as expensively as possible, and part of that is going to be to push IP law in its favor around what counts as fair use, what is ownership, etc.

And while all law is really process, forever contested & changing, that is double+ true for IP law. If you think the New York Times has no chance in its lawsuit against Open AI for its use of its article archives, I think you are insulting their extremely-qualified legal team who knows way more than you. All of this stuff is up for grabs right now, no one really knows how it will shake out.

So if you are an actual career independent artist, there is in fact a lot at stake. What is the legal line for mimicking someone's "style"? Does explicit training on your previous art to generate equivalents count as transformative work? These are quasi-open legal questions, and again since the system is absolutely not going away in any form, its extremely logical to want that system to work for you. "Free art" isn't on the table; the real question is who is gonna be at the table to write the next iteration of owned art. Being at the table is an obvious desire to have. You can still wish there wasn't a table to begin with, that isn't hypocritical at all.

[dawnanddorisqna]

I'm curious about redraws/recreates of characters. Like Dawn is sort of a reboot/recreate of Doris of sorts. For lack of better way of saying it, a new version of Doris running around even though she is a person of her own right. But like, with Mickey and Minnie, there are SO MANY versions of those two out there in media. The day at Disney with the throat punch seems to suggest that Mickey was specifically Steamboat Willie, not the other Mickeys. Seems to strike me sad if there are multiple versions and like, they see the Cratchet version and their child Tiny Tim Cratchet out and about while the rest aren't allowed... and oddly seems also a very Di$ney thing to do.

There's always been one Mickey. Though there was that weird moment in the early days of Termite Terrace studios where they made a few familiar looking mice to torture on screen. But disney toons rarely have multiples. It's a cost cutting thing. So like an actor who puts on layers of makeup each day for a role, a toon can go through multiple changes in a day to film different things. It's all according to their contract. You have to look however the copyright holder wants. The footage of steam boat Willie is now out there for everyone to use. And new mice characters will come from it. And as to how Mickey is dealing with the idea of anyone making a new version of his younger self? I'm not sure. Disney keeps their characters and their lives very private.

So when do multiple characters get made? Usually it's when someone has a separate ownership of a toon. Or sells rights of an image to be made in another country (like powerpuff girls z). Or when someone wants to take a character into an extreme direction while keeping the original going and not having any identity issues (like loonatics unleashes). I was fortunate enough to be an independent character. My studio contract ran out years ago and the school I was drawn in didn't place a copyright ownership on me because i was just a graduate film trst. Not important after graduation. I was able to roam free. Really unheard of now.

On Mickey and Minnie running into the toon who played Tiny Tim. He does! All the time. Tiny Tim was played by one of his nephews. Felicity Mouse's kids. They've appeared in a few of his cartoons.

Thank you so much for the question,

Doris

[enlightenedrobot]

May I ask, for the Betty Boop character free copyright, what versions of hers we can use? like if you don't mind be a little more specific for my dumbass self understands

Only if you don't mind ofc!

Wow, I never made a follow up clarifying the Betty Boop situation. So uh... the situation is complicated.

So like... to play things safe... Betty Boop actually *unambiguously* enters the public domain in 2 years. Which is to say the original version of Betty Boop as depicted in Dizzy Dishes will be free to use.

That said, I'm calling bull. There's dozens of variants of Betty Boop who don't look like the modern incarnation who have fallen into the public domain, and at times, it feels like there's more Betty Boop stuff in the domain than outside of it.

On top of that, the rights to Betty Boop are a complicated mess. From the wikipedia page:

Global Icons, btw, is the same company that also owns the rights to the images of serveral real life celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley... and like... that really sucks.

I'm not a legal expert by any means, but I think this all reads a bit familiar. Disney continues to claim ownership of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, even though that's a lie. The same can be said for DC and any of the Fawcett Comic characters.

What I can tell you is that there's definitely a single recognizable variant of Betty Boop who has fallen into the public domain, with one rather extreme deviation from most other versions of the character.

Betty Boop was a redhead for exactly one cartoon, and nobody talks about that. Poor Cinderella is a solid Betty Boop short, and it's free for anybody to use. And this version of Betty, at least to me, reads as a different incarnation of Betty not commonly used in modern merchandise.

Use her. Call her Cindy or just remove the "Boop" from her name. Put her next to her unambiguously Public Domain friends Bimbo and Koko the Clown. Have her meet Steamboat Willie Mickey and Minnie. Put her into the spiritual successor to Epic Mickey that everybody wants but nobody seems to know how to make.

But allow me to back up for a second.

Right now, as we speak, big AI companies are scraping the art of millions of artists without pay. Original stories aren't being picked up by big networks... everybody wants big IP and indie projects aren't allowed a spotlight. And none of this is going to change anytime soon.

Now more than ever, we are morally obligated to steal art. Not just pirate it. Steal it. Bend it to our whims. Make our own version. Take advantage of parody law and fair use and produce our own frankensteinian creations.

In the future, copyright should belong to the artist, not a corporation. Showrunners who pitch cartoons should own the cartoons they produce; there's no reason Rebecca Sugar and Dana Terrace should be denied royalties for the cartoons they came up with. And in the event of an artists death, the copyright for a character should only by the artists estate for a short amount of time.

I'm sick of Disney. I'm sick of the Marvin Gaye Estate. I'm sick of Global Icons. If they're gonna take advantage of our hard work as artists, then we're morally obligated to take advantage of their IP.

[secretmellowblog]

Anyone who thinks AI is going to “revolutionize/democratize copyright law” is a fucking idiot and just as stupid as all those people who thought NFTs would revolutionize copyright. Because no, it will not? It won’t? That’s now how any of this works? You are just lying? It’s the same argument people always made about Nfts— “currently it looks like it’s just a scummy way for Silicon Valley types and big companies to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else, but in our distant libertarian cyber future it will somehow revolutionize/democratize the concept of ownership in some nebulous poorly defined way we haven’t figured out the logistics of yet!”

The thing is. In my opinion the biggest problem with current copyright law isn’t that it allows people to have any kind of rights over the work, or that people having some kind of rights over their work is inherently always bad. The much greater problem with current copyright law is that it is massively skewed in favor of corporations, and benefits them to an insane degree while giving very little to the people who actually create the work. The people who actually make your favorite movies and comics and games usually don’t have any rights whatsoever over their creations, and instead massive companies have complete control over them.

And that’s the whole problem with the unevenness of current copyright law. if I as an individual violate Disney’s copyright by stealing a single image owned by them, or create derivative work/fanfic based on their stuff, they can sue me. But if a big corporation steals my entire life’s work and everything I’ve ever made to shove in a algorithm and create infinite derivative copies, I can do nothing. Theft on a small scale is a crime— but theft on a massive scale is business.

OpenAI is not some leftist project about taking power away from corporations by revolutionizing ownership. it is itself a giant corporation determined to get as much value for its investors as possible. It needs to be regulated. And laws protecting individual working class artists from a massive corporation determined to use their stolen labor to make them obsolete are necessary, actually!

This is not creating a world free of copyright; it’s creating a world where only individuals are bound by whatever rules exists, and whatever pretense used to exist that we had any rights over our work whatsoever is gone, because now only corporations can own things. AI can generate an image but it cannot generate a movie, which is one of the only “products” that can’t be “generated”, so only big companies with the budgets to make larger projects will be able to generate things that can be owned.

I thought we all agreed that the idea that a libertarian world where “~we don’t need laws and regulations let the free market decide and somehow everything will work itself out-“ was utterly stupid, and there needed to be limits on corporate power?

I find it literally insane that people think it’s somehow progressive to cheer on a massive corporation attempting to get infinite power, and that working class artists who are already overworked and underpaid are ~not real leftists- for pointing out it’s wrong to cheer on corporations getting to play by their own separate rules (rules that WE are bound to but they are not), even when their technology relies on the exploited labor of the people they’re going to drive deeper into poverty.

The leftism leaves people’s bodies when you tell them that they don’t actually need a machine whose data was trained by underpaid impoverished workers in Kenya making less than $2 an hour to write free shitty fanfic for them… and that the machine doesn’t create things “withojt labor,” it creates things by finding corporates loopholes to current laws that allows them to avoid paying the people for their labor. Everything you generate with image/text generators is things that are generated by the all the free labor of the artists they didn’t pay, and all the poor people in developing countries that they exploited. It doesn’t create things without labor, it creates things by obfuscating where the labor came from.

[somyd-2k]

Disney may cannibalise itself thanks to a recent legal dispute.

When Disney went about purchasing other companies recently they gave out a unique contract to each potential asset.

The terms of each of these contracts were carefully tailored to meet each of the asset's needs.

However this has caused a nightmare scenario for Disney in a recent case about an allergy related wrongful death where a customer technically used 3 separate services at once to acquire the meal that lead to the death.

these three services have terms that conflict with one another due to the bespoke contracts used to purchase these services.

as such no terms can be agreed upon that all services agree to and that means if Disney does resolve the confusing legislature they will almost undoubtedly lead towards having to let go certain services they own.

on the small scale these services include multiple restaurants that has established branches within Disney brand parks, however on the larger scale, this includes the owners of these restaurants as well, which includes some pretty big names unfortunately, the main ones being Lucas and Marvel.

Lucus owns the Moss Eisley restaurant which would not be able to meet the new terms, this would lead to restaurant branch needing to be located outside of Disney brand parks and property.

Since the land and streets surrounding Disney parks also fall under the ownership of the Disney brand, it may mean having to relocate the restaurant up to several miles away from the park itself therefore ruining any chances of attaining customers that are in the area due to the Disney park.

Moreover the canteen band from the Moss Eisley in the movies technically falls under the restaurant's copyrights including the character Max Rebo who's meant to appear in the Skeleton Crew show which is being broadcast on Disney Plus, which could lead to several episodes having to rewritten.

As for Marvel they own the Wish franchise restaurant and with that copyright includes King Magnifico though the other characters are Disney properties.

This means that Magnifico can no longer appear on Disney Plus and since he's the main villain of the Wish property, it's going to be very difficult to remove all references to him inside of all the Disney brand parks, especially since the related protagonist of the Wish franchise, a girl named Asha, is in direct conflict with Magnifico within that franchise, and is now included as part Disney's princess program, which is the Disney brand park's main selling feature.

what a mess.

[warbyparker]

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[untilthestarsareallalight]

PSA

Decided to just make this a single post instead of leaving it on the original reblog.

I keep seeing this crap here, and on Pinterest and it's getting on my nerves. I'm majoring in Graphic Design and plan to do this for a living. So I know a thing or two about what I'm talking about in terms of copyright, what you actually own and about giving credit. I thought maybe I ought to clear it up for y'all.

Screenshotting or video recording images from a movie or tv show, then coloring it over, adding a filter and some words DOESN'T LEGALLY MAKE IT YOURS. Sure, it's the internet, and we take pictures and we make pictures. But demanding someone gives YOU the credit for combining one or two images that weren't yours to begin with isn't legally stealing.

It's one thing if it's original art that you drew or photographs you took yourself, because that's YOUR original content. Reposting that kind of work and claiming it's yours IS stealing. Giving credit for gifs and other edits is more of a formal courtesy and not infringing on copyright.

I understand people work hard on gifs and it's annoying when people repost without credit– believe me, I get it. But many of those images weren't yours to begin with anyway. I can't just video record a gif from The Avengers, color it over with a filter and claim it's mine. That footage belongs to Disney and they never gave me any permission to use it or claim ownership of it. So demanding people do the same for you, when you don't own the footage or image you initially used, is outright hypocrisy.

Go ahead and block me if you like. I don't really care. I'm just tired of seeing this, because it's obvious people don't understand copyright laws at all, and they're to the point where they're cool with stealing off the internet themselves, but also feel entitled to receive "credit."

Edit: For the people who are gonna come at me: I don't care how long you've been anywhere, and how long you've been making anything. Stealing is still stealing, and acting entitled doesn't change that fact. So sure, before you "prove me wrong," show me where in the law it says you deserve credit for images you stole off the internet. No one owes you anything.

[bryonieamber]

i dont really want to think too much about ai but it's shoving itself in my face absolutely everywhere i go i cant just not have an opinion about it.

when i was a piglet, everyone always talked about "ai taking jobs" as like a joke. a silly hypothetical, that we all believed was no more likely to affect us than robot overlords, or teleporter malfunctions.

"ai" is still no more advanced than predictive text, and its nowhere near as scary as the thing we jokingly pretended to be frightened of as children. but it's already done that thing we were all joking about years ago.

ive never made much money from my work. the kind of art i specialize in is all freelance these days, full of competitors more skilled than me, and not nearly as marketable as 3d animation or graphic design, like my peers were smart enough to major in. and i never realized until i graduated college how much i hate freelancing.

and when this ai craze first started getting big, and concerns were being raised about copyright, and artists getting laid off, i was in agreement with other artists that this COULD make my art career harder. that people COULD be at risk of losing ownership of their work.

some time last year, i was walking from point A to point B, at the store where i work, where my actual job is, because i've never been a successful enough artist to do this full-time like i wish i could. and i saw some jigsaw puzzles we were selling.

and i noticed all the art on these jigsaw puzzles were ai generated.

and i think that was the moment it really hit me that the robots had already taken my job.

i'll always be appreciative and grateful to people who pay artists for their labor, but those people are in short supply. and now that the logo design, and furry porn markets are pivoting to ai, there's less and less room for artists like me who have to compete in a market with a growing number of thousands of other starving artists.

i can't compete with the skill of other humans, or the cheapness of computers.

i guess i've known for a while i'd never make a career out of art anyway, not like the masters of old, who got to work at disney before they kicked all the 2d animators out. so i realize i'm lamenting a future i never really had. and maybe ai isn't entirely to blame. but when fewer people can afford to be artists, we'll all have less art.

its not all bad, though. i guess. there is something i like about not marketing my art. about not making my whole thing a "brand". i like that i can draw whatever i like, and that i can not draw, if i don't feel like it.

but i also haven't really felt like drawing for a long time. and i think, somehow, the jigsaw puzzle has something to do with that.

[literaticat]

Hi Jenn, thanks for all your work here—it’s very helpful! Is it typical to have a moral rights waiver clause in a book contract? For example, a clause requiring an author to waive all moral rights other than the right to be attributed as author? Thank you!

My first questions are, is this a UK or Canadian or US contract, or other? And is it a Work-For-Hire/IP contract? I feel like I've seen this more NOT in US contracts, and in WFH/IP contracts.

FWIW, "moral rights" or droit moral sounds like, but is quite different from, a morality clause:

moral rights / droit moral in a nutshell: Goes along with copyright to sone extent and refers to an artist's ownership of the work -- you have the right to be named the author/artist, the work can't be attributed to somebody else and other work cannot be falsely attributed to you, and other people/companies/entities can't alter the work without your say-so. HOWEVER, you can see why a publisher might ask for a waiver of moral rights -- let's say you are writing a book about Moana -- well, Disney owns that IP, you are writing it as a work-for-hire, and even though you write it, you DON'T own it, and you can't sue them if they decide to alter it to suit whatever it is they are doing or publish it under the name Priscilla Pennyfeather or whatever they want to do. So they might ask you in the contract to waive your moral rights. If they have agreed that you'll be credited as the author, they might ask you to waive your moral rights EXCEPT attribution.

So basically, it's not anything too weird, and would certainly not be odd to see in a WFH/IP contract, I just think it's more common in the UK/Canada than US? And not every country even allows these rights to be waived. (But I'm not a lawyer and I'm seeing this out of context, so obvs, if there's something that's raising a red flag for you, ask somebody who is actually a lawyer and has the contract in full in front of them!)

morality clause: It's probably not actually CALLED this, but instead would be wrapped up within a larger clause about ways you can breach your contract, but basically, this allows the publisher to cancel the book if, say, you get involved in a scandal that destroys your reputation. I do see why a publisher would want to have this protection, HOWEVER, we try to eliminate these where possible or at least limit the language substantially. Because who is the judge of what is "scandalous"? Like, yes, if you commit an actual CRIME against children and are tried and convicted and your reputation is then majorly damaged ('widespread and prolonged condemnation') -- your cute lil children's book is probably not going to be published, and fair enough. But let's say you are a political firebrand whose whole deal is being "scandalous"/ outrageous, and the publisher contracted you to write a memoir -- if you do a scandal, they can't say that your reputation has been damaged, it was already bad, that's why they signed the book up! OR, let's say that you are just living your life as a gay person but some random religious nutjobs think you should not be allowed to exist -- there should not be language that could allow a publisher to cancel your contract based on some random person's feelings about what is or isn't "bad", you know? Hence why we want to make it something like you've been CONVICTED of a crime, not just accused of being "sinful".

(And yes, correct, that isn't what OP asked about at all -- I just felt the need to mention it, since the two terms sound so much alike and are very easily confused!)

[madhogthymaster]

Mickey Mouse and Horror Cash Grabs: A Reasonable Explanation

Some of you might be wondering, why?

Why is the Mouse getting the Rated-R treatment as soon as Disney's clutches on its inkblot corpse had lessened? For that matter, why was that the case for Winnie the Pooh and his own ill-conceived yet financially successful outing? Is that really all that we, as a society, nay, as people, can accomplish creatively with one of the most historically significant and influential icons in pop culture? Is there a reason for any of this, besides the obvious one? Well, I may be able to offer a reasonable explanation and it's not necessarily as simple as it might seem: this is about trademark issues. Specifically, how to deal with a notoriously litigious mega-company and the perception of its brand. Yes, this will be an essay.

Now, I must preface that I am neither a lawyer nor an expert in trademark laws. This is mere speculation based on what I know and understand about Disney, its modus operandi, the key difference between the ownership of a work of fiction and a commercial entity.

As we all know, the whole public domain business applies specifically to the 1928 shorts (Plane Crazy, The Gallopin' Gaucho and, naturally, Steamboat Willy) but if you're going to use that version of Mickey Mouse for profit, you must be sure that it won't remind the audience, in any way, shape of form, of Disney's family friendly brand. The character's design and the project in which it is used must not look "similar" to Disney's trademarked content or you might incur the ire of its army of lawyers, getting Cease and Desist-ed into oblivion, and so on. As established, Disney is notoriously litigious. This is the corporation that picked a fight with daycare hospitals for having its characters painted on their walls. This is the company that sent a "copyright strike" to a grieving father for the "crime" of adorning his deceased child's grave with a Spider-Man picture.

Its stranglehold on its "precious playthings", regardless of what enters public domain or not, is as tight as Death's grip on our collective testicles. Mickey Mouse is a brand, first and foremost, which means it's a registered trademark, which means that it will be owned by this company for as long as it will be in active commercial use. Now, you've got Steamboat Willie in the public domain. You can use that for profit but you cannot market it to audiences as "Disney's Willie", so to speak. What do you do? The answer is, you put out in the world something that's the diametric opposite to the public perception of the child-friendly Mouse, something the corporation will have no interest in pursuing legally for fear of association: a horror film/game.

Disney hates to put its name on non-family friendly "spooky" materials starring its beloved legacy characters, as evidenced by the disdain for unique Mickey Mouse outings such as The Mad Doctor (1933) and the brilliant Runaway Brain (1995), the former entering public domain long before Steamboat Willie and the latter being generally buried. They "damage" the brand, you see... Unlike blocking a parent from mourning his deceased son, apparently. Clearly, they have their priorities figured out!

As such, a horror film using familiar iconographies placed in an unfamiliar scenario would be the easy way to go about it, theoretically. It will most likely get away with any potential legal trouble. Furthermore, it is a point of fact that audiences do have a morbid fascination for dark interpretations of childhood favourites which all but guarantees a good financial return. Now, that is not to say that wretched Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey was suddenly a valid artistic achievement in retrospect and it certainly does not mean the many, upcoming Mickey-related "big time commercial projects" are anything but lazy, cheap, cash-grabs - because they are. However, I do believe there is more to the story.

At the end of the day, these projects aren't simply a way for some people to make easy money off of a well-known property, they are the SAFEST way for people to make money off of a well-known property. Oh how sweet is that low-hanging fruit.

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A/N:

If you are curious about about Disney and the history of American copyright laws then I recommend this article: https://www.wionews.com/opinions-blogs/how-disney-routinely-exerted-influence-on-the-us-copyright-law-to-keep-its-greatest-asset-mickey-mouse-549141

Also, consider following me on YouTube and Twitter. I recently put out a podcast that covers the subject of Mickey and public domain.

This article was inspired by this post: https://www.tumblr.com/askmovieslate/739857268511768576/why-i-mean-seriously-if-you-have-access-to-such?source=share