I'm not sure which is more embarrassing: today's ludicrous copyright terms that automatically lock away culture from all of us for potentially over a century, or the fact that legislation that spans centuries can be bought for a mere $149,612. The article claims Trent Lot got a piddling $1,000 (well, publicly at least) for getting on board. That's less money than Disney generates for itself per second of its existence.
They'd probably do it for free. It was seen as protecting American business interests. It was argued that it would protect art by incentivizing storage and restoration of old works. There are counter arguments to these arguments, but it wasn't a super controversial bill.
The biggest part of lobbying is just getting people to notice your issue. Meeting the right people and getting the right language crafted is like 9/10ths of the process. Not all (probably not even most) lobbying is bribery.
I'd be hesitant to make the latter statement in isolation. Given my experiences with various levels of "important individuals" over the years, the money is MOST useful for opening that door in the first place.
It's a lot easier to offer a group of high power individuals a 5 star dinner with a realistic expectation they'll who up, as opposed to cold calling them as just another average joe. Once that connection is established, the relationship is much less active bribery and much more "let's have a little chat and see if we can't find something mutually agreeable"; although to be frank, I'm not sure I'd say the latter is any less worrying.
I wouldn't take that quote too seriously. If you read the doc where those quotes came from, it's clear the traders are joking around. They would have done it for favors anyway, no coffee needed.
Still, normally I imagine all these finance people as people in suits, not the type who says this "if u did that i would come over there and make love to you[,] your choice"
Actually this is a very good thing. Politicians being such cheap dates over this topic means that it should be possible for a bunch of us to chip in and buy them all off when the next extension comes up. A PAC or a public pledge of donations devoted to ending the copyright mafia’s control would not need much support to get real results.
Yes it could get into a bidding war, but it would at least be worth trying.
The most likely chance of success would be a fight for better handling of orphan works. We could free 99.9% of all material that should be coming out of copyright while having very little or no impact on the copyright mafia.
It would probably be best to not get into specific cases, but try to find a way that could be more general - say let a current copyright holder extend the copyright of an item for 10 years for a nominal fee (say $100). The money could go to fund a website that would list which old works were still copyright protected.
Mickey would be safe from entering the public domain and everything else would automatic become public domain.
Why not get into specific cases? I know it smells funny to a programmer, but pragmatically just giving Disney an explicit exemption would take them out of the lobbying game.
If that happened, it'd probably be big enough to get mainstream media attention ("grassroots VS corporate lobbying bidding-war!"), at which point politicians might well be forced to side with the grassroots for fear of their image permanently being stuck as "a corporate sell-out", at which point we've won regardless of how much money corporate lobbying puts in.
Maybe we can do it the way protagonists of the book Makers did? They figured out a way to make some IP lawsuits against Disney look profitable enough that it attracted VC investments and suddenly all the power of startup funding industry was redirected to destroy Disney.
You made the point well, maybe the U.S. Govt should squeeze a little harder. Something like a perpetual copyright for 10% of the gross, taxes not included. That's a deal the Hollywood set can understand.
I'm sort of embarrassed to contemplate how much emotional energy goes into casting copyright arguments in such overwrought terms. Locking culture away from us? My god, the violence!
Nothing has entered Public Domain until 2019 IF it isn't extended.
Good case of how it sucks: Sherlock Holmes. Half the stuff is copyrighted and the earlier stuff is Public Domain. So we only get half the stories and nothing about an older Sherlock.
Where do you get violence from a metaphorical lock and the idea of culture?
Care to explain how copyright does not achieve that? The term isn't overwrought, it actually perfectly describes what it achieves. It puts a lock on cultural works.
The really disgusting thing is that the U.S. then turns around and tries to force it's insane copyright laws on other countries under the guise of trade agreements like TPP. It seems inevitable that, eventually, the birth of Mikey Mouse will divide what is public domain from what is not around the entire globe for all time.
Of course, the U.S. could instead do something sensible like create a "Mickey Mouse law". e.g. For ongoing fees of a fairly large size, companies can retain a copyright indefinitely. Set the fees to a little less than the amount Disney spends on lobbyists and graft and everybody wins. Disney keeps the rights to Mickey and saves money. Things not named Mickey Mouse start entering the public domain again.
Don't be so hard on the US. We have a sycophantic prime minister who would do anything the US asked, legal or not (just ask Dotcom) it's hardly fair on the US to expect this not to be used to mild advantage. New Zealand, John Key.
The article briefly mentions some of the other IP that Disney has (Pluto, Goofy etc) from the same era as Mickey, while they are not as important to Disney as Mickey, I doubt the trademark way would cover them too.
This is a good illustration for why I feel democracy is fundamentally broken.
Democracy requires a large number of people to agree on on party/person and to reach these people and to convince them to vote for your candidate, you have to spend tons of money. Either:
A) You use your own money. Which means you fall under "the financial elite".
B) You take money from financial elites, which means you will owe them and pay back in some form. Why else would they give you their precious money?
Thus the power remains restricted to the the financial elite. The elected candidate represents the elites more than the common person because while the common person just gave the candidate a singular vote, the investor gave the candidate much needed money that helped gather all those votes
This was what campaign finance reform was supposed to be about. It can be done differently: in the UK, the parties are not allowed to buy TV advertising! Instead there are a few fixed, free slots for the parties.
The way they're all introduced by a BBC continuity announcer saying "This is a party political broadcast on behalf of the Whatever party", and the fact that most of the people doing the electoral groundwork are volunteers, lends the whole thing a very British dignity.
Doesn't get money out of politics entirely though. We're still beholden to the finance industry and the landlord industry.
By the way, Germany does the same – and parties get money relative to votes and the engagement of their supporters retroactively for their election campaign, so no campaign has to be paid by sponsors.
parties not allowed to buy tv advertising? That would take about 5 minutes to work around. just have a big party official retire, and become the head of a public organization which carefully avoids colluding with the party, while funnelling private donations into privately funded ads which merely explain why one candidate is better than the other.
This doesn't happen in the UK, because the advertising standards body would spot it. I have never seen a paid political ad on UK television. They occasionally appear in newspapers.
The UK press doesn't pretend to be independent though, and is very big on telling voters who to support.
In NZ we have a similar system, but similar laws apply to non-party broadcasts, where unregistered groups or individuals an spend a small amount of money (~10k) and registered groups can spend something like 250k (the three largest parties get more then that each and the rest get less)
If the ECC thinks you breached that they can take you to court, but the results will almost certainly stand.
" to reach these people and to convince them to vote for your candidate, you have to spend tons of money"
I recall reading from freakonomics that (according to them) inverse is actually true: candidates do not do better because they have bigger budgets, but they're likely to receive more financial support if they are more likely to get elected. Truth probably lies somewhere in between, but stating that "democracy is fundamentally broken" is just too naive.
Having worked in federal politics, I can confirm that the notion that "democracy is fundamentally broken" is something far more frequently heard from those who have little-to-no experience in politics, than those who have seen the good and bad of politics' inner workings. In fact, I've never heard it from somebody who works in politics, and those are some of the most jaded people I've ever come across.
IMHO, democracy is definitely not broken, and it's biggest threat stems from those who peddle in FUD relating to government & democracy. Essentially, things aren't as bad as most would like you to believe, and individuals getting involved in politics are the ones with the biggest influence in politics. It's far more accessible than many would have you believe, especially because politics runs on the hard work of young people, who then become insiders, write policy, and affect change.
Well, it makes sense that successful people working in a legal field would not think that field is broken - otherwise how would they rationalise dedicating their life to it?
I'd expect cosmetic plastic surgeons, patent lawyers, payday loan providers, NSA employees, beauty magazine writers, oil company execs, planned parenthood employees, NRA employees, parking wardens and censorship software writers to believe their work had a genuine positive impact on society too.
The question of whether a field is broken (not working how people would like it to work) is different from the question of whether it's valuable.
There's a question of whether lawyers are a net good for society, and I would expect a lawyer to think 'yes' whether or not that's true. But there's also a question of, how much of a lawyer's job involves being friendly with the judge?
I'd expect a lawyer to know the true answer to that, independently of whether or not [she thinks] lawyers are a net good.
(At least, I'd trust the lawyer more than I'd trust a randomer.)
> But there's also a question of, how much of a lawyer's job involves being friendly with the judge?
> I'd expect a lawyer to know the true answer to that, independently of whether or not [she thinks] lawyers are a net good.
A lot depends on your relationship with that lawyer. If they're your brother or wife, or your long-time friend, then you'd probably get the true answer. If they're just a colleague, you'd probably get the official answer.
People working in politics, in my experience, usually understand the strengths and weaknesses of democracy quite well. If they don't, and just have an idealistic view of a utopian version of democracy, then they're likely to fail and quickly get pushed out.
So, is the politicking of democracy perfect? No. But the view that democracy is fundamentally broken misses the good aspects that it can and does provide, and seems like naive radicalism.
1. Obviously, people working in politics believe in it as a vehicle of change, by means of self-selection. A person who doesn't believe in politics will go somewhere else.
2. I wonder just how much real influence can an individual have, especially as they gain more power. Power is gained through deals and friendships, and the more you entangle yourself in the exchange of favours, the more autonomy you lose. I theorize that the people at the top positions are mostly just puppets with no real power and autonomy - because a person that looks uncontrollable will not be allowed by their party to reach higher positions.
1: And it's a shame when people don't "believe in politics", because if one isn't a lunatic, then that individual, if involved, can and will make a difference. There's a saying that's especially true in politics - half the battle is just showing up. Well, it's commonly known that if one wants to be influential, it starts with staying later than the other people and stacking chairs, stuffing envelopes, and knocking on doors. Now, that's not sufficient to obtain success, but it is necessary. However, when we tell people that they can't make a difference because they don't have money, we're lying to citizens and suppressing their democratic influence. Can we criticize aspects of democracy? Absolutely. Should we say it's fundamentally broken? Absolutely not.
2: That's theorizing without experience or evidence.
That seems like an aphorism, but it's just overly simplistic and naive. People in politics depend upon understanding the system. If they don't they then quickly get forced out of influential circles.
Perhaps you have never heard this from people who works in politics precisely because they are part of the cozy system they are in and being fed from it.
Perhaps, but like I said, they're extremely jaded people. Nobody in politics has a rose-colored view of democracy, thinking it's a perfect form of governance. But at the same time, you can see the value it has and you can actually see change occur. Democracy isn't broken because getting involved actually has a tremendous affect on the inner workings of politics. Telling people democracy is broken actually works to break it, because people stay home and don't get involved, which is the lifeblood of democracy.
I think you are missing the point. The financial support is cozying up to whoever will win. Obviously its not a free donation. The investor will eventually seek payback by having a higher voice in legislative matters.
For example, motorcycle driven rickshaws were recently banned in Pakistan. The official statement says they were unsafe and a menace to society. But it doesn't take a genius to see that other forms of public transport (such as buses) stand to gain from this decision and must have had something to do with it.
PS: Public transport is largely owned by private parties in Pakistan.
You may find the book "Democracy, the God that failed" from Herman Hoppe interesting (or you may find him too weird). Although cronyism is one of the main culprit, he gives other reasons for the inferiority of the Democracy. Bare in mind that he is an anti-statist and anarcho-capitalist. His proposed practical solution is de-centralization of governments to as small as possible pieces.
Copyright applies to all creative works. Changing those laws to protect a handful of valuable properties is a global solution to a local problem. According to the article:
...Disney has ingrained Mickey Mouse so deeply in its corporate identity that the character is essentially afforded legal protection for eternity, so long as Disney protects him (trademarks last indefinitely, so long as they are renewed).
If that's true, then why does Disney care whether the copyright expires?
If they start losing copyright, they start losing back catalog. I doubt there's a huge demand for the 1920s Steamboat Willie [1], but in 2032 they'll lose Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and in 2035, Pinnochio.
Of course, that's an awfully long ways off by a time-value-of-money analysis at the rates a modern company would normally use, so the other thing to look at and be... outraged? perturbed? surprised?... at is just how goddamned cheap Congress has historically been. Did you notice this line:
"In one instance, Eisner paid Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) $1,000 on the very same day that he signed on as a co-sponsor."
I mean, I presume that's not necessarily their only cough "donation" to the Senate Majority Leader, but one presumes that the Majority Leader ought to command a price premium, too, and for $1000 to be a notable donation to talk about, well, holy cow. I'd bet Disney wouldn't pay $10 billion as a lump sum in 2023 to extend copyright again... but we're not talking anywhere near that sort of money to get copyright extended. If they can do it for <$10 million, the cost/benefit is a no-brainer.
Remember, the value to Disney only has to exceed their expected costs. If their expected costs for a copyright extension is an accounting rounding error, of course they're going to try to extend it.
As much as I hate the idea of lobbying as it works today, I can't deny the tremendous ROI that it represents for companies like Intuit whose entire business relies on convoluted, complex tax laws.
TurboTax Maker Funnels Millions To Lobby Against Easier Tax Returns
"We allow people to speak to their politicians. And not just during campaign season. By pledging money, ShiftSpark lets you signal the issues tied to your support when politicians need it - BEFORE the election. This gives us more candidates, less corporate influence and politicians who listen."
[1] He was previously the president of the Manhattan Young Democrats and is currently a Vice President at the Young Democrats of America.
It's obviously not about the money. Ignoring the obvious fact that a massive monetary transfer would not be seen kindly by regulators, politicians employ the connections that they made while serving to make gobs of money for themselves after they leave office. Having Disney's CEO in your rolodex and owing you a favor is worth a lot more than any immediate monetary award.
Presumably, lobbying is cheap if there's nobody tugging in the opposite direction. $1000 would convince pretty much anyone to vote a certain way on an issue they're neutral/undecided on. On the other hand, $1000 probably won't "buy back" a vote that e.g. the oil lobby bought for $1mm.
> I mean, I presume that's not necessarily their only cough "donation" to the Senate Majority Leader, but one presumes that the Majority Leader ought to command a price premium, too, and for $1000 to be a notable donation to talk about, well, holy cow.
The limits are pretty low on individual donations.
That's what bundlers are for -- it's amazing how many corporate employees are willing to ante up to the maximum limit amount. Sometimes even folk making fifteen bucks an hour. Very civic-minded, they are.
Less cynically, most contributions aren't about bribery for legislation (superPACs looking increasingly like an exception), but about simple access, ensuring that your calls get returned and your point of view is at least heard. It's still quite arguably a corrupt system, but the corruption is slightly abstracted from the simple act of giving money.
And then you can also donate much more to the various party committees, and you can do it as a "directed donation", so that the money is credited to Politico X and the party committee immediately forwards the money back to Politico X.
But corruption talk that centers on the individual donations made to politicians is mostly wrong. That's not how corruption works. That's a reflection through a mirror of the actual corruption happening, which is mostly about influence, not money. Politico A and Entity B have made a deal to use their influence to support each other, and that is reflected in some puny $1000 donation somewhere, but it's not mostly about the $1000.
I mean, what if we looked at it in another way? What if we could use that $10 billion to pay teachers better in poor school districts around the country? How impactful would that be just to not have the ability to make cartoons with one specific character? And people parody Mickey anyway and if it complies with parody law and isn't SUPER offensive, the Mouse would probably just send a cease and desist.
If corporations are already buying the government and avoiding taxes...why can't we put that money to the public good?
A variety of solutions involving permitting extensive relicensing on some sort of exponential scale have been proposed, but it's all just pointless academic speculation as long as Disney can just keep buying extensions.
It does seem to me that we could possibly reach a compromise with Disney in that respect; to be honest, I don't really care whether Mickey falls into the public domain anytime soon anymore. But it's stupid to hold the entire culture hostage for the vanishingly small percentage of things from the early 20th century that are still ongoing commercial concerns.
Disney is massively protective of its characters, especially what it calls the "core characters". Even Disney-authorized travel agents are told that they can never, I mean never, display an image of Mickey or Minnie Mouse without prior written authorization. There are a handful of artists whom Disney has granted a license to use their characters in specially-cultivated artwork and if these artists try to post their own art that uses licensed characters on their own Facebook accounts, Disney brings out the lawyers. They are rabidly, ridiculously protective of these characters and brands because they don't want to ever risk the consumer getting sick of them or associating them with something negative.
Although Disney would continue to own the Mickey Mouse trademarks, you can probably tell that they wouldn't be fond of the potential dilutive effects that may flow from the free commerce of public domain works involving these characters. To them, Steamboat Willie going PD is the death knell not only of the Mickey Mouse cash cow, but the entire brand icon empire (without which Disney becomes little more than a mediocre theme park destination).
Because the protections afforded by trademark are far more limited and targeted. Trademark law is the scalpel that cuts out the fakes using your logo or companies trying to pass themselves off as you. Copyright is the blunt instrument (especially with the corporate insistence that fair use doesn't exist) that you can browbeat people with. There is nothing like the DMCA for trademark.
It's not about the mouse. If they lose copyright, all their start going into the public domain. They can no longer use their silly "it's in the vault" tricks to drive fake scarcity, as someone else can just copy it and publish it.
The irony is their movies, atleast most of them, come from the public domain.
You've missed the point, which is that even if the copyright expired on Mickey, Disney might have another legal option to protect him, as explained at the end of the article.
But I think as someone else suggested, the reason they care is because of not just Mickey, but their back catalogue of other material which may not fall under that same brand protection. And because Disney doesn't know any better than to continue their campaign of paying people off to get their precious copyright extensions. It's what they do.
Public domain works are an important creative incentive for new works and increased availability of art. Old and new Art enriches our culture, is a source of wisdom and inspiration for young and old, and the more we have the better. We need a strong connection with out artistic past. Society is worse off for this Disney sponsored 100 year blind spot in our cultural rear mirrors.
Words are (1) public domain, and (2) eligible to be trademarks.
Suppose you make paper, but instead of white, it's light blue. You sell it under the brand "Blue Paper". You can (I believe) trademark that (for example, your logo probably has the words in a particular font), but you can't stop anyone else from selling blue paper as "Blue Paper", because that's purely descriptive of the product.
Similarly, once a video featuring Mickey Mouse is out of copyright, it's perfectly OK for people to sell that video. And it seems to me that they could defend using an image of Mickey Mouse on the packaging, under the same logic -- despite the fact that the image of Mickey is trademarked by Disney for the purpose of selling cartoons. It's not obvious that the trademark is actually protective there.
You would presumably be able to create derivative works based on Steamboat Willie, but not reference things that happen in things that are still under copyright, as is the case with Sherlock Holmes (http://io9.gizmodo.com/us-judge-rules-sherlock-holmes-and-wa...)
But that video would be easy to obtain for anyone, so the business model of selling it would not be a threat to Disney.
Further more, if you're in the business of selling public domain works, don't expect the courts to protect you when Disney comes knocking about your use of their character on the video cover. Even though you can sell the video, you don't own the rights. You would have very little to say in court except "I want to make money from public domain art".
And you wouldn't be permitted to sell collections of Disney films, even those expired. From what I understand, that is not allowed when selling public domain works. For example you wouldn't be allowed to sell a "best of old Disney films" collection, or have a website called "Mickey Mouse Movie Store", even if all the movies were in the public domain.
I wonder if a solution would be a payment to extend copyright.
I think the strongest argument in the article is about the disappearance of works, but, as pointed out, this doesn't really apply to Mickey Mouse. Instead of having a universal expiration, which is causing some works to die, have a shorter expiration but then allow those who are still monetizing their works to pay a portion to extend it. This would provide a less grey market alternative to lobbying and perhaps the revenue generated could be put back into the arts.
I've thought the same thing. This seems like a simple way to deal with it. And since most created works don't make money, even fewer after X years this would seem to do the most "public" good while allowing Disney to keep Mickey.
This is especially true for software games where you can't even get the hardware, thus software sales are essentially 0. A lot of the older games will just get forgotten while the copyright runs out. Some get remade and sold and have no problem with that.
Companies won't like it though, because some will forget to register and loose out on potential profits.
To make it really work I think the cost would have to go up exponentially with time. Maybe once a decade you pay. And you could even pre-purchase but at the exponential price. This would allow most works protection early on at an affordable price and companies like Disney that make a lot of money to be able to keep their copyrights.
The other major benefit is that if something is successful and people want it such as a book you have a monetary incentive to publish it to pay the copyright fees. When it's not popular enough to make money with the copyright alone than that's a good signal that it's been copyrighted long enough
Maybe there's some sort of middle ground here. Perhaps copyright extensions should be able to be applied for on a per-work basis, and to succeed, you have to demonstrate that you're still profiting from the work.
Let Disney have indefinite copyright on mickey mouse. But let's not lose the last century of our history.
I think it's simplest to tax copyrighted intellectual property like other property such as real estate. If you want to maintain it beyond some standard copyright term. (and make that term shorter than it is today)
So if one wants to continue to hold some copyrighted material out of the public domain for longer than the original term, sign up on a form to list the property. The gov't audits the value of that property and takes some small percentage of that value.
This is an interesting solution that I haven't heard before. It certainly seems to solve some of the problems with current copyright, but how do you evaluate the value of a copyrighted work? Off the top of my head, taxing recent past sales of it won't work because a rights holder can just sit on a work keeping it from public domain for free (status quo), and estimating some sort of earning potential doesn't seem great either.
An easy formula is just based on the age of the work. So you get (say) 20 years for free, but after that you have to pay more. Disney wants Mickey Mouse? They'd have to pay millions per year. If it's not worth it to them, they can just not pay it.
I'm a fan of this, it seems easier to apply and harder to hide how much you say you're profiting from it. It also represents the trade with the public for protection. The longer it's out of the public domain, the more you have to pay the public.
You could have this increase as a percentage each year, allowing a slow ramp up and much higher fees for something that's been kept for 100 years.
You could just make it more and more expensive to extend copyright.
Ie first twenty years are free, the n-th year after will cost you some multiple of n USD. (Or make it grow quadratic or exponential.)
Or you can get a fair valuation pretty easily: let Disney post a value for Mickey Mouse they'd want to be taxed on. Lower value means less tax. But the self-declared value comes with the obligation to sell to any comer who offers that much in cash.
You don't even have to force them to license it. If they specify a low value, then the damages in the copyright lawsuit should be commensurately lower.
I've heard an interesting proposal that has the owner set a value for the work, and the tax calculation is based on that estimate. To keep the owner from setting the value too low, they are required to sell if anyone offers to purchase the copyright at the owner-set price.
There should be a requirement that the work is actually being sold. Otherwise what good is the copyright doing anyone? That way you can't sit on a work.
I was discussing copyright last night and proposed this exact same idea -- declare intellectual property to be, well, property, and subject it to a property tax. Require disclosure of what percentage of your revenue was due to that IP (or what percent of your total worth, or similar) and use that to determine the value of the IP. Then tax that value just like we tax real estate.
Rather than demonstrating that you are profiting from the work (which seems a low bar to clear), a sliding scale might be a better middle ground. Something like (years for illustration only; personally I'd probably go for shorter terms):
- 0-20 years post publication - free, automatic protection (i.e. basically what we have now)
- 20-30 years post publication - nominal fee and continuous (yearly?) registration required to maintain protection (to prove active use/interest)
- 30-40 years post publication - large-ish fee and registration required (most works would probably be 'abandoned' to public domain here unless continuing to be commercially successful or backed by a large corp.)
- 40+ years post publication - increasing fee each year indefinitely. Disney et al. can keep major works protected if they wish, but most works will enter the public domain
And then your problem becomes infinite profit for finite work. If you want to talk about things that break economics, its a perpetual money machine. It just changes the game to making sure any potentially popular idea in the future must be rigorously defended under copyright forever. You know, like what people do with patents right now, which is also a destructive and horrible IP mess all on its own.
If we have to choose between giving Disney the exclusive right to a perpetual money machine, or to give all copyright owners the same, because Disney is so ingrained into the governing oligarchy, then I think the former choice would be better for society overall.
Interestingly enough Peter Pan has a perpetual copyright in the UK. All proceeds goes to Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. There's a special Act of Parliament for it it.
It wouldn't need to necessarily be an exception, but it could be, as suggested elsewhere in the thread, an appropriate property tax... If this stuff is indeed "intellectual property" then it should have property taxes.
People who don't pay the tax can involuntarily donate to the public domain after the previous reasonable term of say, 56 years after creation.
It would be interesting to see if a "proof of profitability" requirement would affect Hollywood's practice of denying profitability through accounting tricks:
In 1979, when I was 13, I audited a college-level cartooning course in San Francisco by Dan O'Neil, the underground cartoonist mentioned in the article. Little did I know Disney had sued him. But I do clearly remember him teaching the class tips on how to draw Mickey Mouse, and talking about the Mouse Liberation Front. I guess he was trying to increase the ranks of cartoonists who could fight Disney by parodying Mickey.
I wonder whether the extensions are US only ? I understand that Disney has the capacity to protect their trademarks all over the world, but I guess that there has to be several countries where derivative works from the existing locally expired copyrights can already be created. So, in such countries, wouldn't it be possible to use the exact same characters to create new works (comics for example) if you name it differently ?
And the corollary of that is how the copyrights/trademarks issues are handled by the various treaties negociated now (TAFTA, TPP, MEFTA, FTAA, TTIP). To be really effective worldwide, copyright extensions are to be validated everywhere otherwise, it would be of limited effect. So it would be interesting to know the extent of lobbying of powerhouses like Disney in those treaties negociations and their requests and proposals there.
The article points out that the majority of the Disney movies are based on public works. It may be interesting to note the controversy around the 'concidental similarities' between The Lion King and Kimba the White Lion. (http://www.kimbawlion.com/kimbawlion/rant2.htm)
How about: "Copyright is for 7 years. Extensions can be granted for additional 7 year periods indefinitely, but must be requested by the copyright holder. There is a modest fee(say, $100) to file an extension."
That way Disney gets to keep Mickey Mouse, things that are abandoned or neglected get released into the public domain, and the fee stops people from just throwing everything into some software that reapplies indefinitely without thinking.
It could be tweaking by increasing the period(maybe 14 years would be better), by changing the fee(maybe $5 or free is better), or by changing the initial period(maybe 20 years for the first period, and it renews for 10).
How about each subsequent renewal renews for less time and cost more. That way people keep moving forward and innovating, instead of beating all the life out of one thing.
I'd played with a doubling of costs, but that fails to get sufficiently expensive without being reasonably painful, fast enough. Shortening renewal periods might help.
Another option would be to provide some limited revenue-based protections (similar to music's mechanical copyright), but otherwise allow general use.
Recall that those numbers are not dollars, but the entire income of one person, working all year. Given that such a person spends no more than 0.1% of their income on a given work, multiply by 1000 to estimate the number of paying fans required just to keep the work copyrighted. If you have less than 60000 copies sold in the 20th year, it is not worth extending copyright another 11. If you have fewer than 106000 sales in year 31, you probably can't afford to go another 8.
In theory, this would allow a work to remain copyrighted for millennia, but at that point, you are essentially employing tens of thousands of middle class workers to do nothing for you at all. The annual renewal bill for a 2000-year-old copyright would be about $500 million now. The Christian Bible, all editions--the bestselling book--has annual sales around $500 million.
But in reality, a one year consumer boycott on any copyrighted work older than 85 years old would probably be enough to force it into the public domain.
Because we don't want Disney to be able to keep Mickey Mouse forever, and because the Constitution mandates that copyrights be for a "limited time", so an indefinite renewal scheme would require a Constitutional amendment.
The late Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA, actually suggested that copyright terms last for "forever minus one day". Lawrence Lessig argued a case before the Supreme Court (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft) trying to get the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act overturned, but lost 7 to 2.
> While it is impossible to say for certain whether or not Disney’s efforts directly impacted politics, the results heavily worked out in their favor: the bill quietly and unanimously passed in the House and Senate with no public hearings, no debate, no notice to the public, and no roll call.
Of course it's possible to say that: "Disney’s efforts directly impacted politics". There, I said it.
>There can be little doubt that anyone seeing the image of Mickey Mouse (or even his silhouette), immediately thinks of Disney.
Image probably, but the phrase "Mickey Mouse" has acquired a fairly common meaning (at least in the UK and Ireland, don't know about the rest of the world) outside of the character - roughly meaning something like simplistic, shoddy or cheap.
For example, this (http://www.independent.ie/regionals/droghedaindependent/news...) article talking about a plan as a "'Mickey Mouse' solution to a much bigger traffic problem in the Dublin Road area." I suspect that few people over here would immediately think about Disney when they read this article.
Apples to Oranges. Not even close to the same thing. If Physical Property were treated the same way as Intellectual Properties, no one would have any neighbors, because only the first person to build a house is allowed to own a house. Intellectual Property is all about who is allowed to replicate an existing work into additional instances of existence, where as Physical Property is all about not having your existential instance of a work taken from you.
IP should not expire as long as the intellectual product is not publicised, i.e. while it is in the head of whom produced it. But if it is publicised, i.e. published, it is public, and no longer property. If I had a house, that's physical property. If I and my family live in it, it's our property. If I let the public in, i.e. publicised it, then it is public, and essentially not property anymore.
Ideas and concepts have the ability to benefit society as a whole. Physical property benefits very few.
Also after a certain period of time, it becomes a bit of a stretch to suggest that nobody else would have thought of that same idea over a long enough time frame.
Now of course, I'm not really speaking to Mickey Mouse, so much as I am scientific breakthroughs and good ideas that improve on old concepts, but it's all IP.
Physical property benefits very few if you and your offspring are allowed to squat on it for eternity as scarcity drives up its value. If you had limits on it, maybe that peppery goes back to auction bringing more properly into supply for more communal use.
My only problem with that argument is , by that logic, wouldn't land containing a large deposit of oil or some natural resource be public property. The property given to the public would definitely benefit society as a whole.
How about this... Everyone gets two copyrights for their lifetime x 2. Five copyrights for their lifetime. Ten for 20 years, Fifty for 10 years, Everything else expires after, say, 2 years. So you get to protect your most important works, but the rest of us get to take a crack at the things you couldn't quite get right.
So corporations get their own copyrights? Then they can just create a new subsidiary to hold each work. Maybe transfer employees to it while producing it, and then move everyone out when it's done. It'd be annoying having to manage all of these subsidiary corporations, but I'm sure they'd be up to the challenge.
Also, if copyright can be transferred, then there'd be 2.1 billion lifetime copyrights available. A substantial portion of that would be available on a secondary market, I bet. It still might be better, since not everyone will want to use copyrights on minor works. Then again, you'd be encouraging people to do 'big' works rather than lots of small works, which doesn't seem like something a copyright system should be changing.
That's the compromise. Disney gets "The Mouse" for the entirety of its existence as a legal entity, and six more works. And that's it. After that, they'll need to start being thrify with their copyright or release things into the public domain to add new works.
I think you are missing my point. Essentially Disney will start buying your lifetime copyrights. Given that there are 300MM Americans, I'd imagine if every American got 2 lifetime copyrights, the market for transferring those copyrights wouldn't be terribly expensive. Disney could probably buy 100 lifetime copyrights for the cost of the legal work they do today.
I'm not exactly sure and I'm certainly not big on legalese. The premise is meant to be a compromise, where a select few "works" can be held in practical perpetuity, while simultaneously forcing others to be contributed to the public domain. I do agree, though, that the definition of the term "work" is important and essential with such an idea.
when Lessig argued Eldred v Ashcroft before the Supreme Court, the argument went something like: the Constitution states that copyrights are to be granted for a "limited time"; if Congress can pass an unlimited number of finite extensions to the copyright period, this flouts the original meaning and is unconstitutional. alas, the majority bought into the government's argument that this most recent extension was (again) to bring US law in "harmonization" with EU law, and was so permitted.
BUT, iirc, there was some grumbling along the lines of "if they try this again, Lessig's argument will carry more weight".
so it will be interesting to see what happens next time around.
I noticed that the Frozen DVD includes a Mickey short featuring old early Mickey animation reconstructed. I wonder if that was made to show current use of the classic "steamboat mickey" style of the character for trademark reasons?
Heald crawled through more than 2,000 books on Amazon.com, and found that there were more books available from the late 1800s than there were from the 1990s. His conclusion: “Copyright protections had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public.”
THAT is his conclusion? What about radio, TV, increased film production, and finally the internet and other sources of distraction for people?
To be fair, it also sounds like an unfair comparison. A century vs a decade. And how many duplicates in the out of copyright works? The public doesn't really benefit from 100 different editions of Sherlock Holmes's early adventures that differ only in how the cover is rendered and whether the "publisher" charges 99 cents or a 1.03 dollars.
Edit: Oops, late 1800s vs 1990s is not add unbalanced as a century vs a decade. The dupes are still a big issue if he didn't handle those.
To clarify, because it may not be clear without looking at the accompanying graphic in the article, 1800s in this case refers to the decade, not the century.
That is, more books in the years 1800-1809 than 1990-1999.
This causes a large gray area in Google Books. There are large number of books still under extended copyright, but no copyright owner can be found. Google has been to court several times by opponents who also want to make money off of distributing grey books. One part of me wants to see 100% of the world's books online, not the 15% or so now. Another part of me wants to be done in as a finacially fair way as possible.
Something that I've never understood: Even if steamboat Willie were to enter the public domain, couldn't Disney effectively maintain control of its characters through trademark law? The fact that Mickey mouse is a Disney trademark should prevent most new uses of the character even if it doesn't prevent the copying of old shows.
> Ultimately, none of this may matter: Even if Mickey’s copyright does expire in 2023, Disney has no less than 19 trademarks on the words “Mickey Mouse” (ranging from television shows and cartoon strips to theme parks and videogames) that could shield him from public use.
It goes on to talk a little more about it as well.
How is on USA companies cooperating with each others (Microsoft and Apple on 90s vs. Sun is the example in my head) is illegal, while the government cooperating with a company is fine?
USA doing kind of like China, trying to make it the easier it is for companies to prophet from the people even if it's something supposed to be owned by the people... =
It's time to propose the Copyright Harmonization Act. Same terms as TRIPS - 50 years after first publication. USTR prohibited from promoting longer terms.
This made me wonder, is there a country where lobbying (or somehow influencing law-making with money/land/position/etc) is illegal and seen akin to bribe?
