It's unrealistically optimistic to expect the government to do the right thing for the right reasons, so I'm more than willing to settle for doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
I've been railing against Disney's power over copyright law for over 2 decades, but I'm still inclined to look this gift horse in the mouth.
> Hawley, employing DeSantis’ playbook, said in a statement, "Thanks to special copyright protections from Congress, woke corporations like Disney have earned billions while increasingly pandering to woke activists."
Is it okay for the government to enact targeted legislation to punish the exercise of legitimate political speech? I'm very wary of the precedent that's set by this. When the ends justify the means, the entire constitution goes out the window.
> Is it okay for the government to enact targeted legislation to punish the exercise of legitimate political speech?
It's not. This may be fresh legal ground, but it could be argued that it's a 1st amendment violation, if the law can be shown to be in retaliation* to speech, even if the law itself complies with the 1st amendment. (Mind that these are distinct questions: Is it OK, and is it legal. And even though I've answered that it's not okay, I still welcome the move. It's less not okay than perpetual copyright.)
But I think accepting that argument would be even more perilous. If the motivation of legislators can be used to overturn otherwise constitutional laws, you're in a big mess. E.g. you could argue that an algorithmic transparency law violates the 1st amendment if it was motivated by Musk's purchase of Twitter.
The other question is, does this set some kind of precedent - not legal, but of political norms. I'm not sure, but quite possibly yes. While there are plenty of examples of government harming or helping various entities depending on how in-favor they are, there may be a difference in kind here.
*Extremely mild retaliation - I would be surprised if more than 1% of Disney's revenue can be attributed to works older than 50 years.
Edit: Apparently the bill is more narrowly drafted than I thought, and would only apply to two companies in total. Laws this narrow supposedly have precedent to being illegal, according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31334339
But it's an interesting question if to consider what the legal case would be if the law was a general reduction of copyright to ~50 years, for everyone.
> it could be argued that it's a 1st amendment violation, if the law can be shown to be in retaliation* to speech
I think that quote from my original post is pretty damning in that regard. He's openly declaring this as an attack on their bottom line because of clearly protected speech that he finds odious.
> But it's an interesting question if to consider what the legal case would be if the law was a general reduction of copyright to ~50 years, for everyone.
The particulars don't help or harm Hawley. The value to him is in virtue signalling to his voter base. Not for any principled stance on free expression, but for fighting "wokeness."
I mean, I guess he can spin any way he wants. He has branded Disney as a "for the woke" company.
I am no "mouthpiece of the woke" but I thought the actual "woke" wanted lesser copyright years? And he's trying to deliver that.
The best thing here is for the "woke" to loudly cheer him on in this - thus supporting what they want AND confusing the fanbase he thought he was targeting.
It is no gain for anyone to cheer on Hawley. Any small gains made by accident though him are lost to his greater cynicism and general disregard for anyone except Hawley.
I guess we know where their priorities lie. I mean, for years, republicans have championed corporate-friendly agendas like privatization of public resources and copyright maximalism, and now they are willing to undo it in order to stick it to LGBT& folks.
I don't know why this has to be polarized, of all things. There's nothing crazy about people coming to an agreement on copyright limitations. Hell, even if this was a contrived revenge plot, I don't think it detracts from it's legitimacy. IP legislation is insane and everyone knows it, Disney won't catch any empathy from me for virtue-signalling to distract from systematic exploitation.
But in this case it only seems to be in progress because one party got mad at Disney and is now just looking for ways to hurt Disney’s interests in revenge.
If a the school bully beats up a kid who torments you for a terribly unfair reason… should you root for them?
"A thief robs a thief, and God smiles" or whatever it is
It would be pearl-clutchingly terrible if 50+1% of the country/state thought a cabal of (gays, nazis, woke commies, abortionists, pedophiles, etc.) were in the NSA using surveillance tech + weak encryption to accomplish their goals
Reducing the term of copyrights is something I support, but it's pretty gross if it's done for revenge. It feels capricious, and like copyright might be extended again later in order to extract revenge against someone else.
Plus, who knows if it will be well drafted and all that. The article suggests it would be retroactive, which is rarely a sign of fair legislation, IMHO; of course, the same was true of the term extension, but I don't think that necessarily justifies making the change back in the same way; especially for works that were created with an originally long copyright term.
Of course it's not. Governments make legislation to deal with specific organisations or individuals all the time; it's pretty normal. I would go so far to say this is "quite literally" the entire job of the legislative branch: respond to problems as they develop with new laws.
This specific act and pissing match with Disney is of course petty beyond belief, but that's a different matter.
It's not, strictly speaking, a bill of attainder, which is prohibited. It is written so that the number of 'persons' affected would be very, very, small. It is written so that Hawley can make a noise knowing the bill will go nowhere.
As written, it could only apply to 2 companies, Universal and Disney (as those are the only 2 companies that both are in the movie production business and also operate theme parks), and both Universal and Disney are (or at least last month were) over $150 billion in market cap. A bill that narrowly drafted has been held to be a bill of attainder in almost every circuit in the U.S. (A bill of attainder does not need to be limited to a single target; what makes it illegal is that it is narrowly drawn and attempts to legislatively punish a person or entity for otherwise legal acts.)
The punishment part is that the bill would retroactively limit copyright extensions for just those two companies 1 28-year term, and Disney copyrights would expire automatically upon passage of the law for everything dating back to at least Fantasia. Note that retroactive termination of copyright law is not permitted by our existing copyright laws, nor is it permitted by international treaties to which we are signatories.
Or, in other words, it's unconstitutional multiple ways, and is a blatant attempt to exert fascistic coercion over a business with different ideological concerns than the author.
I didn’t say that. And Hawley is, without question a fascist tool. But this bill is a) not going anywhere and b) would be immediately challenged in court. Of course, the courts these days, who knows.
Your example clearly shows that Congress passed a general antitrust law that applied both to Boeing (at the time) and all other companies since that law was passed: a law specifically prohibiting monopolist control of air delivery services by companies that also manufactured the planes used in those delivery services. Note that parts of this law are still in effect today.
This law under discussion would only apply to Disney, and could only ever apply to Disney.
The bill is limited to companies which are both in the movie production and amusement park industries (Disney and Universal) which have over $150 billion in market capitalization (only Disney, as of May 2022, though NBCUniversal was over $150 billion in April).
However, only Disney has copyrights which would be expired by this law due to the retroactive termination of copyright periods and extensions.
US copyright law historically has been written by the Walt Disney company to protect "Steamboat Willie" and related works. This isn't fascism, it's just corporatism.
> for years, republicans have championed corporate-friendly agendas
The Republicans used to be the party of big business but that stopped being true around 2016. They’re now squarely populist which is why you’ve noticed a change in behavior. However, it’s not that anti-woke is more important than big business it’s that big business isn’t a constituency of the populists in the first place.
Disney was one of the champions and remains one of the biggest beneficiaries of the DMCA, a roundly-hated law.
As much as I'd like to stick it to them, it's not enough to stick it to ONLY Disney, and it's certainly not good if it helps a national traitor like Josh Hawley.
Honestly, finding some common ground seems good, but when someone is just doing things out of spite and without any rhyme or reason, it makes you think twice.
There's a right way and a wrong way to enact copyright reform. This particular bill is the wrong way. First, the US government signed onto the Berne Convention in the 1980s, so we'd have to have another bill to leave it. Second, we're also signatories to NAFTA and it's updated treaty which also have similar IP language that conforms to the Berne Convention. Third, the back-dating of the copyright to specific companies that make 150 billion dollars a year is definitely not going to pass muster since the government would have to offer something place of the lost asset meeting the market rate which I'm going to assume the section of the Disney catalog that's affected by this bill would be an astronomical sum of cash. So if this ever got passed by Congress and signed by a President, there would be mayhem over this bill. Like kiss goodbye the US economy considering how many other entertainment companies that aren't Disney would get smacked hard by this. Seriously, Josh Hawley is like that douche from high school that use to bully the nerds for playing D&D but only joined one tabletop session because one cute girl was interested in it so he magically got interested too. It's that kind of thinking that goes through Josh's pinhead.
> “Thanks to special copyright protections from Congress, woke corporations like Disney have earned billions while increasingly pandering to woke activists.”
You know, "woke" has really become the new "commie". It doesn't refer to an ideology anymore, it's just a buzzword that has to be placed in as many sentences as possible to remind your base of all the awful people out there who want to destroy everything that is good and holy.
(That aside, I don't have much sympathy for Disney. They had no business commenting on that Florida law, no matter how much shit their progressive fans and creators gave them.)
> They had no business commenting on that Florida law, no matter how much shit their progressive fans and creators gave them.
The Republican party has spent the past couple of decades arguing that corporations have free speech, and expanding what "speech" means in that case. Does that only apply when they say Republican things?
The draft ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson spells out very clearly that the "freedom of religion" is the freedom for Christians to impose their beliefs through legal stricture.
