> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office.
You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law.
> when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.
That’s the sign of a deeply broken system. It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
Termination of Transfer is what happened to the Friday the 13th franchise. The screenwriter wound up owning the name Jason Voorhees, but not the adult visual of Jason. As I understand it, the F13 franchise owners could have made movies with adult Jason Voorhees as long as they don't call him Jason Voorhees. All in all it was a mess. I think it's all resolved now, but the situation did tank the online game that a lot of people enjoyed.
Yeah, I cannot quite believe the term on that thing. Somewhere between 10 and 20 feels far more reasonable since businesses do need time to work plan around and develop property.
I'm not sure how I feel about auto-reversion as a concept. I can see real problems with it conceptually (creating a deadzone around expiry etc)
He of course leaves out that the term was doubled in 1831, and that renewability became assignable at the turn of the 20th century almost 15 years before Disney was even founded.
The real cheat isn’t the 35-year wait, it’s work-made-for-hire and assignments of future unknown rights (VR, AI, metaverse, whatever - in 1995 for example it was the digital-performance right in sound recording)
They're inherently different: creative work (especially in a digital, trivially replicated format) is non-rivalrous, and at least partially non-excludable. "You wouldn't download a car." [0]
Property rights are a social technology to balance incentives and peacefully negotiate scarce resources (including time and effort). It's helpful to think about them in reverse: that they encode legitimacy to use force (usually via the State) against anyone who violates the right. That doesn't make the force right or wrong, a priori; it simply describes what happens. Exactly when that force is legitimate is the question at hand.
"Intellectual Property" is a post-hoc neologism. What we actually have are three very specific institutions: copyrights, patents, and trademarks. The last is arguably more like regulation than property: persistent brand identity to prevent fraud and confusion. Copyrights and patents are extremely clear in the Constitution, that their purpose is collective, moreso than an individual right for its own sake: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Hence why they expire: at some point, the incentive has already been provided, and the body politic benefits more by their being open-sourced.
Whatever "rights" framework one subscribes to, it is an extremely thorny question, whether they include the right to alienate those rights, to give them up on purpose. We allow people to alienate their labor, an hour at a time; but not to do so for a lifetime (voluntarily sell one's self into slavery). Many US states now refuse to defend "non-compete" clauses: that you cannot constrain your future self from working for a competitor for X years, even if you wanted to, even for very lucrative terms in the contract.
I'd argue that intellectual/creative works, are more like non-compete clauses: you actually create more bargaining power if you limit the scope, and take away the capacity to give up future bargaining power.
Your car (or other real/chattel property) is capital which can be used directly for gain (e.g., commuting to work, driven for hire), loaned, used as collateral in loans, have its likeness or image used, amongst other potential financially-beneficial actions, all without sale or transfer of title.
What? Car leasing is a massive market, and a large percentage of people and companies are very happy to pay to access cars and trucks without owning the title. Same goes for companies happily building on top of leasehold properties whenever it makes financial sense for them.
And as for IP, with the time limits, patents and copyrights are inherently defined to expire, but are definitely not worthless.
Valid argument. Car analogies usually break down at some point, and leasing is a definite weakness of that one.
But at the same time, hopefully you won't complain about the encroaching "You will own nothing and be happy about it" corporate ethos, if you want to restrict peoples' rights to buy and sell property of either a physical or intellectual nature.
Good point, but in this case I'm arguing for the exact opposite: I'm suggesting that (natural) people are the ones owning IP, and companies only lease it. I was just making the case that a lease is not "worthless".
>But at the same time, hopefully you won't complain about the encroaching "You will own nothing and be happy about it" corporate ethos
This has come about due to a strengthening of IP rights, and could be reduced with a weakening of those same rights back to where they were a few decades ago.
In the 80s and early 90s, companies like Sony, Nintendo, and Sega tried to use copyright and Trademark and patent and other IP based rights to legislate their consoles and keep people from interoperating with products and software they sold. The courts correctly found against them: That general consumer product rights, even in their minimal state in the US, gave consumers the right to buy products that could interact with their other products, and that companies that sold those products were not allowed to prevent it, generally following first sale doctrine.
You as a video game seller could literally violate Sega's trademark rights to make your game work on the sega consoles, as verified by a judge, that was "Fair use". If you could find a way to get by Nintendo's security chip, you could sell games for their consoles, and Nintendo could not stop you through lawfare. You could build an emulator of the sony console that you sell for cheaper than a playstation, and that was also fair game. You could reverse engineer the IBM PC bios in order to sell machines that could use the same software that was written for those PCs. All these things were litigated in court and affirmed by judges as "No, consumers have rights and companies should not be allowed to stop you from buying stuff from other people that works on their machine"
Companies didn't like this though, because having to compete with someone else selling stuff for your console meant you had to compete. So they got the DMCA, and now all they have to do is put a teeny bit of "copyright protection" code somewhere, and it is now a crime to interoperate with that system.
The reason computers stopped being so interoperable and stopped being so open and stopped cultivating a vibrant market like that is because you just can't do those things anymore. Microsoft can legally prevent you from writing software that interacts with systems in ways they do not want. You cannot sell non-Nintendo approved games on the Switch like you could on the SNES not only because cryptography and computer security improved, but because trying to get around that can now be a crime!
Imagine if physical product manufacturers had such insane laws benefitting them. Not only would your car need to take Ford branded gasoline, but any company trying to produce a gasoline that was compatible with Ford cars to compete with Ford branded gasoline would likely violate a bunch of laws and lose their shirts in court.
Ferrari can only enforce those terms by refusing to sell you any more cars, though. There's not much they can do beyond that.
GM also comes to mind, where they void the warranty if you flip your new Z06 or ZR1 within 6 months. It's nothing more or less than an encumbrance on the title, and they shouldn't be able to demand that without consideration in the form of a discount. But they can, because they have monopoly power in that particular niche.
Key point is that Ferrari and Corvette are niche markets. Car customers in general wouldn't put up with it, because there's plenty of competition for their business.
They're absolutely different. IP rights are a creating of artificial scarcity for what would otherwise be an infinitely-copyable work. Physical property rights are a codification of rights to a naturally scarce item.
IP rights require specific limitations on speech for everyone who is not the owner of an IP. It's walling off some expression as "copyrighted" so that no one other than the "owner" can express them (in a commercial way at least). Compare this to traditional property rights that merely prevent you from walking up to the owner and taking their (non copyable stuff) - a much lesser restriction.
This is why IP rights need to have limitations like a time limit, but I don't see why other limits like non-transferability are out of the question.
Tangent to your point, the Bible requires that home ownership work exactly like this. You can sell your family's home and lands, but every 50th year, the Jubilee year, the lands must be returned to your family.
The intent was to prevent permanent poverty (poverty = not owning land), and any slaves are also freed on the Jubilee (because slavery was also a poverty thing then). Today, though, it'd probably be more of a tool of a permanent ruling class, so it's probably a good thing that Jews and Christians mostly ignore that section.
Christians don't need to ignore it, it's part of the Old Covenant. Jesus said he fulfilled the requirements of the old covenant, the new one is very basic "love God, love your neighbour, don't sin".
It (Leviticus 25) was a tool of a ruling people-group; it kept Jews special and relegated other people's to potentially be slaves, and to not own property in Jewish lands. Also have special privileges to priests (Levites).
I mean that's part of why it's not relevant to Christians - per Galatians 3:28 - there's not supposed to be racial distinctions! And there are not supposed to be priests either.
> It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
What are you talking about? These aren't human rights we're talking about, it's copyright we're talking about.
Of course you should be able to sell your copyright to something. That's a major way you can make money, and a major way to get funding to create something in the first place. Every day you go to work and write code, you're selling your copyright to that code in exchange for your salary. You're saying you don't think that transaction should be legal...?
Yes you can be swindled. Guess what -- you can be swindled when selling a house or a car too, if you don't check the market rate and sell it for too little. Do your research, your due diligence, and if something looks like a swindle, then don't do it.
No. You don't need to wait half a lifetime. You only need to wait that long if you sign a contract and sell all of the rights. If you don't want to wait, just insist upon another time period. And it should be noted that the contracts only transfer ownership rights to a piece of property. It's like selling a car or a house. Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years.
My guess is that you won't find any publishers interested. Why? Because developing a work requires quite an investment and only the hits make any profit. The backlist is what keeps everyone in business.
> Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years.
Plenty of people lease. One way of looking at this is that Congress has kind of said you can only lease copyright (of certain types) and the maximum lease term is 35 years. Other jurisdictions have similar things with different names.
You could get different terms, but I'm sure you need clout first. Of course, the majority of my output is work for hire and I retain no rights and can't terminate it later; oh well.
That's why it's called copyright. You can perfectly sign it away.
In Germany the right is called "Urheberrecht" which literally translates to "author's right". And while you can license your work and sign away the usage, you cannot by definition sign away the fact that you are the author of a work.
In English this is usually translated as "moral rights"[1]. They are fairly widespread in other civil law jurisdictions than Germany too. Less so in common law jurisdictions.
But they exist to a (very) limited extent even in the US.
This is handled in the employment contract. The "Urheberrecht" is not transferable only inheritable, but you can grant "Nutzungsrechte" which means "rights of use". So in your contract you just grant your employer unrestricted and exclusive rights of use.
Most business conducted in the world does not require someone to reject their lawful rights. For consumers in the EU, for example, the law even offers explicit protections by stating specifically that contract terms which are unfair have no legal binding.
It means “the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work”. If you’re having someone reject their rights in a contract because that benefits you, that’s a form of exploitation. You’re making someone worse explicitly so you benefit.
> It often just means "I don't like what I signed up for freely".
From my first post:
> If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
If you’re swindled, you’re not given them away freely.
Your posts read like “it’s too hard to precisely define these things so why bother” this is what case law is for. To precisely define in the context of real cases what the precise contours of the law are.
Clearly the EU has figured some of this out and might even have some of the specificity you are looking for.
That's what we have courts and juries for. If a jury unanimously agrees that a typical person in a reasonable situation and with full understanding of the conditions would not be willing to sign such a contract because it would strongly go against their interest, then the person who did sign it has likely been swindled.
This really reads like you’re playing rhetorical games. Do you legitimately not know what these terms mean or how they apply in the context of signing legal agreements? Are you unaware of their literal definitions?
If you don’t then my apologies, we can break them down for you and link dictionary definitions (or Wikipedia if that’s your preference).
It is really not any harder to define than "freely". Presumably by "what I signed up for freely" you mean "what I signed up for without any coercion, threat of violence, etc". The people using "exploitation" here just mean that those conditions also include the implied threat of not having money to live. This is a real material condition which affects what people are prepared to agree to (even if they might be able to find a better offer by shopping around).
It is not hard to understand, and I suspect you are not trying to understand it.
I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us.
With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought of getting a lot of plays is a little scary.
Estimates suggest around 117–120 billion people have ever been born, while only about 8 billion are alive today, meaning roughly 93% of all humans are dead. So statistically, if you're alive today, there's a 7% chance that you'll live forever.
Sorta related since Disney held a share in it previously but Dick Tracy exclusive rights are still held by Warren Beatty who produced and starred in the role back in 1990. He had to fight off a challenge from Tribune Media in court decades ago but stipulation was he had to produce new Dick Tracy stuff every few years. It’s lead to a series of increasingly surreal late night specials on TCM where he appears in character and talks about random stuff and the 1990 movie, last time was in 2023: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKncYwtec4
Similarly Wheel of Time had one... I had to dig deep and converse with an LLM to figure it out. I proposed to it "copyslop" as the term of art, it came back with "placeholder productions", "copyright keepers", and eventually there seems to be a "real" term-of-art called "ashcan" - https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/9jxvtb/til_a...
In any case: """Yes, you're likely thinking of the "Wheel of Time" pilot episode titled Winter Dragon, which aired in
2015. It was a low-budget production that was released with almost no promotion and aired in the middle of the night on FXX. The purpose of this release was widely believed to be an attempt by Red Eagle Entertainment to retain the rights to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, as their licensing
agreement required them to produce something before a specific deadline."""
The 1994 Fantastic 4 movie was the same deal. Produced for $1M, never released. I guess it's hard to make a legal standard for "actually trying" with a license, but it is really weird to see that you can keep these licenses alive with these zombie products.
Another less token one I'm aware of is the Marvel themed land of Universal Orlando. Universal has an indefinite license to the IP as long as they don't 'mishandle' it. An easy way to make it very clear that you haven't done that is to just never change anything. So all the rides, signage, etc is carefully maintained but identical to how it was 20 years ago.
Perhaps, but he's also highlighting how fundamentally broken the copyright system is. I don't think that's his goal (he's mostly being petty; there's a reason there's a pop song about his vanity), but it is an interesting side-effect of his odd project.
I think it's simpler than that. IE; not a vanity thing for his ego or pettyness for the sake of being petty,
Entity owns an IP, Entity doesn't want another entity to own it for risk to the IP. (the other entity being a globally publicly owned historic aggregator of IPs for sake of short term profits)
DIsney is doing the same in reverse with the Muppets/Henson Properties. Don't do anything with it beyond semi-annual short projects to retain the IP.
> So is Warren being an asshole here? I mean, we haven't seen a Dick Tracy movie since the 90s. I am out of the loop so trying to understand.
Well the rights were held by Disney from 1988 until 2005, and then they were tied up in court (between Beatty and Tribune) until 2011, when Beatty won the rights. The movie you're referring to was released in 1990.
So Beatty has held the rights for only 14 of those 35 years. Although the first special he made was released in 2010, during that legal battle.
There's also a legendary Star wars merch rights agreement that only expired because the rights holder forgot to send Lucas a check while the franchise was inactive.
Billions of dollars gone because of an oversight.
Arguably they didn't know Lucas was going to bring it back.
There's an argument to be made that Lucas wouldn't have brought it back if they didn't miss the check. A little over half a mil of it's budget came from the initial payout of the new Hasbro deal.
Wow, TIL. I had assumed that Warren Beatty was suffering from dementia due to his great age and his retirement from cinema. I had no idea he was still making media appearances.
There seems to be a popular view nowadays that most old people grow to be senile (just look at any online discussion of old politicians for example). This is not the case!
Sad as it is, when stars from classic Hollywood stop being visible but are still known to be alive at a highly advanced age, dementia is often the case. Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, and Jack Nicholson are notable cases, and I just assumed Beatty was similar.
Or possibly, actors who still have their faculties tend to keep acting, even into advanced age. Not sure if that's true, but even the perception of that being true could lead to these kinds of assumptions.
By the time the actors I mentioned were written about as having dementia, many film fans had already assumed they were dealing with dementia precisely because they were no longer being written about or seen in the media much. Such speculation about Jack Nicholson, for example, was rife on film forums well before those paparazzi images appeared.
> giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money you can give that kid that will buy them lunch – you're just enriching the bullies
Misleading phrases like this are why I dislike Doctorow.
Just before that he tries to sell us on the idea that there are no alternatives when actually there are. For example, you don’t have to publish a book through the Big Five. There are many large and small independent publishers, and some authors have had good luck with self-publishing.
I do think copyright law needs reform, but don’t trust Doctorow to explain it properly.
And what alternatives existed for Wolf in the 80s? What value were publishers providing?
Like many industries, book publishers integrated: editing, production, marketing, and distribution. They may have also helped with licensing.
Would _Who Censored Roger Rabbit_ have been the success it was with a different publisher? These counterfactuals are hard to prove! (Look at the discussions this year around k pop demon hunters - how much credit does Netflix get for growing an objectively good film's audience? Reasonable people debate this!)
The big publishers do provide utility, but there's also an incredible asymmetry (they have trivially made many more book deals than any of their authors)
You don't need to tie yourself to distributor control if you catch fire and maintain your rights. It's never been easier to build your audience and personal brand.
VivziePop with Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss was able to do this on YouTube and then ink deals with Amazon and merch retailers (where the real money is). Her shows alone rake in over $100m and the merch significantly more.
Glitch with Murder Drones and Amazing Digital Circus did the same. And they've stolen a lot of high profile folks from Disney for Knights of Guinevere and upcoming shows.
Psychic Pebbles did it and how has an Adult Swim show. Joel Haver, lots of others...
This is basically what George Lucas was able to engineer with his 20th Century Fox deal to maintain merch rights. But it's even better for creators today.
> The big publishers do provide utility, but there's also an incredible asymmetry (they have trivially made many more book deals than any of their authors)
Literally doesn't matter in today's meta for people making music, video, or games. A substack or podcast following will do the same for authors.
It's not that this isn't hard. I'd argue it's harder to get noticed today now that everyone can make content. It's just that the power asymmetry is disappearing because you can hold onto more of your rights.
Today it's about building a brand following. If you can do that, the publishers will chase you.
It wasn't available for Wolf because nobody realized this strategy yet. A lack of Internet made it more difficult, but not impossible. George Lucas kind of got it.
This is incredibly incorrect! The examples you've pointed to illustrate the smiling curve [1].
Publishers still have an enormous amount of leverage and power, and that is extremely important for other businesses operating in that space. Not everybody is an individual creator, and some creators prefer to work on small teams. You're describing this incredible transformation of the value chain (who provides value, who captures value) while missing the point!!
> It's just that the power asymmetry is disappearing
This is so fundamentally untrue. Do individuals have more power? Yes! Their BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is now "fine I can self publish and survive." That doesn't mean there's not a huge power asymmetry still. Without the blessing of Microsoft, Sony, Apple, valve it is hard to get my game featured. Can I still go viral? Of course! But listen to Zach Gage talk about the funding difference for making a game for Apple Arcade. It prefunds development and allows him to hire a team.
As for rights negotiations, even Taylor Swift had some difficulty reclaiming ownership of her masters. The power asymmetry is alive and well.
> Would you rather I delete my comment
No, I want you to read more carefully and engage with the things people are actually saying and not what you think they are saying from briefly skimming what they write.
> You're describing this incredible transformation of the value chain (who provides value, who captures value) while missing the point!!
Yikes. I really do not appreciate your unkind tone in these last few messages.
There's a really big trend you're missing by focusing on old anecdotes.
The creator economy is on pace to exceed the size of Hollywood and the music industry combined.
There are kids on Roblox making six figures while still in school. The next generation knows what's up - they want to be YouTubers and not movie stars, because they know how fundamentally the world has changed. How a world that once relied on nepotism is opening up more opportunity. (It's still hard, but you don't need the "right parents" anymore.)
$100M brands and franchises are launching on YouTube.
Publishers and distributors will take what they can get. They make money on volume now, and if they screw over publishers, new players enter to fill the gap.
You could even go raise capital on that narrative of servicing the creator economy. The VCs I've talked to are excited about it.
> But listen to Zach Gage talk about the funding difference for making a game for Apple Arcade.
It's becoming easier than ever to raise funding for video game development. There are now dozens of funds specially for this. Including funds that give you six figures without a demo if you've already worked in the industry.
> As for rights negotiations, even Taylor Swift had some difficulty reclaiming ownership of her masters.
Taylor Swift is a billionaire and she negotiated her early contracts two decades ago. Before steaming, ie. ancient times, ie. when dinosaurs roamed the earth. And she's found ways to wiggle out of them.
His book "Why None Of My Books Are Available On Audible: And why Amazon owes me $3,218.55" captures the soul, heart, nuance (and grammar) that he repeatedly brings to these issues.
He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection. Resulting in twice compressed 128k MP3s and innumerable blog posts.
Sounds like the analog hole. You play DRM material out the audio port and at the same time capture the input of that and re-encode in a non-DRM format.
He set up two computers and manually played low-res DRM-protected MP3 files out of one and into the other for weeks, documenting the process on BoingBoing. He touted this not only as freedom but "preservation."
> He set up two computers and manually played low-res DRM-protected MP3 files out of one and into the other for weeks, documenting the process on BoingBoing. He touted this not only as freedom but "preservation."
I see. When I hear "record collection" I think of vinyl records, so I was quite confused how DRM was relevant there.
It's true that the alternatives may not be good, but if so it suggests that maybe publishing is a business that requires certain behavior.
I think the best thing that Doctorow could do is set up his own publishing business and show the big companies the right way to do it. If he's right, he'll get the best new talent and quickly succeed.
But I'm guessing he'll discover what the major companies know: the consumer is fickle, developing a new book/movie/song is expensive, and only a few hits pay for the rest.
There are plenty of fine, even higher quality and credibility, publishers out there.
In fact even a mediocre university press likely has higher standards, in just about every conceivable quality aspect, than even the best imprints of the big 5.
He describes what he sees as a monopsony. That is not misleading. You can have lots of options and still be stuck in this monopsonistic (sp?) world that controls your rights and your financial future.
> some authors have had good luck with self-publishing
Indeed. What are the relative statistics on authors who have managed to bootstrap themselves vs. authors who make a comfortable living through the Big Five?
"The median income of full-time self-published authors in 2022 was $12,800 from books and $15,000 total from all author-related activities. Full-time self-published authors who had been publishing since at least 2018 reported a median income of $24,000 compared to $13,700 in 2018, a 76 percent increase."
Traditionally published commercial authors made about $10,000 more.
It’s not common, but it does happen. Andy Weir, author of “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary”, originally gave his work away for free online on his website. He only self-published to Kindle (for the lowest possible price setting, 99 cents) because some of his fans didn’t know how or didn’t want to manually install his home-rolled ePubs on their devices, and begged him for the Amazon/Kindle distribution.
It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs (relative to a straight 100% increase relative to the basic income). So you might send everyone $100 per month and costs go up $100 per month, until supply chains shift towards supplying lower income humans with more goods and services than they used to get, at which point costs will decrease (from the $100 increase).
With enough forewarning, suppliers could anticipate the increased demand and prepare for it.
A major factor in what makes places more desirable is access to jobs. In the case of full UBI, it will be easier to: stay unemployed, negotiate a remote work contract or launch a new venture from anywhere, so I expect that we'll see people spread out a lot more.
> It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs
Landlords are, by and large, not the ones who create new housing units, and "lack of profit potential is" also generally not the main impedance to creating new housing in most locations either.
Really, any place where building falls behind demand you should expect the lower profit affordable housing to be the first projects cancelled. Economically it only makes sense to service the affordable housing market if the luxury housing market is too saturated to support more projects.
>and "lack of profit potential is" also generally not the main impedance to creating new housing in most locations either.
It somewhat is. Housing builders can only do so many projects per whatever cycle they run. They will optimize towards building fewer projects that are highly profitable rather than building tons of low income housing or starter homes that each have much lower profit.
Builders don't want to scale up, they want to make money. Building would also be abysmal to scale up anyway, because it's somewhat skilled labor that you pay peanuts for.
This is just one of the ways that wealth inequality results in market failures.
People with lots and lots of wealth value each individual dollar significantly less, and are therefore willing to part with significantly more dollars per unit of service or product. That means you always get a much higher profit margin targeting stupid rich people than anything else. So everything is built around bilking these dumb but wealthy people for everything you can, and nobody builds or sells much to the poorer people. This drives prices for things up in general, and starves the market of oxygen for meeting the needs of less wealthy people.
Ask any developer, big or small, who their target market is, and they will not say "poor people" and this has been true for decades, and the difference between "poor" and "not poor" has only continued to grow.
> Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audio books.
> when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.
Beautifully explained the complex situation and its kind of scary how it applies to tech as well in some areas.
The second point is also true w.r.t big tech & privacy regulations.
How can Congress make it any easier to access an audience? The Internet made it so there is zero friction between a media consumer and a media creator.
Having to compete with a billion other content creators (including hits from the past) is inherently hard. The most valuable service the big media sellers provide these days is curation.
Reducing copyright length would be the best thing to reduce the big companies’ power though. That way, they can’t sway buyers to their silos using content from the past, and therefore have to invest in the future.
Shortening copyright terms would reduce the power of any given media company; but I think it might disadvantage creators of new works overall. Right now each company has a smaller back-catalogue than they would under a shorter term regime, and so the relative value to them of new content is higher.
Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content), which would then reduce the number of buyers for new content, increasing the monopsony effects.
The vast majority of money for any given copyrighted work comes within the first few years of its existence. (This is extra true for things like video games.)
Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator.
You seem to be thinking of copyright purely in terms of vast media conglomerates, but it affects literally every work created by every human in the country. That includes these HN discussion posts!
Additionally, I find it hard to see how your second paragraph holds. If the amount of exclusive content a given entity holds affects their odds of being bought by a larger conglomerate, I would think it would be in the opposite direction: having more exclusive content would make them more likely to be a target for acquisition, so that the larger company could then hold all of that exclusively.
If everything older than, say, 35 years were suddenly in the public domain, available to be distributed by any of the distribution companies, and Hypothetical Media Corp had half the back catalogue that they used to, then surely that would make big conglomerates less interested in buying up Hypothetical Media Corp?
I am generally anti-copyright; but it's not really a pro-creator policy to curtail copyright; it's pro-consumer.
> If everything older than, say, 35 years were suddenly in the public domain, available to be distributed by any of the distribution companies, and Hypothetical Media Corp had half the back catalogue that they used to, then surely that would make big conglomerates less interested in buying up Hypothetical Media Corp?
Doesn't your first point contradict this? If almost all the value of copyrighted works comes in the first few years, then no, curtailing copyright terms doesn't discourage buyouts, because the buyout is going to be mostly justified on the recent works held by the purchased company, not the residual value of its old works.
It's pro-creator as well. Creators are artificially restricted from drawing upon the commons to create new things due to copyright.
In the 1800s, musicians would freely write new lyrics to existing tunes, which is why folk music has various songs that share the same music. (There is the satire loophole, but that's creatively limiting.)
In the 1980s, musicians would record short slices of chords from records (or breakbeats) onto sampling devices and make new music from them, giving rise to an incredible number of musical genres.
Copyright came for all of them and created a new status quo where exercising that sort of creativity is legally cumbersome.
And now the paperclip maximizers are trying to chip away at fundamental music theory, with lawsuits over chord progressions (of which there are very finite possibilities) and other attempts to grab slices of other pies. (See: the recent suits against Dua Lipa, Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran.)
We wouldn't have Wicked, one of the most beloved twenty-first century musicals and now a high-grossing film, if Oz were still legally encumbered.
> Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator.
It's important to recognize why this is the case - a lot of the hubbub around posthumous copyright comes from the fact that a large amount of classic literature often went unrecognized during an author's lifetime (a classic example is Moby Dick, which sold and reviewed poorly - Melville only made 1260$ from the book in total and his wife only made ~800$ from it in the remaining 8 years it remained under copyright after Melville died, even though it's hard to not imagine it on a literature list these days). Long copyright terms existed to ensure that the family of an author didn't lose out on any potential sales that would come much later. Even more recent works, like Lord of the Rings also heavily benefitted from posthumous copyright, as it allowed Tolkien's son to actually make the books into the modern classics they are today, through carefully curating the rereleases and additions to the work (the map of Middle Earth for instance was drawn by Tolkien's son.)
It's mostly a historic example though; Copyright pretty blatantly just isn't designed with the internet in mind. Personally I think an unconditional 50 years is the right timeline for copyright to end. No "life+50"; just 50.
50 years of copyright should be more than enough to get as much mileage out of a work as possible, without running into the current insanity where all of the modern worlds cultural touchstones are in the hands of a few megacorporations. For reference, 50 years means that everything before 1975 would no longer be under copyright today, which seems like a much fairer length to me. It also means that if you create something popular, you have roughly the entire duration of a person's working life (starting at 18-23, ending at 65-70) to make money from it.
Long copyright also means that the estate can control the work- like how Tolkien's son guarded lord of the rings like a hawk.
And I also understand Disney's point of view. Imagine you invested a lot of money into a franchise and the original author suddenly goes crazy and makes Roger the Rabbit a Klansman.
Although personally I would put the protection at 10 years.
In the modern world, some sort of reasonable fixed duration seems to make a lot of sense. An elderly author cranking out a work partly for the benefit of a soon-to-be widow/widower isn't insane. You can argue about exact timeframes and details but some sort of duration after creation (maybe not less than life of creator) probably works pretty well.
I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content.
Currently, people give a ton of money to Comcast/Disney for stuff made decades ago, which in turn gives Comcast/Disney more power, since people are far likelier to stay within those silos.
If friends/seinfeld/whatever could be accessible via multiple sources, then other groups of content creators could emerge, offering $15 to $25 per month of new stuff, rather than compete for a smaller portion of the budget since the old content takes up so much.
The creators of new work don’t earn much from 130 year copyrights anyway, to fund any decent production, they will need outside investors such as Disney or Apple or whoever to make the gamble. In exchange, Disney and Apple are going to want the ability to sell it for 130 years, but few if any new content creators is able to negotiate gross royalties, those days are long gone.
>Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content)
This is the opposite of what would happen. If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.
> I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content.
Because this syllogism doesn't hold. There's not a fixed pot of money that must be spent on content. If now every streaming service has access to a bigger pool of old hits, then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.
> If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.
Each service will just become sameier and compete more on their UX than their exclusive content. You can see this in music, for instance, where the big streamers already have more or less identical catalogues. Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.
> then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.
Why would they have customers in the first place if all they offer is reruns, which everyone else also offers? Streaming only old content will be a very, very low profit margin business.
> Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.
Creating and streaming audio is not a comparable business to creating and streaming video, due to the vastly different sums of money, and hence risk, involved.
But, also, people have to pick only Spotify/Apple/Amazon/Alphabet and a couple others because of excess copyright terms. All the old hits people want are controlled by Universal, Sony, and Warner, and so if your audio streaming business does not contract with those 3, then you’re dead in the water. Which means every audio streaming business, and hence every audio streaming customer, is always paying rent to those 3 businesses that own copyrights.
That means there is less money available for new audio creators. And this holds true for all rent seeking. If it weren’t for excessive copyright, there could be much more variety in audio streaming.
> Why would they have customers in the first place if all they offer is reruns
You can ask the same question for cable TV, but it's not dead. Netflix also started as purely "reruns" and was still quite popular.
> Creating and streaming audio is not a comparable business to creating and streaming video, due to the vastly different sums of money, and hence risk, involved.
If anything that extra risk should make studios more shy of investing in new content vs just serving up old hits. It's noticeable that film leans way more heavily on franchises and remakes already, which agrees with this hypothesis?
> That means there is less money available for new audio creators. And this holds true for all rent seeking. If it weren’t for excessive copyright, there could be much more variety in audio streaming.
You assume this, but I really don't think it's true! Most people don't seek out new music; their tastes are set in their youths and then they happily listen to the same music for the rest of their lives. The choice is to make them pay to listen, generating at least some stream of royalties, or let them listen for free, in which case they will be happy to.
Yes, I always preferred the short term with renewals; I didn't realize that it used to be the creator not the publisher. I wonder how that would interact with the current "work fore hire" laws that exist.
> I wonder how that would interact with the current "work fore hire" laws that exist.
The simplest interaction would be "it's practically impossible to renew copyright on something created by a large number of employees", but IMO, that's not a bad thing.
I don’t know if Cory Doctorow has read the “fantastic 1981 novel”, but I have (decades ago) and as I recall the plot of the book and the plot of the movie are very different from each other. The author of the book didn’t write the screenplay and I doubt he had much (if anything) to do the character designs in the movie. So even if he has the rights to his novel back, it’s not at all clear to me that he could just make (or sell a license to make) a straight, recognizable sequel to Disney’s movie without getting back into bed with Disney, and clearly Disney isn’t interested or they’d have done something by now.
I read the "fantastic 1981 novel", too, and you know what? It wasn't very good. It had a lot of really interesting world-building and some cool ideas, but the characters were flat and the central mystery was terrible. Despite common wisdom, the book is not always better than the movie.
I mean, given that Disney wasn't doing anything new with Roger Rabbit, I'm glad he got the rights back. But I think part of the reason that very little new material got produced is that the first movie was kind of lightning in a bottle. It's possible other production companies would have had to be involved to get something new done, depending on how the rights were parceled out. (We're all talking about Disney here because that's who Doctorow focused on, but it was a co-production with Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment.) And I think you're right that he's unlikely to have the rights to do a sequel that's too close to the original.
Disney definitely owns the character designs, so Roger and Jessica Rabbit will have to look different if a new movie is made using the IP owned by the book's author.
Sometimes (often) the original is the best. Sequels are just milking more money from the concept and rarely match the original let alone exceed it. It's the laziest sort of movie-making.
In this case it’s not that there is litigation. It’s that Steven Spielberg must approve any and all content featuring Roger Rabbit. The delinquent partner who sits on their hands and does nothing is Spielberg.
Yeah the Roger Rabbit is a miracle where multiple major studios came together and allowed their IP to be in the same work. Disney, Warner Bros, Fleischer Studios, Harvey Comics, King Features Syndicate, Felix the Cat Productions, Turner Entertainment, and Universal Pictures/Walter Lantz Productions all agreed to share their characters. One of Steven Spielbergs great accomplishments was negotiating this. With how protective these studios are about their IP anymore I doubt we'd see anything close to the Roger Rabbit movie sadly.
Not to mention some of the actors have passed like Paul Reuben who really sold the cartoon aspect of Roger Rabbit.
Roger Rabbit was voiced by Charles Fleischer. (Paul Reubens was under consideration in an earlier version, and you can find his voice tests out on YouTube, which might be what you're remembering.)
Roger Rabbit was voiced by Charles Fleischer (no relation to Max and Dave Fleischer of Fleischer Studios), who is currently still working (and also voiced Roger's cameo in the Chip and Dale movie that was a spiritual sequel).
It's a long-winded article, even for a lawyer, but the payload seems to be a crack at the head of the RIAA, which is suing Midjouney.
"In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods."
I don’t find it long winded. It just gives background and makes a bunch of valid points.
Mainly that creatives are being screwed because every time they get given extra rights they’re bullied into selling them for nothing.
So this right that they get the copyright back after 35y is different - because you can’t be forced to sell it for nothing.
We need more laws like this to help creative people make the money they deserve. Most creative people make a pitiful amount of money while studios / publishers / labels do better and better. It’s not sustainable.
It's a readable and enjoyable text about a complex issue. You can't really distill anything about copyright without actually talking about history, relevant examples, and how it affects other industries, or other creative works, or...
It amazes me the number of people who are raging at how AI is hurting creators, and will make long videos and posts about this subject, without touching on the fact that the __ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY__ is the single largest abuser of creators, and it's far worse than AI is or probably will ever be.
That's how you can tell that the RIAA/MPAA propaganda campaign against AI to protect its racket is working.
The RIAA isn't opposed to AI as much as they're saying "join me, and together we can destroy indie music forever".
The RIAA is a cartel monopsony that demands songwriters and singers negotiate away all equity in their work as a condition of market entry. But there are alternative markets for music, and successful musicians that have navigated them. This is why, for example, mainstream music has been so strangely stagnant while the independent space is a lot more innovative. The labels don't pay good money for innovation; hell, they don't even want it. They want a sure hit saleable product every time.
As nerds, we're predisposed to look at generative AI through the framing of the Napster Wars. Except file sharing wasn't doing what generative AI does. P2P gave you a more or less faithful, if lossy, reproduction of a specific work. It might have missing or wrong metadata, but it was still clearly identifiable as that work. A generative AI system is instead producing legally distinct work - which is why all the AI training lawsuits are failing - using the creative input of the data the company scraped to train on. It infringes on the moral grounding of copyright but not the copyright itself.
The threat that generative AI systems pose to artists is twofold: spam and standardization. Generative AI makes it far easier to churn out samey-looking outputs, while losing utility as you try to get more interesting or innovative styles out of it. It's a slop machine. And, notably, these are exactly the sort of things the RIAA wants out of mainstream music:
- AI music is safe and approachable. If you ask it for jazz, you're getting a stereotype of the jazz genre.
- AI music can be mass-produced at scale without needing to advance an artist royalties. That means you can spam it on Spotify and destroy the discoverability of independent musicians.
- More importantly, generative AI turns the act of music production into ownable equity. The artist is cut out of the picture completely, there is not even the need to find a naive artist that will sign their life away in a 360 deal for peanuts.
The ideal world that the RIAA wants to live in is one where each label sues and then buys out an AI music company, and then has that company train a fully-owned "house model" on their back catalog only. No other entities will be allowed to train models, either through aggressive copyright litigation or through some new "AI safety law" that conveniently exempts them. They'll own the streaming sites and digital marketplaces, and any independent musician making real music will get crushed under the weight of AI slop.
There's a real discoverability issue on platforms from generative AI; real artists are getting crowded out due to poor algorithmic curation. 100% agree on this point.
Real talking head videos do way better than AI videos though (there's a huge authenticity movement), and a lot of what people like about consuming content is the connection with the creators, so I don't think creators are really threatened by AI.
Generative AI is dangerous to pop, but for subculture fans, the uniqueness of the art means a lot more, because subculture people tend to be discovery motivated.
> Termination is a powerful copyright policy, and unlike most copyright, it solely benefits creative workers and not our bosses.
That's an interesting framing. I know why Doctorow wants to import the boss/worker concept here, but it just doesn't apply. Disney wasn't Wolf's boss in any sense that is usually understood, and it just obscures the picture with a bunch of class-based chaff.
I read it more like "workers" being the ones who actually produce the good stuff, and "the boss" as being the entity to stick it to (as explained in the classic film "School of Rock").
You can make a case that the relation with creators and media/publishing is,in formal structure, more petit bourgeois/haut bourgeois than proletarian/bourgeois, but even if strictly the class dynamic is different, the essential dynamic is broadly similar between those who do the work and those who purchase it and functionally, if not strictly necessarily, provide access to the broader market.
> The answer lies in the structure of creative labor markets, which are brutally concentrated. Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks.
> The media industry isn't just a monopoly, in other words – it's also a monopsony, which is to say, a collection of powerful buyers. The middlemen who control access to our audiences have all the power
I'm happy to see apps included here, I feel sometimes folks forget these are also a form of creative works and having the two gatekeepers constantly filter and influece what can and can't be released is absolute nightmare for both developers and consumers (who don't even know the things they could've had but were denied by big A or big G).
”Giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. You're just enriching the bullies.”
The big “5,4,3,2,1” is also a powerful piece of rhetoric. Who is this Doctorow person? He has my attention! :)
> Under Termination, a media company can force you to sign away your rights in perpetuity, but you can still claim those rights back after 35 years. Termination isn't just something to bargain away, it's a new power to bargain with.
It's sentences like these that make it hard for me to take Doctorow seriously.
No media company is "forcing" anyone to do anything. They're paying creatives for their work. Every creative is free to say no. Musicians are free to shop their music to different record labels for the best deal. Authors pitch their books to different publishers to see which one offers the best deal. And there's always self-publishing as well.
We can have a reasonable conversation about copyright without saying silly untrue things like media companies are "forcing" creators to take deals.
I loved WFRR as a kid, and of all the movies I loved as a kid, it has definitely held up the best. I re-watched it recently and it is still great. Hilarious, thoughtful and just the right amount of dark.
One of the reasons I still love it is that it hasn't fallen prey to the usual Hollywood practice of taking something you love and shovelling it down your throat until you're sick of it. It saddens me when you see a really good movie with a bunch of bad sequels, or TV series that were once great but ran for 10 seasons too long.
Yeah. One thing is what's good for the author, one thing is what's good for the publisher. But what's good for us as viewers/end users (and every "creative" ought to remember that's what they are 99.9% of the time!) is often a third thing entirely.
There's something very weird in this editorial. Doctorow implies that he's unhappy that copyright renewability became assignable in 1909†. Assignability to publishers is, by implication, bad for creators.
How exactly could that be the case? Assignment isn't automatic. Creators have to agree to assign to publishers. It's not clear to me how this doesn't make them strictly better off. Assignment of renewability, in Doctorow's framing, is valuable. How are creators made better off for not being able to sell it?
†(he refers to the framer's original term of 14 years + renewability for 14 years, leaving out that the term was extended to base 28 + 14 year renewal in 1831 --- he also leaves out that assignability predates the modern media industry by decades).
it's a double edged sword -- media companies are generally franchise/lifetime hits oriented businesses - they pay (and generally lose, per investment, btw) for a shot at a hit.
On the one hand, imagine they could only negotiate rights to monetize that hit for, say, one year, and then this termination right kicked in. What do you think would be the top offer they could make an author?
The fraction of creatives that are great creatives and also great marketers/producers/runners of media companies is small, really small. So, creatives have an incentive to have a system where some amount of time is contractable. And media licensors rely on this hits-based model to fund all their development and betting on things that don't work out. And also to fund their jets and cool Bel-Air homes.
very reasonable ideas! Of course creators could license for this term right now, but generally they do not have the bargaining power when they need it.
Really interesting read, but I wonder if the character design everyone associates with the story isn't still owned by Disney even after termination. As I understand the original work is a written novel (and not a graphic novel), and I assume Disney designed the characters.
Otherwise ("creative works" based on the original material also transfer to the author of the original material) would mean that the author suddenly owns the MOVIE as well...
Roger Rabbit was actually played in 35mm just last Thursday in Central NJ. What a treat it would have been to known that the original author got his characters back. I was lamenting on all the time that had passed since release. This cheered me right up! Will we see a whole Roger Rabbit universe now?
Not exactly the same, but in Japan (where obviously many of the great games of the 80s and 90s were authored) there's a mechanism to acquire a license from the government to publish abandonware. The government collects a royalty from the new distributor that it holds in case a valid copyright holder comes forward.
Little Samson, a late-era NES game that because of its rarity can sell for thousands, was developed by a now-defunct company and is getting a re-release next year using this process.
> In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods. He wants there to be a new copyright that allows creators to decide whether their work can be used to train AI models, and then he wants that right transferred to media companies who will sell it to AI companies in a bid to stop paying artists <…>
There’s a timeline where big media publishers at least accidentally defend the rights of small-time IP holders (individual creators)—they’d go to court with the likes of OpenAI and Midjourney and put an end to training commercial ML solutions on unlicensed material. Specifically, if they would owe a large media company for training on their original works, presumably they just as well owe an average Jane. (Granted, assuming that Jane has not signed away her rights to a large media company she works with, but that would not apply to a massive number of small-time creators.)
It doesn't, in practice. Consider the NPV of year 36 with, say, a 10% discount rate. It's low. Also, having watched directly some fairly famous friends deal with property coming up on the 35 year mark, media companies are adept at tying in other deals, finally getting projects financed, cutting a deal for a different project with some agreements made about the original property.. You can imagine.
With Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it’s not really clear whether the author originally came up with such a great idea and script, or if Disney just brought it to life so brilliantly on screen. I’m leaning toward the second. It’s cool that he got the rights back, but without Disney this idea just isn’t going to "sing" again.
It would be difficult. Aside from the characters and the cast, one of the biggest heroes of the movie was the script. It was dense with irony, jokes about the noir genre, straight man/funny man jokes and physical humor. You don't need the original cast to make a new Chinatown comedy with toons. It's a matter of assembling a story that's interesting and funny, with associated recognizable cartoon characters.
Let me get this straight: the author is angry that Disney didn't release a series of shitty Roger Rabbit sequels, prequels, and shared cinematic universe pictures with Pixar and Marvel, so he's re-taking his copyright in order to sell it to another studio who will exploit and debase his creative works more rapaciously?
> copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power, which means that copyright becomes something we bargain away.
This quote sums up a lot of the issues with current copyright laws in a very elegant way.
> But at the same time, the amount of money being earned by creative workers has only fallen over this period [50 years, so since 1975], both in real terms (how much money an average creative worker brings home) and as a share of the total (what percentage of the revenues from a creator's work the creator gets to keep).
Is there evidence this is true? It doesn't sound very true.
Does this takeback include the likeness of Roger and Jessica Rabbit from Disney's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or just the content from the original 1981 novel? From what I can tell, the familiar cartoon movie designs are unique to the Disney movie and affiliated Disney shorts.
> This is a nightmare scenario for a creator: you make a piece of work that turns out to be incredibly popular, but you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them.
This nightmare scenario involves selling the rights to your character to a company that has the ability to produce, advertise and cast a movie with talented actors.
I'm certain I never would have heard of Roger rabbit had it not been sold.
You quoted one of the key sentences from the piece, and yet missed the point. It's the "you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them." part that is important. In the case of Roger Rabbit, the problem is the Disney has not made any new Roger Rabbit movies or other media in 35 years, despite the first movie being very successful. No doubt other concept, that could be successful, never even get to that point. See stories of "stuck in develompent hell".
This seems like one of those scenarios where you find out Disney did make a Roger Rabbit sequel, but they never marketed it, or it had a limited release in 12 California cinemas, and it only existed as a pro forma device to show they still controlled the character and would have the option to make sequels for another 35 years.
Bonus if it randomly starred or was directed by someone who later became famous, or if there are blog posts calling it an unknown masterpiece.
Nice to hear that didn't happen in this case and the author gets a second chance!
No, I got that point. I just find it funny that the article completely glosses over the reason why artists license their work in the first place. Because the company they license it to is far more capable of making money off of their work and, in most cases, the artist will make far more money by licensing their work than they would by trying to make an indie film on a shoe string budget with their own resources. That was an option for Wolf, yet he thought licensing his work was his best option, why did he do that?
> that has the ability to produce, advertise and cast a movie with talented actors.
Isn’t that most of the work?
You get: A lumpsum for your initial research that ended up as a character that people like,
They get: The idea of a character, but then they have to invest billions, build projects that work, tie relationships with cinemas and actors, advertise worldwide and maybe they make billions if they worked properly, but sometimes they make losses. Sounds like they worked for it, and building the initial character is like 0.0…1% of the talent involved.
Unionist gets: A nice story about how it’s always multibillion dollars companies that have all the money.
Maybe ideas are free and implementation is everything?
For over one decade now, maybe two, seemingly every big (or mid?) budget movie Hollywood has produced is based on existing IP: a comic book, novel, previous movie, TV show, or even non fiction article. I’ve been surprised many times by movies which seem original but are actually based on a French comic, or some other semi-obscure (internationally) source.
That tells me that ideas aren’t free. There’s a value to a fully cooked, ready to wear, tried and tested ideas.
As a second point, many good Hollywood pitches remain in development hell, unable to get a satisfying script, or a “second act that works”.
> What's the point of buying something if the other person is allowed to steal it back.
If you can't make a profit off of a licensed property after 35 years of exclusive control, you've done something horribly wrong. If you sit on a licensed property and do nothing with it for decades, it should be allowed to revert to someone else, or better yet go into public domain.
The issue is, what happens if you have a work where e.g. the music and the script were written by different people? If one of them can terminate the license then you create a situation where nobody can distribute it because nobody has the rights to all of it anymore.
Of course, what they should do is have the copyright expire after 35 years. Then if the original creators want to make sequel at that point they're entitled to -- just like everybody else.
Interesting. The article certainly gave that impression. It's strange that the process isn't automatic when the main requirement is simply submitting a notice.
Is that what is happening? My understanding of Termination of Transfer is that it keeps you from being able to make a sequel to your video game using the characters you licensed from me, but that the game you have already created you can continue to sell.
What the termination allows me to do as the creator of that character in this analogy is say - charcircuit isn't doing anything with my character for 35 years - I'm going to take back control and maybe do something myself with it or license it to someone else to do something with...
I don't think you are correct here. From the FAQ [0] on the website linked by the post:
“Derivative works” exception – although a successful termination causes all of the rights to revert, this will not affect exploitation of derivative works created during the lifetime of the agreement, even after that agreement has been terminated. Once the agreement has been terminated, the grantee (see the glossary) may continue after termination to utilize “derivative works prepared under authority of the grant before its termination…[consistent with] the term of the grant” (to quote from the U.S. Copyright Act). This means that if, for example, an author granted a company a 50-year exclusive license to create a movie based on the author’s novel, that company can continue to use and exploit the movie even after the author successfully terminates the exclusive license. The company may not prepare a new movie based on the novel; it may only continue to use the existing movie that it created when the exclusive license was still current.
Thank you, I was wrong. This does seem more reasonable. But it would be nice if minor changes were still allowed. For example patching security issues of a video game should be allowed.
I wish this were further up in the comments. Most people seem to be assuming that you get all the marbles back.
Imagine the chaos if someone were able to say ‘whoops, all those books you bought are no longer sellable!’.
Imagine if Alan Cox took back all the bits of Linux he wrote and decided they were no longer to be licensed under the GPL!
…although maybe it’s only a matter of time before that second thing happens somewhere? “The company may not prepare a new movie based on the novel; it may only continue to use the existing movie that it created when the exclusive license was still current” seems problematic for open source software (or commercial software! What if the original authors of the FAT file system decided to try to start getting royalties from new derivative works?…)
Under the U.S. Copyright Act, copyrighted works that qualify as “works made for hire” are subject to special rules that govern who becomes the first owner of copyright in a work. For regular works, the person who creates the work becomes the first owner of copyright. However, for “works made for hire” either the employer or person who commissioned the work becomes the first owner of copyright. Neither of these transfers of rights from the author to the employer or commissioning party, which occur by operation of the Copyright Act, nor any subsequent agreements entered into by the employer or commissioning party in relation to the work, may be challenged by the author or their family members.
There’s a whole lot more nuance there, but notably “A contribution to a collective work” is allowed to be a work for hire.
Yeah, if you license something to use in your game then that item comes with a license term. You did not buy it and you do not own it. If you did buy it instead of license it, you would be free to do whatever you wanted with it forever. But you didnt buy it, you licensed its use.
And I think it would be best if they could license the content in perpetuity so it doesn't come to that. But that's impossible as even if the studio gets a perpetual license, it can still be terminated.
Copyright was originally intended to last 14 years, after which the work is transferred to public domain. That was back in the 1700s, when the pace of life moved much faster than it does now.
If it weren't for Disney's success at regulatory capture, the copyright would be expired and anybody would be able to produce a fictional work featuring Roger Rabbit, including Disney.
I honestly can't tell if this is meant sarcastic or not. The power offset is so huge you need clauses like this to keep the power at some form of equilibrium.
The power dynamic is very asymmetrical. Disney is ABSOLUTELY free to negotiate with him to continue distributing the movie, running the ride, etc.
It has been 35 YEARS and Disney's failed to do anything else with the IP. The original creator wants to make a sequel, and now he's able to.
Also: you mentioned a scenario where you might make a video game and wanted to be able to distribute it in perpetuity. Unless you based the video game on some pre-existing creative work that someone else came up with (Roger Rabbit's Raucous Riot or something), you WILL retain the rights. Termination of copyright doesn't apply to works made for hire [0] (i.e., if you pay your employees to create the IP, it doesn't apply).
> Copyright is a very weak tool for protecting creators' interests, because copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power,
This is drivel written by someone who doesn't understand the mechanism of supply and demand. If you don't like the price, don't sell. If you don't like the terms, propose alternative ones. The real risk to creators is artificially suppressed demand through industry consolidation, not nuances to copyright law.
> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office.
You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law.
> when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.
That’s the sign of a deeply broken system. It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
Termination of Transfer is what happened to the Friday the 13th franchise. The screenwriter wound up owning the name Jason Voorhees, but not the adult visual of Jason. As I understand it, the F13 franchise owners could have made movies with adult Jason Voorhees as long as they don't call him Jason Voorhees. All in all it was a mess. I think it's all resolved now, but the situation did tank the online game that a lot of people enjoyed.
> You have to wait half a lifetime?!
Yeah, I cannot quite believe the term on that thing. Somewhere between 10 and 20 feels far more reasonable since businesses do need time to work plan around and develop property.
I'm not sure how I feel about auto-reversion as a concept. I can see real problems with it conceptually (creating a deadzone around expiry etc)
How about 14? Which as the article explains was the original copyright term.
He of course leaves out that the term was doubled in 1831, and that renewability became assignable at the turn of the 20th century almost 15 years before Disney was even founded.
The real cheat isn’t the 35-year wait, it’s work-made-for-hire and assignments of future unknown rights (VR, AI, metaverse, whatever - in 1995 for example it was the digital-performance right in sound recording)
> should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
So, if I sell you my house or car I can't sign away my rights on it? - Sure, there is a difference between material and intellectual property ...
Against swindling there needs to be protection from fraud, but that exists in most legislative systems.
You answer your own question.
Yes, intellectual property rights should be different than physical property rights.
No, they're not different. If I can't sign away the title to my car, it's literally worthless. Exactly the same is true of my IP rights.
They're inherently different: creative work (especially in a digital, trivially replicated format) is non-rivalrous, and at least partially non-excludable. "You wouldn't download a car." [0]
Property rights are a social technology to balance incentives and peacefully negotiate scarce resources (including time and effort). It's helpful to think about them in reverse: that they encode legitimacy to use force (usually via the State) against anyone who violates the right. That doesn't make the force right or wrong, a priori; it simply describes what happens. Exactly when that force is legitimate is the question at hand.
"Intellectual Property" is a post-hoc neologism. What we actually have are three very specific institutions: copyrights, patents, and trademarks. The last is arguably more like regulation than property: persistent brand identity to prevent fraud and confusion. Copyrights and patents are extremely clear in the Constitution, that their purpose is collective, moreso than an individual right for its own sake: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Hence why they expire: at some point, the incentive has already been provided, and the body politic benefits more by their being open-sourced.
Whatever "rights" framework one subscribes to, it is an extremely thorny question, whether they include the right to alienate those rights, to give them up on purpose. We allow people to alienate their labor, an hour at a time; but not to do so for a lifetime (voluntarily sell one's self into slavery). Many US states now refuse to defend "non-compete" clauses: that you cannot constrain your future self from working for a competitor for X years, even if you wanted to, even for very lucrative terms in the contract.
I'd argue that intellectual/creative works, are more like non-compete clauses: you actually create more bargaining power if you limit the scope, and take away the capacity to give up future bargaining power.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_gZZHu4TBk
Your car (or other real/chattel property) is capital which can be used directly for gain (e.g., commuting to work, driven for hire), loaned, used as collateral in loans, have its likeness or image used, amongst other potential financially-beneficial actions, all without sale or transfer of title.
What kind of collateral does not involve putting the title as the collateral?
Point, though so long as the terms of the loan are met, possession does not transfer.
The broader point of my comment remains: a vehicle is a useful asset even without transferability.
What? Car leasing is a massive market, and a large percentage of people and companies are very happy to pay to access cars and trucks without owning the title. Same goes for companies happily building on top of leasehold properties whenever it makes financial sense for them.
And as for IP, with the time limits, patents and copyrights are inherently defined to expire, but are definitely not worthless.
Valid argument. Car analogies usually break down at some point, and leasing is a definite weakness of that one.
But at the same time, hopefully you won't complain about the encroaching "You will own nothing and be happy about it" corporate ethos, if you want to restrict peoples' rights to buy and sell property of either a physical or intellectual nature.
Good point, but in this case I'm arguing for the exact opposite: I'm suggesting that (natural) people are the ones owning IP, and companies only lease it. I was just making the case that a lease is not "worthless".
You are describing the current system, where corporations own everything and humans own nothing.
>But at the same time, hopefully you won't complain about the encroaching "You will own nothing and be happy about it" corporate ethos
This has come about due to a strengthening of IP rights, and could be reduced with a weakening of those same rights back to where they were a few decades ago.
In the 80s and early 90s, companies like Sony, Nintendo, and Sega tried to use copyright and Trademark and patent and other IP based rights to legislate their consoles and keep people from interoperating with products and software they sold. The courts correctly found against them: That general consumer product rights, even in their minimal state in the US, gave consumers the right to buy products that could interact with their other products, and that companies that sold those products were not allowed to prevent it, generally following first sale doctrine.
You as a video game seller could literally violate Sega's trademark rights to make your game work on the sega consoles, as verified by a judge, that was "Fair use". If you could find a way to get by Nintendo's security chip, you could sell games for their consoles, and Nintendo could not stop you through lawfare. You could build an emulator of the sony console that you sell for cheaper than a playstation, and that was also fair game. You could reverse engineer the IBM PC bios in order to sell machines that could use the same software that was written for those PCs. All these things were litigated in court and affirmed by judges as "No, consumers have rights and companies should not be allowed to stop you from buying stuff from other people that works on their machine"
Companies didn't like this though, because having to compete with someone else selling stuff for your console meant you had to compete. So they got the DMCA, and now all they have to do is put a teeny bit of "copyright protection" code somewhere, and it is now a crime to interoperate with that system.
The reason computers stopped being so interoperable and stopped being so open and stopped cultivating a vibrant market like that is because you just can't do those things anymore. Microsoft can legally prevent you from writing software that interacts with systems in ways they do not want. You cannot sell non-Nintendo approved games on the Switch like you could on the SNES not only because cryptography and computer security improved, but because trying to get around that can now be a crime!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention#United_Stat...
Imagine if physical product manufacturers had such insane laws benefitting them. Not only would your car need to take Ford branded gasoline, but any company trying to produce a gasoline that was compatible with Ford cars to compete with Ford branded gasoline would likely violate a bunch of laws and lose their shirts in court.
You're describing literally Ferrari.
Ferrari can only enforce those terms by refusing to sell you any more cars, though. There's not much they can do beyond that.
GM also comes to mind, where they void the warranty if you flip your new Z06 or ZR1 within 6 months. It's nothing more or less than an encumbrance on the title, and they shouldn't be able to demand that without consideration in the form of a discount. But they can, because they have monopoly power in that particular niche.
Key point is that Ferrari and Corvette are niche markets. Car customers in general wouldn't put up with it, because there's plenty of competition for their business.
They're absolutely different. IP rights are a creating of artificial scarcity for what would otherwise be an infinitely-copyable work. Physical property rights are a codification of rights to a naturally scarce item.
IP rights require specific limitations on speech for everyone who is not the owner of an IP. It's walling off some expression as "copyrighted" so that no one other than the "owner" can express them (in a commercial way at least). Compare this to traditional property rights that merely prevent you from walking up to the owner and taking their (non copyable stuff) - a much lesser restriction.
This is why IP rights need to have limitations like a time limit, but I don't see why other limits like non-transferability are out of the question.
It's very simple if you spend more than 12 seconds thinking about it. Non-transferability devalues the property you're trying to sell.
Why is that so hard to understand? You're free to negotiate such terms, but the buyer can and will push back.
Why?
You can't sign away your copyright in germany, you can only hand over the rights of distribution of your work.
An exclusive usage right (Nutzungsrechte) is pretty much the same (and not limited to distribution)
Tangent to your point, the Bible requires that home ownership work exactly like this. You can sell your family's home and lands, but every 50th year, the Jubilee year, the lands must be returned to your family.
The intent was to prevent permanent poverty (poverty = not owning land), and any slaves are also freed on the Jubilee (because slavery was also a poverty thing then). Today, though, it'd probably be more of a tool of a permanent ruling class, so it's probably a good thing that Jews and Christians mostly ignore that section.
Christians don't need to ignore it, it's part of the Old Covenant. Jesus said he fulfilled the requirements of the old covenant, the new one is very basic "love God, love your neighbour, don't sin".
It (Leviticus 25) was a tool of a ruling people-group; it kept Jews special and relegated other people's to potentially be slaves, and to not own property in Jewish lands. Also have special privileges to priests (Levites).
I mean that's part of why it's not relevant to Christians - per Galatians 3:28 - there's not supposed to be racial distinctions! And there are not supposed to be priests either.
"you wouldn't steal a car" again?
> It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
What are you talking about? These aren't human rights we're talking about, it's copyright we're talking about.
Of course you should be able to sell your copyright to something. That's a major way you can make money, and a major way to get funding to create something in the first place. Every day you go to work and write code, you're selling your copyright to that code in exchange for your salary. You're saying you don't think that transaction should be legal...?
Yes you can be swindled. Guess what -- you can be swindled when selling a house or a car too, if you don't check the market rate and sell it for too little. Do your research, your due diligence, and if something looks like a swindle, then don't do it.
No. You don't need to wait half a lifetime. You only need to wait that long if you sign a contract and sell all of the rights. If you don't want to wait, just insist upon another time period. And it should be noted that the contracts only transfer ownership rights to a piece of property. It's like selling a car or a house. Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years.
My guess is that you won't find any publishers interested. Why? Because developing a work requires quite an investment and only the hits make any profit. The backlist is what keeps everyone in business.
> Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years.
Plenty of people lease. One way of looking at this is that Congress has kind of said you can only lease copyright (of certain types) and the maximum lease term is 35 years. Other jurisdictions have similar things with different names.
You could get different terms, but I'm sure you need clout first. Of course, the majority of my output is work for hire and I retain no rights and can't terminate it later; oh well.
That's why it's called copyright. You can perfectly sign it away.
In Germany the right is called "Urheberrecht" which literally translates to "author's right". And while you can license your work and sign away the usage, you cannot by definition sign away the fact that you are the author of a work.
In English this is usually translated as "moral rights"[1]. They are fairly widespread in other civil law jurisdictions than Germany too. Less so in common law jurisdictions.
But they exist to a (very) limited extent even in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
Which is one of the reasons public domain is problematic in some jurisdictions because it requires you to waive rights you can't necessarily waive.
Yes, Louisiana somewhat notwithstanding, the US is basically common law like the UK (and much of the Anglosphere/Commonwealth).
As a bit of trivia, the MIT License was essentially created because of issues with "just" making X public domain. https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license
So how does ghostwriting work then? Lots of books have unaccredited ghostwriters.
Not a Lawyer, but this seems like work-for-hire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire
I assume Germany has something like this (possibly a EU requirement). It would cover more than just ghostwritten books.
Most software is written in a similar manner. Microsoft didn't write windows, lots of ghostwriting programmers did.
The author never had the rights, as they worked under contract, so they don't need to sign them away.
But we also the right to be named as author is not a requirement to be named as author.
This is handled in the employment contract. The "Urheberrecht" is not transferable only inheritable, but you can grant "Nutzungsrechte" which means "rights of use". So in your contract you just grant your employer unrestricted and exclusive rights of use.
How is business supposed to be conducted under those conditions?
Fairly, respectfully, and without exploitation?
Most business conducted in the world does not require someone to reject their lawful rights. For consumers in the EU, for example, the law even offers explicit protections by stating specifically that contract terms which are unfair have no legal binding.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...
> I don't like what I signed up for freely
I believe the post makes a good case that "freely" doesn't mean by choice at all. In other words, not what people consider freely.
I think you meant to reply to a different post?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46032573
Oh yes, it was peer comment. Oh well, too late now and you made the same point :)
"Exploitation" isn't an objective term. It often just means "I don't like what I signed up for freely".
> "Exploitation" isn't an objective term.
It means “the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work”. If you’re having someone reject their rights in a contract because that benefits you, that’s a form of exploitation. You’re making someone worse explicitly so you benefit.
> It often just means "I don't like what I signed up for freely".
From my first post:
> If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
If you’re swindled, you’re not given them away freely.
> If you’re swindled, you’re not given them away freely.
How do you define "swindle"?
Your posts read like “it’s too hard to precisely define these things so why bother” this is what case law is for. To precisely define in the context of real cases what the precise contours of the law are.
Clearly the EU has figured some of this out and might even have some of the specificity you are looking for.
That's what we have courts and juries for. If a jury unanimously agrees that a typical person in a reasonable situation and with full understanding of the conditions would not be willing to sign such a contract because it would strongly go against their interest, then the person who did sign it has likely been swindled.
This really reads like you’re playing rhetorical games. Do you legitimately not know what these terms mean or how they apply in the context of signing legal agreements? Are you unaware of their literal definitions?
If you don’t then my apologies, we can break them down for you and link dictionary definitions (or Wikipedia if that’s your preference).
It is really not any harder to define than "freely". Presumably by "what I signed up for freely" you mean "what I signed up for without any coercion, threat of violence, etc". The people using "exploitation" here just mean that those conditions also include the implied threat of not having money to live. This is a real material condition which affects what people are prepared to agree to (even if they might be able to find a better offer by shopping around).
It is not hard to understand, and I suspect you are not trying to understand it.
> You have to wait half a lifetime?!
I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us.
With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought of getting a lot of plays is a little scary.
(Note: Statistically, people don’t live forever.)
Estimates suggest around 117–120 billion people have ever been born, while only about 8 billion are alive today, meaning roughly 93% of all humans are dead. So statistically, if you're alive today, there's a 7% chance that you'll live forever.
That's not what the statistics indicate.
Not at all.
7% have uncertain lifetimes, >= (current value).
Sorta related since Disney held a share in it previously but Dick Tracy exclusive rights are still held by Warren Beatty who produced and starred in the role back in 1990. He had to fight off a challenge from Tribune Media in court decades ago but stipulation was he had to produce new Dick Tracy stuff every few years. It’s lead to a series of increasingly surreal late night specials on TCM where he appears in character and talks about random stuff and the 1990 movie, last time was in 2023: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKncYwtec4
Similarly Wheel of Time had one... I had to dig deep and converse with an LLM to figure it out. I proposed to it "copyslop" as the term of art, it came back with "placeholder productions", "copyright keepers", and eventually there seems to be a "real" term-of-art called "ashcan" - https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/9jxvtb/til_a...
In any case: """Yes, you're likely thinking of the "Wheel of Time" pilot episode titled Winter Dragon, which aired in 2015. It was a low-budget production that was released with almost no promotion and aired in the middle of the night on FXX. The purpose of this release was widely believed to be an attempt by Red Eagle Entertainment to retain the rights to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, as their licensing agreement required them to produce something before a specific deadline."""
https://wheeloftime.fandom.com/wiki/Winter_Dragon
The 1994 Fantastic 4 movie was the same deal. Produced for $1M, never released. I guess it's hard to make a legal standard for "actually trying" with a license, but it is really weird to see that you can keep these licenses alive with these zombie products.
Another less token one I'm aware of is the Marvel themed land of Universal Orlando. Universal has an indefinite license to the IP as long as they don't 'mishandle' it. An easy way to make it very clear that you haven't done that is to just never change anything. So all the rides, signage, etc is carefully maintained but identical to how it was 20 years ago.
So is Warren being an asshole here? I mean, we haven't seen a Dick Tracy movie since the 90s. I am out of the loop so trying to understand.
Perhaps, but he's also highlighting how fundamentally broken the copyright system is. I don't think that's his goal (he's mostly being petty; there's a reason there's a pop song about his vanity), but it is an interesting side-effect of his odd project.
I think it's simpler than that. IE; not a vanity thing for his ego or pettyness for the sake of being petty,
Entity owns an IP, Entity doesn't want another entity to own it for risk to the IP. (the other entity being a globally publicly owned historic aggregator of IPs for sake of short term profits)
DIsney is doing the same in reverse with the Muppets/Henson Properties. Don't do anything with it beyond semi-annual short projects to retain the IP.
So he is being an ass.
I mean, let the IP free or try to sell it if you are not doing anything with it.
> So he is being an ass.
No, let me correct you: He's being a Dick.
> So is Warren being an asshole here? I mean, we haven't seen a Dick Tracy movie since the 90s. I am out of the loop so trying to understand.
Well the rights were held by Disney from 1988 until 2005, and then they were tied up in court (between Beatty and Tribune) until 2011, when Beatty won the rights. The movie you're referring to was released in 1990.
So Beatty has held the rights for only 14 of those 35 years. Although the first special he made was released in 2010, during that legal battle.
There's also a legendary Star wars merch rights agreement that only expired because the rights holder forgot to send Lucas a check while the franchise was inactive.
Billions of dollars gone because of an oversight.
Arguably they didn't know Lucas was going to bring it back.
https://equinoxbusinesslaw.com/blog/how-hasbro-almost-blew-a...
There's an argument to be made that Lucas wouldn't have brought it back if they didn't miss the check. A little over half a mil of it's budget came from the initial payout of the new Hasbro deal.
Wow, TIL. I had assumed that Warren Beatty was suffering from dementia due to his great age and his retirement from cinema. I had no idea he was still making media appearances.
You assume he has dementia because he’s old and retired?
There seems to be a popular view nowadays that most old people grow to be senile (just look at any online discussion of old politicians for example). This is not the case!
Old people do lose mental capacity just as they lose strength etc, dementia is a more extreme thing.
Sad as it is, when stars from classic Hollywood stop being visible but are still known to be alive at a highly advanced age, dementia is often the case. Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, and Jack Nicholson are notable cases, and I just assumed Beatty was similar.
Do you think perhaps there is a sample bias because old actors who retire and don't have dementia don't get written about?
Or possibly, actors who still have their faculties tend to keep acting, even into advanced age. Not sure if that's true, but even the perception of that being true could lead to these kinds of assumptions.
By the time the actors I mentioned were written about as having dementia, many film fans had already assumed they were dealing with dementia precisely because they were no longer being written about or seen in the media much. Such speculation about Jack Nicholson, for example, was rife on film forums well before those paparazzi images appeared.
Right, but that’s probably because they read stories that go back to people who knew the actors. There’s a well-oiled gossip machine.
Lots of old actors who don’t have dementia retire, there just aren’t stories about how they don’t have dementia.
The phrase below is worth the read:
> giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money you can give that kid that will buy them lunch – you're just enriching the bullies
Misleading phrases like this are why I dislike Doctorow.
Just before that he tries to sell us on the idea that there are no alternatives when actually there are. For example, you don’t have to publish a book through the Big Five. There are many large and small independent publishers, and some authors have had good luck with self-publishing.
I do think copyright law needs reform, but don’t trust Doctorow to explain it properly.
And what alternatives existed for Wolf in the 80s? What value were publishers providing?
Like many industries, book publishers integrated: editing, production, marketing, and distribution. They may have also helped with licensing.
Would _Who Censored Roger Rabbit_ have been the success it was with a different publisher? These counterfactuals are hard to prove! (Look at the discussions this year around k pop demon hunters - how much credit does Netflix get for growing an objectively good film's audience? Reasonable people debate this!)
The big publishers do provide utility, but there's also an incredible asymmetry (they have trivially made many more book deals than any of their authors)
You don't need to tie yourself to distributor control if you catch fire and maintain your rights. It's never been easier to build your audience and personal brand.
VivziePop with Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss was able to do this on YouTube and then ink deals with Amazon and merch retailers (where the real money is). Her shows alone rake in over $100m and the merch significantly more.
Glitch with Murder Drones and Amazing Digital Circus did the same. And they've stolen a lot of high profile folks from Disney for Knights of Guinevere and upcoming shows.
Psychic Pebbles did it and how has an Adult Swim show. Joel Haver, lots of others...
This is basically what George Lucas was able to engineer with his 20th Century Fox deal to maintain merch rights. But it's even better for creators today.
It feels like you're not responding to my actual point, so let me repeat my first sentence:
> And what alternatives existed for Wolf in the 80s?
Really? It isn't obvious?
> The big publishers do provide utility, but there's also an incredible asymmetry (they have trivially made many more book deals than any of their authors)
Literally doesn't matter in today's meta for people making music, video, or games. A substack or podcast following will do the same for authors.
It's not that this isn't hard. I'd argue it's harder to get noticed today now that everyone can make content. It's just that the power asymmetry is disappearing because you can hold onto more of your rights.
Today it's about building a brand following. If you can do that, the publishers will chase you.
It wasn't available for Wolf because nobody realized this strategy yet. A lack of Internet made it more difficult, but not impossible. George Lucas kind of got it.
Now it's glaringly obvious. Just not easy.
> Literally doesn't matter anymore
This is incredibly incorrect! The examples you've pointed to illustrate the smiling curve [1].
Publishers still have an enormous amount of leverage and power, and that is extremely important for other businesses operating in that space. Not everybody is an individual creator, and some creators prefer to work on small teams. You're describing this incredible transformation of the value chain (who provides value, who captures value) while missing the point!!
> It's just that the power asymmetry is disappearing
This is so fundamentally untrue. Do individuals have more power? Yes! Their BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) is now "fine I can self publish and survive." That doesn't mean there's not a huge power asymmetry still. Without the blessing of Microsoft, Sony, Apple, valve it is hard to get my game featured. Can I still go viral? Of course! But listen to Zach Gage talk about the funding difference for making a game for Apple Arcade. It prefunds development and allows him to hire a team.
As for rights negotiations, even Taylor Swift had some difficulty reclaiming ownership of her masters. The power asymmetry is alive and well.
> Would you rather I delete my comment
No, I want you to read more carefully and engage with the things people are actually saying and not what you think they are saying from briefly skimming what they write.
[1] https://stratechery.com/concept/aggregation-theory/smiling-c...
> You're describing this incredible transformation of the value chain (who provides value, who captures value) while missing the point!!
Yikes. I really do not appreciate your unkind tone in these last few messages.
There's a really big trend you're missing by focusing on old anecdotes.
The creator economy is on pace to exceed the size of Hollywood and the music industry combined.
There are kids on Roblox making six figures while still in school. The next generation knows what's up - they want to be YouTubers and not movie stars, because they know how fundamentally the world has changed. How a world that once relied on nepotism is opening up more opportunity. (It's still hard, but you don't need the "right parents" anymore.)
$100M brands and franchises are launching on YouTube.
Publishers and distributors will take what they can get. They make money on volume now, and if they screw over publishers, new players enter to fill the gap.
You could even go raise capital on that narrative of servicing the creator economy. The VCs I've talked to are excited about it.
> But listen to Zach Gage talk about the funding difference for making a game for Apple Arcade.
It's becoming easier than ever to raise funding for video game development. There are now dozens of funds specially for this. Including funds that give you six figures without a demo if you've already worked in the industry.
> As for rights negotiations, even Taylor Swift had some difficulty reclaiming ownership of her masters.
Taylor Swift is a billionaire and she negotiated her early contracts two decades ago. Before steaming, ie. ancient times, ie. when dinosaurs roamed the earth. And she's found ways to wiggle out of them.
His book "Why None Of My Books Are Available On Audible: And why Amazon owes me $3,218.55" captures the soul, heart, nuance (and grammar) that he repeatedly brings to these issues.
He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection. Resulting in twice compressed 128k MP3s and innumerable blog posts.
> He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection
What are you referring to here?
Sounds like the analog hole. You play DRM material out the audio port and at the same time capture the input of that and re-encode in a non-DRM format.
He set up two computers and manually played low-res DRM-protected MP3 files out of one and into the other for weeks, documenting the process on BoingBoing. He touted this not only as freedom but "preservation."
> He set up two computers and manually played low-res DRM-protected MP3 files out of one and into the other for weeks, documenting the process on BoingBoing. He touted this not only as freedom but "preservation."
I see. When I hear "record collection" I think of vinyl records, so I was quite confused how DRM was relevant there.
Why is it misleading? The fact that alternatives exist doesn't mean that they're any good .
It's true that the alternatives may not be good, but if so it suggests that maybe publishing is a business that requires certain behavior.
I think the best thing that Doctorow could do is set up his own publishing business and show the big companies the right way to do it. If he's right, he'll get the best new talent and quickly succeed.
But I'm guessing he'll discover what the major companies know: the consumer is fickle, developing a new book/movie/song is expensive, and only a few hits pay for the rest.
Doctorow has been distributing most of his books for free for at least 20 years.
That's how I read them as a kid with no money.
Or set up a social content recommendation system.
There are plenty of fine, even higher quality and credibility, publishers out there.
In fact even a mediocre university press likely has higher standards, in just about every conceivable quality aspect, than even the best imprints of the big 5.
Yes but do the books make more money and get more distribution? Quality is not the critical factor here
You're correct that you no longer need to go through one of the big five publishers to get your book in front of readers.
But Doctorow also says:
> or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks
And this is largely true. I don't think there's any viable path for self-publishing success right now that doesn't go through Amazon.
He describes what he sees as a monopsony. That is not misleading. You can have lots of options and still be stuck in this monopsonistic (sp?) world that controls your rights and your financial future.
>There are many large and small independent publishers
Are there many small press distributors? How's SPD doing these days?
> some authors have had good luck with self-publishing
Indeed. What are the relative statistics on authors who have managed to bootstrap themselves vs. authors who make a comfortable living through the Big Five?
According to this survey:
"The median income of full-time self-published authors in 2022 was $12,800 from books and $15,000 total from all author-related activities. Full-time self-published authors who had been publishing since at least 2018 reported a median income of $24,000 compared to $13,700 in 2018, a 76 percent increase."
Traditionally published commercial authors made about $10,000 more.
https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author...
It’s not common, but it does happen. Andy Weir, author of “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary”, originally gave his work away for free online on his website. He only self-published to Kindle (for the lowest possible price setting, 99 cents) because some of his fans didn’t know how or didn’t want to manually install his home-rolled ePubs on their devices, and begged him for the Amazon/Kindle distribution.
Hugh Howey is a similar case.
Artists can put their big boy pants on and negotiate better deals instead of crying about them retroactively.
This is the problem with basic income if you don’t also increase the housing supply: landlords will just raise rents and soak it all up.
It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs (relative to a straight 100% increase relative to the basic income). So you might send everyone $100 per month and costs go up $100 per month, until supply chains shift towards supplying lower income humans with more goods and services than they used to get, at which point costs will decrease (from the $100 increase).
With enough forewarning, suppliers could anticipate the increased demand and prepare for it.
Not if desirable places restrict zoning in a way that prevents more housing from being legal to build.
A major factor in what makes places more desirable is access to jobs. In the case of full UBI, it will be easier to: stay unemployed, negotiate a remote work contract or launch a new venture from anywhere, so I expect that we'll see people spread out a lot more.
No need to stay in a "desirable place" (read: place with jobs) if you have UBI.
> It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs
Landlords are, by and large, not the ones who create new housing units, and "lack of profit potential is" also generally not the main impedance to creating new housing in most locations either.
Really, any place where building falls behind demand you should expect the lower profit affordable housing to be the first projects cancelled. Economically it only makes sense to service the affordable housing market if the luxury housing market is too saturated to support more projects.
>and "lack of profit potential is" also generally not the main impedance to creating new housing in most locations either.
It somewhat is. Housing builders can only do so many projects per whatever cycle they run. They will optimize towards building fewer projects that are highly profitable rather than building tons of low income housing or starter homes that each have much lower profit.
Builders don't want to scale up, they want to make money. Building would also be abysmal to scale up anyway, because it's somewhat skilled labor that you pay peanuts for.
This is just one of the ways that wealth inequality results in market failures.
People with lots and lots of wealth value each individual dollar significantly less, and are therefore willing to part with significantly more dollars per unit of service or product. That means you always get a much higher profit margin targeting stupid rich people than anything else. So everything is built around bilking these dumb but wealthy people for everything you can, and nobody builds or sells much to the poorer people. This drives prices for things up in general, and starves the market of oxygen for meeting the needs of less wealthy people.
Ask any developer, big or small, who their target market is, and they will not say "poor people" and this has been true for decades, and the difference between "poor" and "not poor" has only continued to grow.
Or you could have progressive real estate tax so you don't let the bully keep the stolen lunch money and you can give it to your kid again.
That would be amazing, but places like California prohibit that as well.
haha, you probably want to replace "their" with "[media conglomerates']"
> Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audio books.
> when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.
Beautifully explained the complex situation and its kind of scary how it applies to tech as well in some areas.
The second point is also true w.r.t big tech & privacy regulations.
How can Congress make it any easier to access an audience? The Internet made it so there is zero friction between a media consumer and a media creator.
Having to compete with a billion other content creators (including hits from the past) is inherently hard. The most valuable service the big media sellers provide these days is curation.
Reducing copyright length would be the best thing to reduce the big companies’ power though. That way, they can’t sway buyers to their silos using content from the past, and therefore have to invest in the future.
Shortening copyright terms would reduce the power of any given media company; but I think it might disadvantage creators of new works overall. Right now each company has a smaller back-catalogue than they would under a shorter term regime, and so the relative value to them of new content is higher.
Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content), which would then reduce the number of buyers for new content, increasing the monopsony effects.
The vast majority of money for any given copyrighted work comes within the first few years of its existence. (This is extra true for things like video games.)
Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator.
You seem to be thinking of copyright purely in terms of vast media conglomerates, but it affects literally every work created by every human in the country. That includes these HN discussion posts!
Additionally, I find it hard to see how your second paragraph holds. If the amount of exclusive content a given entity holds affects their odds of being bought by a larger conglomerate, I would think it would be in the opposite direction: having more exclusive content would make them more likely to be a target for acquisition, so that the larger company could then hold all of that exclusively.
If everything older than, say, 35 years were suddenly in the public domain, available to be distributed by any of the distribution companies, and Hypothetical Media Corp had half the back catalogue that they used to, then surely that would make big conglomerates less interested in buying up Hypothetical Media Corp?
I am generally anti-copyright; but it's not really a pro-creator policy to curtail copyright; it's pro-consumer.
> If everything older than, say, 35 years were suddenly in the public domain, available to be distributed by any of the distribution companies, and Hypothetical Media Corp had half the back catalogue that they used to, then surely that would make big conglomerates less interested in buying up Hypothetical Media Corp?
Doesn't your first point contradict this? If almost all the value of copyrighted works comes in the first few years, then no, curtailing copyright terms doesn't discourage buyouts, because the buyout is going to be mostly justified on the recent works held by the purchased company, not the residual value of its old works.
It's pro-creator as well. Creators are artificially restricted from drawing upon the commons to create new things due to copyright.
In the 1800s, musicians would freely write new lyrics to existing tunes, which is why folk music has various songs that share the same music. (There is the satire loophole, but that's creatively limiting.)
In the 1980s, musicians would record short slices of chords from records (or breakbeats) onto sampling devices and make new music from them, giving rise to an incredible number of musical genres.
Copyright came for all of them and created a new status quo where exercising that sort of creativity is legally cumbersome.
And now the paperclip maximizers are trying to chip away at fundamental music theory, with lawsuits over chord progressions (of which there are very finite possibilities) and other attempts to grab slices of other pies. (See: the recent suits against Dua Lipa, Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran.)
We wouldn't have Wicked, one of the most beloved twenty-first century musicals and now a high-grossing film, if Oz were still legally encumbered.
> Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator.
It's important to recognize why this is the case - a lot of the hubbub around posthumous copyright comes from the fact that a large amount of classic literature often went unrecognized during an author's lifetime (a classic example is Moby Dick, which sold and reviewed poorly - Melville only made 1260$ from the book in total and his wife only made ~800$ from it in the remaining 8 years it remained under copyright after Melville died, even though it's hard to not imagine it on a literature list these days). Long copyright terms existed to ensure that the family of an author didn't lose out on any potential sales that would come much later. Even more recent works, like Lord of the Rings also heavily benefitted from posthumous copyright, as it allowed Tolkien's son to actually make the books into the modern classics they are today, through carefully curating the rereleases and additions to the work (the map of Middle Earth for instance was drawn by Tolkien's son.)
It's mostly a historic example though; Copyright pretty blatantly just isn't designed with the internet in mind. Personally I think an unconditional 50 years is the right timeline for copyright to end. No "life+50"; just 50.
50 years of copyright should be more than enough to get as much mileage out of a work as possible, without running into the current insanity where all of the modern worlds cultural touchstones are in the hands of a few megacorporations. For reference, 50 years means that everything before 1975 would no longer be under copyright today, which seems like a much fairer length to me. It also means that if you create something popular, you have roughly the entire duration of a person's working life (starting at 18-23, ending at 65-70) to make money from it.
Long copyright also means that the estate can control the work- like how Tolkien's son guarded lord of the rings like a hawk.
And I also understand Disney's point of view. Imagine you invested a lot of money into a franchise and the original author suddenly goes crazy and makes Roger the Rabbit a Klansman.
Although personally I would put the protection at 10 years.
In the modern world, some sort of reasonable fixed duration seems to make a lot of sense. An elderly author cranking out a work partly for the benefit of a soon-to-be widow/widower isn't insane. You can argue about exact timeframes and details but some sort of duration after creation (maybe not less than life of creator) probably works pretty well.
I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content.
Currently, people give a ton of money to Comcast/Disney for stuff made decades ago, which in turn gives Comcast/Disney more power, since people are far likelier to stay within those silos.
If friends/seinfeld/whatever could be accessible via multiple sources, then other groups of content creators could emerge, offering $15 to $25 per month of new stuff, rather than compete for a smaller portion of the budget since the old content takes up so much.
The creators of new work don’t earn much from 130 year copyrights anyway, to fund any decent production, they will need outside investors such as Disney or Apple or whoever to make the gamble. In exchange, Disney and Apple are going to want the ability to sell it for 130 years, but few if any new content creators is able to negotiate gross royalties, those days are long gone.
>Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content)
This is the opposite of what would happen. If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.
> I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content.
Because this syllogism doesn't hold. There's not a fixed pot of money that must be spent on content. If now every streaming service has access to a bigger pool of old hits, then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.
> If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.
Each service will just become sameier and compete more on their UX than their exclusive content. You can see this in music, for instance, where the big streamers already have more or less identical catalogues. Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.
> Each service will just become sameier and compete more on their UX than their exclusive content.
This is an incredibly good thing.
> then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.
Why would they have customers in the first place if all they offer is reruns, which everyone else also offers? Streaming only old content will be a very, very low profit margin business.
> Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.
Creating and streaming audio is not a comparable business to creating and streaming video, due to the vastly different sums of money, and hence risk, involved.
But, also, people have to pick only Spotify/Apple/Amazon/Alphabet and a couple others because of excess copyright terms. All the old hits people want are controlled by Universal, Sony, and Warner, and so if your audio streaming business does not contract with those 3, then you’re dead in the water. Which means every audio streaming business, and hence every audio streaming customer, is always paying rent to those 3 businesses that own copyrights.
That means there is less money available for new audio creators. And this holds true for all rent seeking. If it weren’t for excessive copyright, there could be much more variety in audio streaming.
> Why would they have customers in the first place if all they offer is reruns
You can ask the same question for cable TV, but it's not dead. Netflix also started as purely "reruns" and was still quite popular.
> Creating and streaming audio is not a comparable business to creating and streaming video, due to the vastly different sums of money, and hence risk, involved.
If anything that extra risk should make studios more shy of investing in new content vs just serving up old hits. It's noticeable that film leans way more heavily on franchises and remakes already, which agrees with this hypothesis?
> That means there is less money available for new audio creators. And this holds true for all rent seeking. If it weren’t for excessive copyright, there could be much more variety in audio streaming.
You assume this, but I really don't think it's true! Most people don't seek out new music; their tastes are set in their youths and then they happily listen to the same music for the rest of their lives. The choice is to make them pay to listen, generating at least some stream of royalties, or let them listen for free, in which case they will be happy to.
> The original US copyright lasted for 14 years, and could be renewed for another 14 years, but only by the creator (not by the publisher).
I wish we would go back to that.
Yes, I always preferred the short term with renewals; I didn't realize that it used to be the creator not the publisher. I wonder how that would interact with the current "work fore hire" laws that exist.
> I wonder how that would interact with the current "work fore hire" laws that exist.
The simplest interaction would be "it's practically impossible to renew copyright on something created by a large number of employees", but IMO, that's not a bad thing.
I don’t know if Cory Doctorow has read the “fantastic 1981 novel”, but I have (decades ago) and as I recall the plot of the book and the plot of the movie are very different from each other. The author of the book didn’t write the screenplay and I doubt he had much (if anything) to do the character designs in the movie. So even if he has the rights to his novel back, it’s not at all clear to me that he could just make (or sell a license to make) a straight, recognizable sequel to Disney’s movie without getting back into bed with Disney, and clearly Disney isn’t interested or they’d have done something by now.
I read the "fantastic 1981 novel", too, and you know what? It wasn't very good. It had a lot of really interesting world-building and some cool ideas, but the characters were flat and the central mystery was terrible. Despite common wisdom, the book is not always better than the movie.
I mean, given that Disney wasn't doing anything new with Roger Rabbit, I'm glad he got the rights back. But I think part of the reason that very little new material got produced is that the first movie was kind of lightning in a bottle. It's possible other production companies would have had to be involved to get something new done, depending on how the rights were parceled out. (We're all talking about Disney here because that's who Doctorow focused on, but it was a co-production with Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment.) And I think you're right that he's unlikely to have the rights to do a sequel that's too close to the original.
> the characters were flat
Yeah, isn't that the central gag of the movie though?
Disney definitely owns the character designs, so Roger and Jessica Rabbit will have to look different if a new movie is made using the IP owned by the book's author.
Sometimes (often) the original is the best. Sequels are just milking more money from the concept and rarely match the original let alone exceed it. It's the laziest sort of movie-making.
>clearly Disney isn’t interested
often big media companies aren't interested in exploiting specific properties if there is ongoing litigation regarding them.
In this case it’s not that there is litigation. It’s that Steven Spielberg must approve any and all content featuring Roger Rabbit. The delinquent partner who sits on their hands and does nothing is Spielberg.
Yeah the Roger Rabbit is a miracle where multiple major studios came together and allowed their IP to be in the same work. Disney, Warner Bros, Fleischer Studios, Harvey Comics, King Features Syndicate, Felix the Cat Productions, Turner Entertainment, and Universal Pictures/Walter Lantz Productions all agreed to share their characters. One of Steven Spielbergs great accomplishments was negotiating this. With how protective these studios are about their IP anymore I doubt we'd see anything close to the Roger Rabbit movie sadly.
Not to mention some of the actors have passed like Paul Reuben who really sold the cartoon aspect of Roger Rabbit.
Roger Rabbit was voiced by Charles Fleischer. (Paul Reubens was under consideration in an earlier version, and you can find his voice tests out on YouTube, which might be what you're remembering.)
Roger Rabbit was voiced by Charles Fleischer (no relation to Max and Dave Fleischer of Fleischer Studios), who is currently still working (and also voiced Roger's cameo in the Chip and Dale movie that was a spiritual sequel).
Direct link to the article: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/#im-just-drawn...
It's a long-winded article, even for a lawyer, but the payload seems to be a crack at the head of the RIAA, which is suing Midjouney.
"In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods."
I don’t find it long winded. It just gives background and makes a bunch of valid points.
Mainly that creatives are being screwed because every time they get given extra rights they’re bullied into selling them for nothing.
So this right that they get the copyright back after 35y is different - because you can’t be forced to sell it for nothing.
We need more laws like this to help creative people make the money they deserve. Most creative people make a pitiful amount of money while studios / publishers / labels do better and better. It’s not sustainable.
It's a readable and enjoyable text about a complex issue. You can't really distill anything about copyright without actually talking about history, relevant examples, and how it affects other industries, or other creative works, or...
It amazes me the number of people who are raging at how AI is hurting creators, and will make long videos and posts about this subject, without touching on the fact that the __ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY__ is the single largest abuser of creators, and it's far worse than AI is or probably will ever be.
That's how you can tell that the RIAA/MPAA propaganda campaign against AI to protect its racket is working.
The RIAA isn't opposed to AI as much as they're saying "join me, and together we can destroy indie music forever".
The RIAA is a cartel monopsony that demands songwriters and singers negotiate away all equity in their work as a condition of market entry. But there are alternative markets for music, and successful musicians that have navigated them. This is why, for example, mainstream music has been so strangely stagnant while the independent space is a lot more innovative. The labels don't pay good money for innovation; hell, they don't even want it. They want a sure hit saleable product every time.
As nerds, we're predisposed to look at generative AI through the framing of the Napster Wars. Except file sharing wasn't doing what generative AI does. P2P gave you a more or less faithful, if lossy, reproduction of a specific work. It might have missing or wrong metadata, but it was still clearly identifiable as that work. A generative AI system is instead producing legally distinct work - which is why all the AI training lawsuits are failing - using the creative input of the data the company scraped to train on. It infringes on the moral grounding of copyright but not the copyright itself.
The threat that generative AI systems pose to artists is twofold: spam and standardization. Generative AI makes it far easier to churn out samey-looking outputs, while losing utility as you try to get more interesting or innovative styles out of it. It's a slop machine. And, notably, these are exactly the sort of things the RIAA wants out of mainstream music:
- AI music is safe and approachable. If you ask it for jazz, you're getting a stereotype of the jazz genre.
- AI music can be mass-produced at scale without needing to advance an artist royalties. That means you can spam it on Spotify and destroy the discoverability of independent musicians.
- More importantly, generative AI turns the act of music production into ownable equity. The artist is cut out of the picture completely, there is not even the need to find a naive artist that will sign their life away in a 360 deal for peanuts.
The ideal world that the RIAA wants to live in is one where each label sues and then buys out an AI music company, and then has that company train a fully-owned "house model" on their back catalog only. No other entities will be allowed to train models, either through aggressive copyright litigation or through some new "AI safety law" that conveniently exempts them. They'll own the streaming sites and digital marketplaces, and any independent musician making real music will get crushed under the weight of AI slop.
There's a real discoverability issue on platforms from generative AI; real artists are getting crowded out due to poor algorithmic curation. 100% agree on this point.
Real talking head videos do way better than AI videos though (there's a huge authenticity movement), and a lot of what people like about consuming content is the connection with the creators, so I don't think creators are really threatened by AI.
Generative AI is dangerous to pop, but for subculture fans, the uniqueness of the art means a lot more, because subculture people tend to be discovery motivated.
> Termination is a powerful copyright policy, and unlike most copyright, it solely benefits creative workers and not our bosses.
That's an interesting framing. I know why Doctorow wants to import the boss/worker concept here, but it just doesn't apply. Disney wasn't Wolf's boss in any sense that is usually understood, and it just obscures the picture with a bunch of class-based chaff.
I read it more like "workers" being the ones who actually produce the good stuff, and "the boss" as being the entity to stick it to (as explained in the classic film "School of Rock").
You can make a case that the relation with creators and media/publishing is,in formal structure, more petit bourgeois/haut bourgeois than proletarian/bourgeois, but even if strictly the class dynamic is different, the essential dynamic is broadly similar between those who do the work and those who purchase it and functionally, if not strictly necessarily, provide access to the broader market.
They can tell him he can't use the IP he created. That may not be precisely a "boss" but it's a powerful constraint on his freedom.
> The answer lies in the structure of creative labor markets, which are brutally concentrated. Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks.
> The media industry isn't just a monopoly, in other words – it's also a monopsony, which is to say, a collection of powerful buyers. The middlemen who control access to our audiences have all the power
I'm happy to see apps included here, I feel sometimes folks forget these are also a form of creative works and having the two gatekeepers constantly filter and influece what can and can't be released is absolute nightmare for both developers and consumers (who don't even know the things they could've had but were denied by big A or big G).
Lots of fun ranting (the good kind) about the ills of the industries built to take advantage of creators, but for those who just want to know more about the state of Roger Rabbit: https://www.imnotbad.com/2025/11/roger-rabbit-copyright-reve...
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Hot damn I’m a sucker for a good analogy…
”Giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. You're just enriching the bullies.”
The big “5,4,3,2,1” is also a powerful piece of rhetoric. Who is this Doctorow person? He has my attention! :)
You're today's lucky 10,000!
https://craphound.com/category/redteamblues/
A great article on how awfully twisted copyright has become away from its intended goal, or at least the publicly stated intended goal.
Much reform is needed, seems to apply to everything...
> Under Termination, a media company can force you to sign away your rights in perpetuity, but you can still claim those rights back after 35 years. Termination isn't just something to bargain away, it's a new power to bargain with.
It's sentences like these that make it hard for me to take Doctorow seriously.
No media company is "forcing" anyone to do anything. They're paying creatives for their work. Every creative is free to say no. Musicians are free to shop their music to different record labels for the best deal. Authors pitch their books to different publishers to see which one offers the best deal. And there's always self-publishing as well.
We can have a reasonable conversation about copyright without saying silly untrue things like media companies are "forcing" creators to take deals.
I loved WFRR as a kid, and of all the movies I loved as a kid, it has definitely held up the best. I re-watched it recently and it is still great. Hilarious, thoughtful and just the right amount of dark.
One of the reasons I still love it is that it hasn't fallen prey to the usual Hollywood practice of taking something you love and shovelling it down your throat until you're sick of it. It saddens me when you see a really good movie with a bunch of bad sequels, or TV series that were once great but ran for 10 seasons too long.
Yeah. One thing is what's good for the author, one thing is what's good for the publisher. But what's good for us as viewers/end users (and every "creative" ought to remember that's what they are 99.9% of the time!) is often a third thing entirely.
The 8 most terrifying words in the English language are "Let us turn this movie into a franchise"
There's something very weird in this editorial. Doctorow implies that he's unhappy that copyright renewability became assignable in 1909†. Assignability to publishers is, by implication, bad for creators.
How exactly could that be the case? Assignment isn't automatic. Creators have to agree to assign to publishers. It's not clear to me how this doesn't make them strictly better off. Assignment of renewability, in Doctorow's framing, is valuable. How are creators made better off for not being able to sell it?
†(he refers to the framer's original term of 14 years + renewability for 14 years, leaving out that the term was extended to base 28 + 14 year renewal in 1831 --- he also leaves out that assignability predates the modern media industry by decades).
35 years seem quite excessive.
Taking half your life to get your stuff back?
it's a double edged sword -- media companies are generally franchise/lifetime hits oriented businesses - they pay (and generally lose, per investment, btw) for a shot at a hit.
On the one hand, imagine they could only negotiate rights to monetize that hit for, say, one year, and then this termination right kicked in. What do you think would be the top offer they could make an author?
The fraction of creatives that are great creatives and also great marketers/producers/runners of media companies is small, really small. So, creatives have an incentive to have a system where some amount of time is contractable. And media licensors rely on this hits-based model to fund all their development and betting on things that don't work out. And also to fund their jets and cool Bel-Air homes.
Sure, but what about 10 or 15 years?
very reasonable ideas! Of course creators could license for this term right now, but generally they do not have the bargaining power when they need it.
They could simply set up contracts that give some percentage to the author over time. But they don't want to sign away percentages, I guess.
I mean, it's pretty generous. In most other domains, if you sell something of yours, it's gone and you have no right to claw it back later.
Really interesting read, but I wonder if the character design everyone associates with the story isn't still owned by Disney even after termination. As I understand the original work is a written novel (and not a graphic novel), and I assume Disney designed the characters.
Otherwise ("creative works" based on the original material also transfer to the author of the original material) would mean that the author suddenly owns the MOVIE as well...
This is so freakin awesome!
Roger Rabbit was actually played in 35mm just last Thursday in Central NJ. What a treat it would have been to known that the original author got his characters back. I was lamenting on all the time that had passed since release. This cheered me right up! Will we see a whole Roger Rabbit universe now?
He's got a book out with a Jessica Rabbit origin story, that he's trying to shop a film adaptation of. The RRCU may be go.
This should work for video game developers right? Can they reclaim ownership of the games they created in the 80s/90s that have been abandoned?
Not exactly the same, but in Japan (where obviously many of the great games of the 80s and 90s were authored) there's a mechanism to acquire a license from the government to publish abandonware. The government collects a royalty from the new distributor that it holds in case a valid copyright holder comes forward.
Little Samson, a late-era NES game that because of its rarity can sell for thousands, was developed by a now-defunct company and is getting a re-release next year using this process.
https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/10/daunting-limited-...
If the developer was a work for hire and never owned the copyright then no.
If the developer licensed the game to a publisher then maybe.
Video game copyrights were rarely ever held by a single person, even in the early days of the industry.
> In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods. He wants there to be a new copyright that allows creators to decide whether their work can be used to train AI models, and then he wants that right transferred to media companies who will sell it to AI companies in a bid to stop paying artists <…>
There’s a timeline where big media publishers at least accidentally defend the rights of small-time IP holders (individual creators)—they’d go to court with the likes of OpenAI and Midjourney and put an end to training commercial ML solutions on unlicensed material. Specifically, if they would owe a large media company for training on their original works, presumably they just as well owe an average Jane. (Granted, assuming that Jane has not signed away her rights to a large media company she works with, but that would not apply to a massive number of small-time creators.)
Disney has the Roger Rabbit themed rides at Disneyland. How is that not considered using the IP?
Intellectual property rights should go away after 10 years.
> Remember, Termination is one of the only copyright policies that solely benefits creative workers.
To play devil's advocate, this provision probably lowers how much media companies are willing to pay when acquiring copyrights.
It doesn't, in practice. Consider the NPV of year 36 with, say, a 10% discount rate. It's low. Also, having watched directly some fairly famous friends deal with property coming up on the 35 year mark, media companies are adept at tying in other deals, finally getting projects financed, cutting a deal for a different project with some agreements made about the original property.. You can imagine.
Probably not, because of the monopoly power mentioned - and also because you can't count on a copyright to be worth anything after 35 years.
Why? A publishers goal is always to pay nothing at all for the rights, at best this is simply another excuse.
For the same reason a 35-year lease on a house is cheaper than buying it outright. If you know you won't own it forever, you won't pay as much.
That’s not the right comparison. Is a 35 year lease that much cheaper than a 70 year lease? Copyright isn’t forever.
So does this mean that the developers of abandonware can get legal rights to their old work?
Only if they didn’t work for hire.
With Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it’s not really clear whether the author originally came up with such a great idea and script, or if Disney just brought it to life so brilliantly on screen. I’m leaning toward the second. It’s cool that he got the rights back, but without Disney this idea just isn’t going to "sing" again.
It would be difficult. Aside from the characters and the cast, one of the biggest heroes of the movie was the script. It was dense with irony, jokes about the noir genre, straight man/funny man jokes and physical humor. You don't need the original cast to make a new Chinatown comedy with toons. It's a matter of assembling a story that's interesting and funny, with associated recognizable cartoon characters.
35 years seems to be a lot of time. Make it 15 maybe. Which is still a lot of time with your creation collecting dust. Or am I missing something?
You’re missing who had the better lobbyists. ;)
Let me get this straight: the author is angry that Disney didn't release a series of shitty Roger Rabbit sequels, prequels, and shared cinematic universe pictures with Pixar and Marvel, so he's re-taking his copyright in order to sell it to another studio who will exploit and debase his creative works more rapaciously?
> copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power, which means that copyright becomes something we bargain away.
This quote sums up a lot of the issues with current copyright laws in a very elegant way.
> But at the same time, the amount of money being earned by creative workers has only fallen over this period [50 years, so since 1975], both in real terms (how much money an average creative worker brings home) and as a share of the total (what percentage of the revenues from a creator's work the creator gets to keep).
Is there evidence this is true? It doesn't sound very true.
Does this takeback include the likeness of Roger and Jessica Rabbit from Disney's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or just the content from the original 1981 novel? From what I can tell, the familiar cartoon movie designs are unique to the Disney movie and affiliated Disney shorts.
It's really nice to read about the side of things that sheepish defenders of copyright seem to always be blissfully not aware of.
> .... by waiting 35 years ...
Should be 3.5
> This is a nightmare scenario for a creator: you make a piece of work that turns out to be incredibly popular, but you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them.
This nightmare scenario involves selling the rights to your character to a company that has the ability to produce, advertise and cast a movie with talented actors.
I'm certain I never would have heard of Roger rabbit had it not been sold.
You quoted one of the key sentences from the piece, and yet missed the point. It's the "you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them." part that is important. In the case of Roger Rabbit, the problem is the Disney has not made any new Roger Rabbit movies or other media in 35 years, despite the first movie being very successful. No doubt other concept, that could be successful, never even get to that point. See stories of "stuck in develompent hell".
This seems like one of those scenarios where you find out Disney did make a Roger Rabbit sequel, but they never marketed it, or it had a limited release in 12 California cinemas, and it only existed as a pro forma device to show they still controlled the character and would have the option to make sequels for another 35 years.
Bonus if it randomly starred or was directed by someone who later became famous, or if there are blog posts calling it an unknown masterpiece.
Nice to hear that didn't happen in this case and the author gets a second chance!
No, I got that point. I just find it funny that the article completely glosses over the reason why artists license their work in the first place. Because the company they license it to is far more capable of making money off of their work and, in most cases, the artist will make far more money by licensing their work than they would by trying to make an indie film on a shoe string budget with their own resources. That was an option for Wolf, yet he thought licensing his work was his best option, why did he do that?
The article does touch on that (monopsony) but it is largely irrelevant to the main point of the article.
> that has the ability to produce, advertise and cast a movie with talented actors.
Isn’t that most of the work?
You get: A lumpsum for your initial research that ended up as a character that people like,
They get: The idea of a character, but then they have to invest billions, build projects that work, tie relationships with cinemas and actors, advertise worldwide and maybe they make billions if they worked properly, but sometimes they make losses. Sounds like they worked for it, and building the initial character is like 0.0…1% of the talent involved.
Unionist gets: A nice story about how it’s always multibillion dollars companies that have all the money.
Maybe ideas are free and implementation is everything?
For over one decade now, maybe two, seemingly every big (or mid?) budget movie Hollywood has produced is based on existing IP: a comic book, novel, previous movie, TV show, or even non fiction article. I’ve been surprised many times by movies which seem original but are actually based on a French comic, or some other semi-obscure (internationally) source.
That tells me that ideas aren’t free. There’s a value to a fully cooked, ready to wear, tried and tested ideas.
As a second point, many good Hollywood pitches remain in development hell, unable to get a satisfying script, or a “second act that works”.
Ofcourse ideas are not free. Are we arguing Disney did not write a check?
Plenty of people earn lots of money licensing their art to Hollywood. Some people just have more business acumen than others.
And yes if you are selling art for money you are a businessman. Get an agent if you cannot hack it for crying out loud.
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> I admittedly haven't read that rambling post, but...
...you probably should.
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They didn’t buy it. They licensed it, and these are the terms of copyright - which is what they used to license it.
If you rent a house, and your lease expires, that’s not the landlord stealing the house back from you.
> What's the point of buying something if the other person is allowed to steal it back.
If you can't make a profit off of a licensed property after 35 years of exclusive control, you've done something horribly wrong. If you sit on a licensed property and do nothing with it for decades, it should be allowed to revert to someone else, or better yet go into public domain.
The issue is, what happens if you have a work where e.g. the music and the script were written by different people? If one of them can terminate the license then you create a situation where nobody can distribute it because nobody has the rights to all of it anymore.
Of course, what they should do is have the copyright expire after 35 years. Then if the original creators want to make sequel at that point they're entitled to -- just like everybody else.
Termination of Transfer has nothing to do with how much profit a work is making.
Interesting. The article certainly gave that impression. It's strange that the process isn't automatic when the main requirement is simply submitting a notice.
3 months is too long. 35 years is crazy.
Why would anyone invest millions in something that they can’t make money with after three months?
I dont care
Is that what is happening? My understanding of Termination of Transfer is that it keeps you from being able to make a sequel to your video game using the characters you licensed from me, but that the game you have already created you can continue to sell.
What the termination allows me to do as the creator of that character in this analogy is say - charcircuit isn't doing anything with my character for 35 years - I'm going to take back control and maybe do something myself with it or license it to someone else to do something with...
I can't keep selling it if you terminate the distribution right to some texture you made that I used in my game.
I don't think you are correct here. From the FAQ [0] on the website linked by the post:
“Derivative works” exception – although a successful termination causes all of the rights to revert, this will not affect exploitation of derivative works created during the lifetime of the agreement, even after that agreement has been terminated. Once the agreement has been terminated, the grantee (see the glossary) may continue after termination to utilize “derivative works prepared under authority of the grant before its termination…[consistent with] the term of the grant” (to quote from the U.S. Copyright Act). This means that if, for example, an author granted a company a 50-year exclusive license to create a movie based on the author’s novel, that company can continue to use and exploit the movie even after the author successfully terminates the exclusive license. The company may not prepare a new movie based on the novel; it may only continue to use the existing movie that it created when the exclusive license was still current.
[0]: https://rightsback.org/faq/#So.2C_I_get_all_of_my_rights_bac...
Thank you, I was wrong. This does seem more reasonable. But it would be nice if minor changes were still allowed. For example patching security issues of a video game should be allowed.
I wish this were further up in the comments. Most people seem to be assuming that you get all the marbles back.
Imagine the chaos if someone were able to say ‘whoops, all those books you bought are no longer sellable!’.
Imagine if Alan Cox took back all the bits of Linux he wrote and decided they were no longer to be licensed under the GPL!
…although maybe it’s only a matter of time before that second thing happens somewhere? “The company may not prepare a new movie based on the novel; it may only continue to use the existing movie that it created when the exclusive license was still current” seems problematic for open source software (or commercial software! What if the original authors of the FAT file system decided to try to start getting royalties from new derivative works?…)
Replying to myself…
From https://rightsback.org/faq/#What_kinds_of_agreements_cannot_... , works for hire are not covered, which includes most 1990s software (though I do still wonder about open source licenses):
Under the U.S. Copyright Act, copyrighted works that qualify as “works made for hire” are subject to special rules that govern who becomes the first owner of copyright in a work. For regular works, the person who creates the work becomes the first owner of copyright. However, for “works made for hire” either the employer or person who commissioned the work becomes the first owner of copyright. Neither of these transfers of rights from the author to the employer or commissioning party, which occur by operation of the Copyright Act, nor any subsequent agreements entered into by the employer or commissioning party in relation to the work, may be challenged by the author or their family members.
There’s a whole lot more nuance there, but notably “A contribution to a collective work” is allowed to be a work for hire.
Yeah, if you license something to use in your game then that item comes with a license term. You did not buy it and you do not own it. If you did buy it instead of license it, you would be free to do whatever you wanted with it forever. But you didnt buy it, you licensed its use.
this happens with eg licensed music or product tie-ins or whatever, and the game just stops being sold
And I think it would be best if they could license the content in perpetuity so it doesn't come to that. But that's impossible as even if the studio gets a perpetual license, it can still be terminated.
Thats up to whatever you agree with the owner when you license it.
Copyright was originally intended to last 14 years, after which the work is transferred to public domain. That was back in the 1700s, when the pace of life moved much faster than it does now.
If it weren't for Disney's success at regulatory capture, the copyright would be expired and anybody would be able to produce a fictional work featuring Roger Rabbit, including Disney.
Not sure if sarcasm. If not:
Is 35 years not long enough? Disney knew the terms going in.
I think it should go back to the 25-year automatic ownership back to the actual creator.
> What's the point of buying something if the other person is allowed to steal it back.
Well in the case of the very thing we're talking about, the point was apparently to make $330 million in a single year in the 1980s
I honestly can't tell if this is meant sarcastic or not. The power offset is so huge you need clauses like this to keep the power at some form of equilibrium.
Oh noooo it isn't fair to Disney!
Oh, wait, I actually don't care about that at all.
The power dynamic is very asymmetrical. Disney is ABSOLUTELY free to negotiate with him to continue distributing the movie, running the ride, etc.
It has been 35 YEARS and Disney's failed to do anything else with the IP. The original creator wants to make a sequel, and now he's able to.
Also: you mentioned a scenario where you might make a video game and wanted to be able to distribute it in perpetuity. Unless you based the video game on some pre-existing creative work that someone else came up with (Roger Rabbit's Raucous Riot or something), you WILL retain the rights. Termination of copyright doesn't apply to works made for hire [0] (i.e., if you pay your employees to create the IP, it doesn't apply).
TLDR; fuck the mouse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976#Terminat...
>Unless you based the video game on some pre-existing creative work that someone else came up with
Licensing assets like rocks, foliage, random textures or sounds is extremely common in the game industry, even among big games.
> Copyright is a very weak tool for protecting creators' interests, because copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power,
This is drivel written by someone who doesn't understand the mechanism of supply and demand. If you don't like the price, don't sell. If you don't like the terms, propose alternative ones. The real risk to creators is artificially suppressed demand through industry consolidation, not nuances to copyright law.