What woke means to me: Empathetic. Aware of the fact that there are other people unlike me, someone who isn’t a hetero, cis, white man, who has other life experiences and has problems that government hasn’t seemed interested in solving during most of America’s lifetime. But that they’re people who live rich, complex lives, and they’re deserving of the same consideration I am.
Republicans try to use that as a slur, and I treat it as a badge of honor.
Woke was a term started in the black community, dating back to the 30s but popularized on Black Twitter after the Black Lives Matter movement started, and then picked up by white liberals.
That’s a whole long series of trigger words for the right. And, um, rightly so. The term spread to include awareness of every bad thing in society that the right helps foster. Using “woke” is sometimes shorthand for “I’m looking at you, asshole.” The right knows that, which is why they’ve taken to calling Democrats pedophiles and groomers. Doesn’t matter to them how ludicrous those accusations are; as long as they name-call back they think they’re even.
Gotcha. Makes you wonder why the Dems haven’t been doing a similar campaign against the Repubs. One thing the Dems don’t get is to fight dirty like them. Always taking the moral high ground and trudging on when they get slammed.
Which is rather hilarious when you consider the fact there’s outright pedophiles and groomers within their ranks, even in congress.
Whatever the GOP accuses the Dems of doing, be very sure they are doing themselves.
The P in GOP is for Projection.
snort. 
On May 10, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) introduced legislation that would cut down copyright protection to two 28-year terms for the following companies:
(i) has a market capitalization of more than $150,000,000,000; and
(ii) (I) is classified under North American Industry Classification System code 5121 or 71; or
(II) engages in substantial activities for which a code described in subclause (I) could be assigned.
Those classification codes are for motion picture and entertainment companies. So, this seems to be a “revenge” bill aimed at Disney.
I’m all for a 28 year copyright term, I think the current ones are far too long.
But for everyone, not just whatever companies happen to fit into those particular criteria.
I’m also all for reduced copyright terms–and I think a lot of people who seem to advocate “going after” Disney do not realize that a reduced copyright term doesn’t suddenly implode their ability to make money off of Mickey Mouse or any of their other legacy properties. It would mean their very oldest works would become public domain, but Disney is making essentially no real revenue off of titles like Steamboat Willy, the proposed 2-28 year terms would be relatively reasonable, that would certainly mean some of the bigger “back titles” that probably do make them some meaningful revenue would now be public domain. But that’s also somewhat the intention of copyright as a concept, it was never intended to be a permanent ownership but a limited one–the family of Charles Dickens for example has no claim to his copyrights from the 1850s.
Current right’s holders who enjoy big legacy catalogs certainly would not benefit from a reduced copyright term, but it wouldn’t make such businesses non-viable, it would just curtail what IMO has been an inappropriate vehicle for their enrichment for many years.
Every time a Republican does something like this, a corporate PAC decreases its contributions to Republicans and increases them to Democrats.
Their oldest copyrights were going to start sunsetting in 2 years anyway and there was not much chatter about a new extension of the law, AFAIK.
Plus, Mickey Mouse is trademarked so someone could remake Steamboat Willie but still could not create their own Mickey Mouse cartoons, right?
Right, but if you make a youtube video, and during the video someone walks by whistling “whistle while you work” and you miss it in your editing, you are not going to get demonetized.
That’s quite complicated and gets healthily outside anything I can even feign strong knowledge on. I was involved once with a relative in just getting the filings done for securing some trademarks related to a private book imprint and suffice to say this isn’t an area of the law friendly to people trying to figure it out on their own.
There’s a bit of dissension here. In short, most people agree that as a “practical matter” you can trademark a character, and that makes it incredibly difficult for anyone to produce a derivative work of that character, even one that would not violate any held copyrights. However, many people who believe that also believe that goes against the “intent” and text of the copyright law, and that this status quo is essentially the product of basically Disney and a few other big right’s holders being so scary for a small artist to litigate with no one has really pushed the envelope very far, plus a few somewhat industry-tilted court cases.
But what you could do is once the early Disney library enters public domain, you could start selling DVDs (if people still bought DVDs) that literally contain those videos–just like the works of Charles Dickens can be published by anyone who wants to publish them. Note you have to be careful though–you can’t just grab a Penguin edition Dickens book published in 1988 and copy paste it and sell it, that edition enjoys copyright for some years after publication. You would have to quite carefully to go back to a version of Dickens’ work that you know is definitely in the public domain and reprint that, not anything containing a modern edition’s text. [Interestingly Dickens’ works never enjoyed copyright protection in the United States even during his lifetime, but that’s another story.]
However
But what you could do is once the early Disney library enters public domain, you could start selling DVDs (if people still bought DVDs) that literally contain those videos
While that ought be true, it may actually not be. Interestingly despite all the drama about Steamboat Willy and other early Disney titles potentially hitting public domain, there’s significant evidence that Disney did not properly register copyright on any of those early works at the time, and that under copyright law they actually are in the public domain right now. Someone could already be doing their own Steamboat Willy DVDs and selling them. Why aren’t they? For one, because no one wants to test that legal theory in a court against Disney. And for two, even if they were successful in arguing Steamboat Willy was in the public domain, they don’t want to get sued by Disney for trademark infringement. Disney would argue that you are confusing customers and making them think they are buying a product from Disney.
Now, there is firm precedent–you cannot use trademark to extend an expired copyright. But there is enough of a case that it would have to be litigated. If you’re a fly by night DVD imprinter you simply cannot meaningfully litigate against Disney. If you go 5 years and win, you have the ability sell DVDs that probably won’t gross you more than $100,000, and you are likely bankrupted by legal fees.
What a shock. Desantis is backing down.
Well, the election is over so he doesn’t have to cater to those people anymore.
Huh. It’s like something happened, oh say, a month ago, that made attacking Disney no longer necessary. Wonder what that could be??? Maybe Ron will need revisit the issue later, say, oh, how about Jan/Feb of 2024?
Disney just got Bob Iger back as CEO. I wonder how much influence that has on this. Apparently, the last CEO was a bit of a mess. Bob’s been around the block a couple times.
I wonder if a lot of the answer isn’t in this statement from DeSantis’ office (from the article):
“We will have an even playing field for businesses in Florida, and the state certainly owes no special favors to one company. Disney’s debts will not fall on taxpayers of Florida.”
Wasn’t one of the consequences of taking away Disney’s self-governing that debts related to infrastructure construction and maintenance in the self-governing areas would shift to the counties and have to be paid through property taxes for all the inhabitants? Seems to me DeSantis’ has just waited until enough GOP voters have forgotten this was his badly planned brain child all along for him to spin it as a bold decision to protect them from Disney malfeasance.
Blue counties, though, so costing the taxpayers was a bonus.