Plane Crazy…
Copyright laws in 1928 were different than today. You had to make the item publicly available to be eligible. I don’t think a test release counts.
Again, as I already posted, businesses balance probable costs against possible revenues. Making the decision *not *to spend money to earn less money in return is an everyday action. If you want us to take you seriously, provide a dollars and cents cost benefit analysis that takes both halves of the equation into account.
Uh, no. They also take into account the other side of the cost and the likelihood of success and the political capital necessary. They balance the costs.
They also look at the powers arrayed against them, such as Google, which are far bigger and wealthier companies than Disney or any other pure Hollywood outfit.
They look at the fact that Congress is likely to pass very little. They look at the fact that copyright legislation of any kind is controversial. They look at the fact that copyright term extension at this point has specifically become a third rail. They look at the fact that at this point they have no convincing policy argument for extension. They look at the fact that opening up the question of copyright term is far more likely to get it reverted to pre-CTEA levels than vet it extended.
And they take into account what the real value of each of those films is in terms of licensing. They don’t just sit around and say—“Fuck everything. We are going to use all the power and capital of our evil entertainment and media company to do this one thing no matter how hard it will be to get and how little it will actually benefit our bottom line.”
Disney is a large corporation now, no longer the plaything of a single obsessed individual. Their decision making is not like that appearing in a cartoon.
Given all that, there is a chance that someone might try to propose term extension sometime in the future, but it won’t be as the result of such cartoonish decision making. And it would be a huge mistake to characterize the issue as being one based on protecting the copyright status of Steamboat Willie.
If it were just a matter of deciding “Let it lapse into public domain, or not”, then of course they’d choose “not lapse”. And they probably will make at least some token effort at getting the law extended. But they can’t prevent it from lapsing just by saying no: It’d take an awful lot of very hard and very expensive work, and even if they succeeded in bribing or blackmailing enough legislators, it’d probably cost them more in goodwill than the value of the old cartoons they’d be saving.
I really don’t see why these companies don’t just host old obscure stuff for free on YouTube or something. Not only would it garner them good will (as unquantifiable as that is) it’d be advertisement for merchandise that you can’t just stream via internet.
When I was growing up, Disney Channel was premium cable whereas Cartoon Network* was always basic, so I have a lot more nostalgia for Looney Tunes, Fleischer and MGM shorts than for the Silly Symphonies. Nostalgia is $$$exploitable$$$ so why hoard stuff kids would otherwise lack the means or motive to care about?
*Of course CN nor Boomerang air the vintage stuff anymore, and AOL Time Warner charges people to stream it via YouTube, the cads.
That’s nice. But how much are those cartoons worth now compared to Disney’s?
That’s a totally serious question. Why should Disney care about those old cartoons? How would it help them to sell *Frozen *or *Moana *or Zootopia? How much has those old Looney Tunes cartoons helped Warner Bros.? How many Looney Tunes-related movies has Warner done? How does those old Cartoon Network showings help Warners sell The Lego Movie? Did you even know that Warners owns the Lego movies?
The old cartoons have a total value in the millions. Single digit. Collectively. Modern movies have a total value in the billions. Single digit, but individually. Nothing is going to change that.
Maybe that makes you think that Disney should therefore do it for nostalgia or the goodness of their hearts or to salute the old animators or any other non-business reason. Sounds good to me. But I can’t see how you can justify doing so in business terms. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
So, not much then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBgghnQF6E4
Um, yeah, I knew Warner Bros. was behind the Lego movie. Granted, I’m the sort of dork who would.
But, yknow, it’s not like frozen was based on a generations-old story that you can download the PDF off of archive.org for free or anything. The fact that the Looney Tunes get only sporadic feature films may have more to do with their poor execution – or painfully cynical “urban” clothes lines or that execrable Loonatics Unleashed diluting the brand – than anything, but naw, that’s crazy talk! It’s making the original shorts available to all classes that did it!
It’s not the old cartoons. It’s the availability of anyone to use Micky in any way they choose.
Look, Gregory Maguire turned the harmless old fraud Oz into a Hitler figure.
Alan Moore turned Alice, Dorothy & Wendy into kiddie porn.
Someone will do the same to Mickey.
Which is, of course, why they maintain the trademark on Mickey. But that has nothing at all to do with the copyright on Steamboat Willy, as explained several times in this thread.
Exapno Mapcase, there is indeed a lot of money in movies, but most of it isn’t in the movies. You think the only way that Warner Bros makes money off of Bugs Bunny and the like is via movies? Any time anyone buys anything with a Looney Tunes character, Warner Bros gets a cut. And why do people buy those things? Because they grew up with the cartoons. Even if Warner Bros never got a cent from the cartoons directly, they’d still be hugely profitable.
OK, one more time. The character Mickey Mouse is under trademark to Disney and trademark lasts as long as the company does.
Can other people use Mickey Mouse? The answer is a qualified yes. There is a First Amendment right to produce parodies of copyrighted works. Googling parodies of Mickey Mouse brings up thousands of hits. The parody wiki has a long list of videos using Mickey as other famous characters. Also, anybody can refer to trademarks at any time, as we’re doing here.
The prohibitions are on the use of Mickey as Mickey. But if Steamboat Willie enters the public domain, then people will get the right to use that Mickey character, true. But only that Mickey character, the Mickey as he looked and sounded and acted in 1928, not the more familiar and more famous Mickey of later years.
Yes and that has just destroyed all value of the Oz and Wonderland books. Wait, it hasn’t? They’re even more valuable now than they have ever been? But nobody is doing that now to Mickey, are they? I just typed Mickey Mouse into Pornhub. You can too. What a… variety of hits I get. And on lots of other Disney characters, too. Well, I guess you’d better sell all your Disney stock right away now that the value of its characters is down the toilet.
You’re making a bad case based on lack of understanding of the law and willing ignorance of the market. Disney will do just fine in 2023 and every year thereafter.
Chronos, most of the money made by the corporations is not from movies or from merchandise. Check the link I gave in post #24. Of that small part of total revenue, cartoon character-based earnings are an even smaller part and they’re the sum of thousands of characters. Warner Bros. is not even its own corporation but a fragment of a bigger corporation without the theme park earnings. Comcast owns NBCUniversal so it has a tiny chunk of theme parks in its portfolio, but they don’t drive revenues or earnings.
The important point is Disney and Warners will still have trademarks on their characters and still get money from their use, even if some early copyrights are lost. As I argued above, they would still make money from official merchandise even if they lost the trademark. That’s because they’ve poured a hundred years of brand identification into the older ones. There is no plausible world in which these giant corporations would take a noticeable hit under the worst case scenario, which means that the much, much milder case scenario we’re talking about is a drop in the bucket.
OK, let’s see…
It looks like the biggest slice of the pie is from the TV networks, but while Disney might own those, I would argue that they’re only very loosely tied to the Disney brand. Loss of their iconic properties would make very little difference there, since most people never even know that ABC or ESPN are Disney-owned.
In second place, though, are the theme parks. I’m astounded-- I knew that they were profitable, but I had assumed that they mostly existed as a way to promote all of the other subsidaries.
In any event, though, the point remains that the old properties like Steamboat Willie probably have more value in promoting the characters (to bring in profits from the merchandise and parks) than they do in themselves. Nobody’s going to buy a ticket to go see those old cartoons in the theater, but they might pay to meet Mickey, or to wear a Mickey T-shirt.
Nope, you missed the key words ‘mucking up’. Frozen and the rest are anemic, simpering, exercises in globular shit sentimentality, that do not declare the previous authors and turn tales of moral complexity into soppy crap for little women. And of course are simplified and changed to give those simple little women different kinds of heroes as exemplars.
You may be surprised to know that the Snow Queen in the original, however very attractive, was not someone to take home to mother.
Which could be ignored were it not for Disney pursuing others for the appropriation they smugly build their crap on. Last year they sued some chap in NY for teaching fencing with light-sabres; they have sued day care centers for having Disney figures on the walls; a couple who dressed up as Tigger and Eeyore to dance and entertain Floridians throwing high-toned parties were sued by Disney for $1 million in 2008.
Not only do they take the author’s originals and besmear them with grubby hands, they then sue others for utilizing their precious crap. It is this frivolity that will destroy us: America already has a litigious society without big corporation joining in.
I will say, however, I do enjoy Jirka Väätäinen’s brilliant depictions of Disney characters as people. So good can come from others taking Disney slop and turning it into magic.
Princess Aurora especially.
Mickey is certainly valuable as a trademarked character image. All we’re doing here is asking what percentage of that value is due to his cartoons and what, if any, loss on that value would Disney suffer by losing the copyright on those cartoons.
My answers are almost zero and almost zero. Disney stopped making Mickey cartoons in 1953! That’s pretty odd if the cartoons are so valuable. The early black & white cartoons contribute almost nothing. I simply don’t believe modern kids care about black & white movies, and there’s plenty of comments here on the Dope to back that up. Disney didn’t make the transition to color until 1935. Those cartoons may have some effect, though to be honest I hated the Mickey Mouse movies because of Walt’s squeaky mouse voice.
Is there really any doubt that Mickey is far more valuable today as the image of Disney than from the cartoons? Historically that brand is based on the cartoons but history doesn’t contribute anything to the bottom line. Mickey will continue as the face of Disney for as long as the company wishes. Can you give any realistic numbers for what Disney will lose from the loss solely of cartoon copyrights? My number, again, is almost zero.
Disney will not lose the trademark on Mickey Mouse. It will not lose the ability to release Mickey Mouse cartoons or associated merchandise. It will not lose the ability to use Mickey’s image in its theme parks or other promotion or advertising. The only thing it might lose is part of whatever revenues from early cartoons it now gets, and in the beginning at least the odds are that the increased publicity and visibility of others releasing them will help revenues for official Disney products. The Corporation
can’t get hurt from others using the Mouse because others do right now and it’s suffered no measurable financial harm.
Disney is Disney, the mega-conglomerate, home to Marvel and Pixar. The Mouse is an anachronism and a footnote. Steamboat Willie is even less.
What does any word of this have to do with the length of copyright?
Yes but Disney’s answers by their *experts, *are obviously much greater than zero.
It wasn’t the Berne Convention that was changed. It was the European Community Directive on Copyright, which extended the period to 70 years. The US amended its copyright law to keep in sync with the European Community law. See the wiki article on the Copyright Duration Directive:
The Berne Convention sets a minimum term of 50 years from the death of the author, but signatories to the Convention can provide for a longer term, as the US and EU have done. Other signatories to the Berne Convention still use 50 years (e.g. - Canada has a 50 year protection).
So you can cite these experts and show us what their answers are? Please do so.
Their lawyers fight hard to keep copyright, dont they? Those lawyers dont come cheap. You think they do it for fun?
Yeah, we’re in agreement on that. Almost none of the movies’ value to Disney will be lost by the lapse of their copyright.
No, of course not. They fight hard to keep trademark, but copyright is not something that you fight for.
Using lawyers to spot violations of copyright and issue takedown or cease and desist orders is pretty cheap. Any first year can do that. Disney has oodles of lawyers; why underuse them?
But that has exactly nothing to do with the entirely different thing that is a multi-year lobbying effort to get Congress to change a major law that will involve tens of thousands of companies and have worldwide implications. That uses your top lawyers at top prices. And it’s very, very public. Lobbyists have to register. Campaign donations can be traced. Groups that want to roll back copyright will publicize any effort to increase its length.
And that’s why I can keep saying that Congress is not going to change the Copyright Act. There’s simply no public fight to do so. And that’s odd, though probably not in the way you think. Copyright needs to be rethought for the digital age. Probably every aspect of the law needs updating or revising or overhauling or replacing. Right now a few odds and ends get nibbled on around the edges but nothing major is being talked about. Which is about as bad as ignoring climate change, and fully as blind.
That’s true even though starting Jan. 1, 2018 all the works from 1923 currently in copyright go into the public domain.
I suppose if you believe in Disney conspiracy theories you can write that off by saying that Disney doesn’t care about anything prior to 1928 and if they don’t care then all the things that will go into the public domain over the next five years don’t count because they aren’t Disney’s. Do I really have to point out how insane that logic would be? If Disney cared it would be fighting right this minute to ensure that works never start moving into the public domain any more. They would be joining with a huge armada of corporations to kick Congress in the ass to get them going. Letting other works enter the public domain but changing the law for Steamboat Willie would be a public relations disaster.
But, heck, Disney’s evil, right? It does what it wants and in total secret, and no one can stop it. :smack: