At the beginning of this year, the MPAA and six studios – Universal, Sony, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Disney – joined together to begin a new campaign against piracy on the web. A January 25th email lays out a series of legally and technically ambitious new tools, including new measures that would block infringing sites from reaching customers of many major ISPs. Documents reviewed by The Verge detail the beginning of a new plan to attack piracy after the federal SOPA efforts failed by working with state attorneys general and major ISPs like Comcast to expand court power over the way data is served. If successful, the result would fundamentally alter the open nature of the internet.
Those who try to halt progress eventually always lose.
As a sidenote, because I absolutely love stressing this: of the companies mentioned, Disney is the absolute worst. Disney’s entire fortune was built almost exclusively on taking public domain works from Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world, build an empire with those, and then proceed to lock everyone else out through corruption and buying off the US government. Without the open and limited copyright laws that Disney seeks to eliminate and has eliminated, the company itself would not have existed.
Behind the friendly facade, the Disney company is pure, unadulterated evil. Apple, Google, Microsoft – they’re saints compared to the damage Disney has done to the progress of culture and the free flow of information in the 20th century.
“…they’re saints compared to the damage Disney has done to the progress of culture and the free flow of information in the 20th century.”
Meh, Disney may behave foolishly and overprotective of their IP, but they’ve hardly damaged progress of culture.
Disney has had influence beyond their own IP, primarily via their aggressive lobbying for copyright term extensions in the US – apparently out of a desire to (among other things) keep the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons from becoming public domain. It’s no coincidence that the Copyright Term Extension Act is often referred to as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#Support
Sure, thanks to rule 34
They have. Disney’s Pinocchio was released the year after the original novel fell into the public domain. They made tremendous money on that derivative work, and they also enriched our culture, as their own version is pretty damn good. Now you can’t make new Pinocchios in Disney’s image, as that’s covered in new, longer-lasting copyrights. Good for them, of course, but the real problem is that you can’t do what Disney did with any work at the same age. To protect their own stuff, they ruined their own original business plan — for everyone else.
Also known as pulling the (public) ladder up behind them, so that nobody can follow them up.
Or you may well liken it to stomping on the shoulders of the (dead) giants whom they are standing on.
In the case of Hollywood is even more projective. The movie industry was set up there, in the West Coast, mainly to get as far as possible from the East Coast conglomerates which owned most of the patents and IP regarding moving pictures at the turn on the century in the US.
It’s only after the thief steals the crown, that stealing from the king becomes a capital offense.
Edited 2014-12-13 00:14 UTC
Also Disney planned the release of the ‘Jungle Book’ so that it would arrive a year after Kipling’s copyright had expired.
I wouldn’t have thought about it before, but now that you mention it, I can totally see that.
Finding good material on this subject seems to be challenging though. I simply cannot determine what is heavily biased, FUD, or trolling. Any recommendations on material that explores this subject (specifically Disney) even more that is unbiased (as much as possible)?
Welcome to modern day “image management”. Fill the news channels with so much FUD and misdirection that nobody knows if Nixon simply resigned, mooned the world, or shot himself on public television…
Edited 2014-12-12 22:02 UTC
You may wish to recalibrate your hyperbole meter, because on mine that ticked right off the scale and blew the glass out of the gauge.
But have you seen what Mickey does in his spare time?!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi-c6lbFGC4
Complaining about other people’s bad hyperbole with a bad hyperbole of your own, fascinating… 😉
What’s the use of owning a hyperbole meter if it doesn’t live up to its name?
Maybe it’s time for an upgrade, one that goes up to eleven perhaps?
Its on my Christmas list
What’s new? Jerks are jerks. Movie studios, big corporations and big financial institutions are jerks. Politicians are corrupt and governments are spying their own citizens.
I have found myself thinking that the moment when Google got music and movies into the Android Marketplace (now Google Play Store) was the moment when Android started to crapify.
Almost simultaneously they started efforts to clamp down on direct file management by users.
They introduced MTP (a Microsoft extension of PTP to provide iTunes like “functionality” between Windows Media Player and Zune) and MediaScanner, the latter being a process running on Android that maintains the database sitting between MTP and the file system.
Early implementations where a right mess. the MediaScanner database could all too easily become out of sync with the actual state of the device FS. I have both seen it myself and heard from others of directories that showed up empty over MTP but that was chock full of files on the device. Delete apparently empty dir via MTP and the files would by poof.
Thing is that MTP, by “virtue” of being a PMP aimed protocol, has a sub-system that handles DRM. This means that it can check if files you attempt to copy are files you are authorized by Big Media to copy to or from a device.
I dunno if it has actually happened, but it could very well be that if you attempted to copy files from a android device that came from Google Music or Google Movies over MTP, that you device or computer would balk because you lacked the authorization from on high.
Never mind the apparent clamp down with 4.4 onwards. The claim from Google was that it was to improve the security of user data. But they barely block write rights for internal areas with this change, never mind read rights. What they clamped down on was access to physical SD cards (not the pseudo-card they have set up as a union mount for legacy reasons).
Sorry about the rant…
…what are you going to do? I’m going to Disney Land!
There’s a reason why Disney is the last entertainment mega company standing. They tightly control the production marketing and distribution of all their IP. They have no shortage of talent (kids) wanting to come up through the ranks and parents willing to push them. They are printing money. From owning major TV networks to radio to cable networks, and their advertising dollars, to name a few. Throw in the gazillion dollar franchise that they’ve turned Marvel into, and the upcoming financial windfall from Star Wars and we’re talking obscene money.
And then there are the parks. You pay $100 per person, per day, to visit one huge gift shop that happens to have some rides, along with tens of thousands of others.
No matter how you feel about their business practices, the capitalist in you has to tip your cap to them.
Well I think Sony Entertainment might disagree with you there. The Dear Leader hasn’t destroyed them yet.
Yet they agreed to release classic LucasArts games DRM-free on GOG. Very uncharacteristic of them.
Disney aren’t capitalist. They are crony monopolists and as bad as any other monopolist out there. Realistically they should be broken up for having too much political power. Pretty much every thing Elizabeth Warren said this week about the banks and too big to fail applies to Disney.
Monopolist isn’t the opposite of capitalist. Actually, capitalism doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. Capitalism is about the private ownership of the means of production. And Disney is absolutely capitalist.
I suspect you mean Disney doesn’t believe in free markets. And whether one believes that or not depends on their point of view.
I definitely think Disney (and others) are guilty of subverting the political process to their own selfish ends. However, I think much of what they would like to achieve can be done through the clever use of trademarks and goodwill.
I think copyrights need to be made both stronger and weaker in parts. I think people should be free to reinterpret stories in a period of time that is much shorter than the 95 years or so that is currently granted for copyrights. However, I also think that simply copying does not deserve that kind of protection. For example, if you want to redo the Avengers movie, with the same story, then you should recast it, reshoot it, and redo all the special effects again, and you should be able to keep every penny you make. However, if you simply want to repackage the movie that Disney shot, then you should do it on Disney’s terms, and if they demand a fee for the distribution, then you should abide by it.
What parts do you think it should be stronger in? Reducing it in many parts makes sense, but stretching it further? I can’t think of any.
I know exactly what Capitalism means. What I’m referring to of course is the modern concept of how a responsible corporate citizen should behave. There is a detailed history since the late 1800s of governments breaking up trusts and monopolies that threaten state power. It’s bad for society to concentrate power in the way that Disney has been doing.
If you want to discuss what every single term refers to then sure I can go on for ages about socialism, anarchy, communism, democracy, capitalism, libertarianism etc. But honestly, theres a public perception of how the market/companies should operate and for a long time (basically forever) they haven’t followed that path.
Edited 2014-12-15 10:46 UTC
In that case what about the copyright of the person who wrote the story? What if it is a adaptation of a book, or comic book, a play, etc?
I am not saying you are right or wrong, but I want to know is how does it logically flow to say that remaking an (re)adaptation of someone’s novel means they don’t deserve royalties and an automatic license.
I’m sure Thom was referring to the blockbuster animated features, but the company existed before those. So it might have only been like Warner Bros?