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> What people forget in the debate over public company 'CEOs' is that, when the price of disney shares goes up from $24 to $135, that is millions upon millions

> What people forget in the debate over public company 'CEOs' is that, when the price of disney shares goes up from $24 to $135, that is millions upon millions of peoples retirements that are that much more secure. I would happily accept that argument if we were talking about other sectors of the economy. Copyright trolling and rent-seeking in general, however, are not value-creating activities; on the contrary, they actively destroy value and wealth. For each person whose retirement has been "made more secure" by such a business, many more have been made substantially worse off.

tathougies 7y ago
Disney is copyright trolling? (This is a genuine question). Disney definitely enforces its own copyrights and intellectual property, but seeing as it created those ideas (like Mickey Mouse, etc), I'm not sure how you can call enforcing copies of this idea 'copyright trolling'. It seems only right that the company that made the cartoon profit off of its likeness. The government has perfectly reasonable regulation when others want to use likenesses or movie clips for 'fair use'.
- 0815test 7y ago
  > seeing as it created those ideas (like Mickey Mouse, etc) Mickey Mouse, perhaps[0]. Many other Disney characters and broad ideas were ripped off of public domain work (sometimes it's even more complicated, see Winnie the Pooh - the original character was created by someone else and later licensed to Disney, but there certainly was a lot of subsequent controversy about the precise terms of that licensing deal!) with Disney then laying proprietary claims on them, and also lobbying for extended protections on their newly-proprietarized forms. That's a particularly obnoxious form of copyright trolling. [0] Though, in many ways, Mickey Mouse is simply a technically-simplified form (serving the new medium of cartoon animation, which Walt Disney was then experimenting with) of an existing genre of cartoon/comic anthropomorphic mice (of which 'Teddy Tail' is the best-documented representative). Serendipitously, the changes - although introduced for merely technical reasons - also made the character a lot more popular, for the same reason why ubercheap anime characters from Japan are popular - humans are attracted to simple forms, symmetry and easily-read neotenous traits, and repelled by complexity and artistry. So Walt Disney had a good intuition to start with, but his creative success was for the most part a matter of serendipity and being in the right place. No way his character is worth billions of dollars - no anthropomorphic mouse in the freakin' noosphere is! /s

tathougies 7y ago

Disney is copyright trolling? (This is a genuine question). Disney definitely enforces its own copyrights and intellectual property, but seeing as it created those ideas (like Mickey Mouse, etc), I'm not sure how you can call enforcing copies of this idea 'copyright trolling'. It seems only right that the company that made the cartoon profit off of its likeness. The government has perfectly reasonable regulation when others want to use likenesses or movie clips for 'fair use'.

0815test 7y ago
> seeing as it created those ideas (like Mickey Mouse, etc) Mickey Mouse, perhaps[0]. Many other Disney characters and broad ideas were ripped off of public domain work (sometimes it's even more complicated, see Winnie the Pooh - the original character was created by someone else and later licensed to Disney, but there certainly was a lot of subsequent controversy about the precise terms of that licensing deal!) with Disney then laying proprietary claims on them, and also lobbying for extended protections on their newly-proprietarized forms. That's a particularly obnoxious form of copyright trolling. [0] Though, in many ways, Mickey Mouse is simply a technically-simplified form (serving the new medium of cartoon animation, which Walt Disney was then experimenting with) of an existing genre of cartoon/comic anthropomorphic mice (of which 'Teddy Tail' is the best-documented representative). Serendipitously, the changes - although introduced for merely technical reasons - also made the character a lot more popular, for the same reason why ubercheap anime characters from Japan are popular - humans are attracted to simple forms, symmetry and easily-read neotenous traits, and repelled by complexity and artistry. So Walt Disney had a good intuition to start with, but his creative success was for the most part a matter of serendipity and being in the right place. No way his character is worth billions of dollars - no anthropomorphic mouse in the freakin' noosphere is! /s