3 ms·

This is a circumstance where I honestly believe a commerce determination needs to exist in fair use law (that wasn't the basis of the decision, btw). What happ

This is a circumstance where I honestly believe a commerce determination needs to exist in fair use law (that wasn't the basis of the decision, btw). What happened here is that someone wrote a funny mashup based on a famous Dr. Seuss book with Star Trek jokes and sold it, as a book. Clearly there's transformative value here. The jokes look funny. But absent the original properies, there's no commercial value to this thing, so without Seuss and Roddenberry this book wouldn't exist anyway. I think it would be a much happier world if we could trade transformative jokes and memes on the internet with impunity, but still agree that there's a bright line between that and trying to trade on someone else's idea. Right now we end up on one side or the other: either we have to agree that sometimes good stuff needs to be banned entirely (imagine a world without Baby Yoda memes!) or we have to allow someone else to come along and "transform" our revenue sources for their own benefit (faceless corporations steal ideas just as often as they have them stolen!).

Animats 6y ago
But absent the original properties, there's no commercial value to this thing, so without Seuss and Roddenberry this book wouldn't exist anyway. Exactly. The value is in the original properties. As an original work with new characters, it would flop.
dmurray 6y ago
> I think it would be a much happier world if we could trade transformative jokes and memes on the internet with impunity, but still agree that there's a bright line between that and trying to trade on someone else's idea. Isn't that the status quo? If you make a "Oh, the places you'll boldly go!" joke on HN, the Geisel estate won't come after you - or if they do, your post will be taken down after almost everyone who was going to read it has read it. If a million people make a million "Oh, the places you'll boldly go!" jokes on social media, maybe they'll come after the 10 most popular. If so, the world can live with the other 990,000. More likely though, they'll come after the 10 guys , the 10 guys selling T-shirts with the meme, who you already agree are fair game.
- newacct583 6y ago
  It's not, because infringing-but-non-commercial[1] stuff gets taken down all the time by overzealous IP owners. The Baby Yoda thing wasn't entirely a joke, really. Disney in particular is extraordinarily strict, and there are lots of places on the internet you can't post a joke with an image of Baby Yoda. [1] Or at most minimally commercial, like monentized youtube videos.
gnopgnip 6y ago
"The effect of the use upon the potential market." Is one of the four factors for fair use. If this wasn't a product being sold, competing with the original books the fair use determination probably would have been in their favor, and it is unlikely any lawsuit would be filed
- newacct583 6y ago
  But that standard is too strict. I mean, this specific book isn't a replacement for Dr. Seuss. No one is going to buy this for their kids (or new graduates) who don't already know the Seuss book. And obviously no one is going to consume this instead of Picard season 2. It's definitely not competing with the original. But it's trading on the originals, which is clearly sort of unfair. So the court wants to find against them. But the only tools in the box are these clumsy arguments about "transformation" that would seem to apply equally to this thing if it wasn't commercial. But if it wasn't a commercial product, it wouldn't have seemed unfair! Basically, the law just needs a clearer standard here for what it clearly wants to do.

Animats 6y ago

But absent the original properties, there's no commercial value to this thing, so without Seuss and Roddenberry this book wouldn't exist anyway. Exactly. The value is in the original properties. As an original work with new characters, it would flop.

dmurray 6y ago

> I think it would be a much happier world if we could trade transformative jokes and memes on the internet with impunity, but still agree that there's a bright line between that and trying to trade on someone else's idea. Isn't that the status quo? If you make a "Oh, the places you'll boldly go!" joke on HN, the Geisel estate won't come after you - or if they do, your post will be taken down after almost everyone who was going to read it has read it. If a million people make a million "Oh, the places you'll boldly go!" jokes on social media, maybe they'll come after the 10 most popular. If so, the world can live with the other 990,000. More likely though, they'll come after the 10 guys , the 10 guys selling T-shirts with the meme, who you already agree are fair game.

newacct583 6y ago
It's not, because infringing-but-non-commercial[1] stuff gets taken down all the time by overzealous IP owners. The Baby Yoda thing wasn't entirely a joke, really. Disney in particular is extraordinarily strict, and there are lots of places on the internet you can't post a joke with an image of Baby Yoda. [1] Or at most minimally commercial, like monentized youtube videos.

gnopgnip 6y ago

"The effect of the use upon the potential market." Is one of the four factors for fair use. If this wasn't a product being sold, competing with the original books the fair use determination probably would have been in their favor, and it is unlikely any lawsuit would be filed

newacct583 6y ago
But that standard is too strict. I mean, this specific book isn't a replacement for Dr. Seuss. No one is going to buy this for their kids (or new graduates) who don't already know the Seuss book. And obviously no one is going to consume this instead of Picard season 2. It's definitely not competing with the original. But it's trading on the originals, which is clearly sort of unfair. So the court wants to find against them. But the only tools in the box are these clumsy arguments about "transformation" that would seem to apply equally to this thing if it wasn't commercial. But if it wasn't a commercial product, it wouldn't have seemed unfair! Basically, the law just needs a clearer standard here for what it clearly wants to do.