12 ms·

Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

500 points by leephillips 11mo ago

BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
A great article on how awfully twisted copyright has become away from its intended goal, or at least the publicly stated intended goal. Much reform is needed, seems to apply to everything...
mathgeek 11mo ago
Lots of fun ranting (the good kind) about the ills of the industries built to take advantage of creators, but for those who just want to know more about the state of Roger Rabbit: https://www.imnotbad.com/2025/11/roger-rabbit-copyright-reverts-to.html?m=1 https://www.imnotbad.com/2025/11/roger-rabbit-copyright-reve...
- TitaRusell 11mo ago
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charcircuit 11mo ago
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- consp 11mo ago
  I honestly can't tell if this is meant sarcastic or not. The power offset is so huge you need clauses like this to keep the power at some form of equilibrium.
- monkeywork 11mo ago
  Is that what is happening? My understanding of Termination of Transfer is that it keeps you from being able to make a sequel to your video game using the characters you licensed from me, but that the game you have already created you can continue to sell. What the termination allows me to do as the creator of that character in this analogy is say - charcircuit isn't doing anything with my character for 35 years - I'm going to take back control and maybe do something myself with it or license it to someone else to do something with...
  - charcircuit 11mo ago
    I can't keep selling it if you terminate the distribution right to some texture you made that I used in my game.
    - blendergeek 11mo ago
      I don't think you are correct here. From the FAQ [0] on the website linked by the post: “Derivative works” exception – although a successful termination causes all of the rights to revert, this will not affect exploitation of derivative works created during the lifetime of the agreement, even after that agreement has been terminated. Once the agreement has been terminated, the grantee (see the glossary) may continue after termination to utilize “derivative works prepared under authority of the grant before its termination…[consistent with] the term of the grant” (to quote from the U.S. Copyright Act). This means that if, for example, an author granted a company a 50-year exclusive license to create a movie based on the author’s novel, that company can continue to use and exploit the movie even after the author successfully terminates the exclusive license. The company may not prepare a new movie based on the novel; it may only continue to use the existing movie that it created when the exclusive license was still current. [0]: https://rightsback.org/faq/#So.2C_I_get_all_of_my_rights_back.3F https://rightsback.org/faq/#So.2C_I_get_all_of_my_rights_bac...
      - charcircuit 11mo ago
        Thank you, I was wrong. This does seem more reasonable. But it would be nice if minor changes were still allowed. For example patching security issues of a video game should be allowed.
      - jrmg 11mo ago
        I wish this were further up in the comments. Most people seem to be assuming that you get all the marbles back. Imagine the chaos if someone were able to say ‘whoops, all those books you bought are no longer sellable!’. Imagine if Alan Cox took back all the bits of Linux he wrote and decided they were no longer to be licensed under the GPL! …although maybe it’s only a matter of time before that second thing happens somewhere? “The company may not prepare a new movie based on the novel; it may only continue to use the existing movie that it created when the exclusive license was still current” seems problematic for open source software (or commercial software! What if the original authors of the FAT file system decided to try to start getting royalties from new derivative works?…)
- invl 11mo ago
  this happens with eg licensed music or product tie-ins or whatever, and the game just stops being sold
  - charcircuit 11mo ago
    And I think it would be best if they could license the content in perpetuity so it doesn't come to that. But that's impossible as even if the studio gets a perpetual license, it can still be terminated.
    - alt227 11mo ago
      Thats up to whatever you agree with the owner when you license it.
- wpm 11mo ago
  Oh noooo it isn't fair to Disney! Oh, wait, I actually don't care about that at all.
- water-data-dude 11mo ago
  The power dynamic is very asymmetrical. Disney is ABSOLUTELY free to negotiate with him to continue distributing the movie, running the ride, etc. It has been 35 YEARS and Disney's failed to do anything else with the IP. The original creator wants to make a sequel, and now he's able to. Also: you mentioned a scenario where you might make a video game and wanted to be able to distribute it in perpetuity. Unless you based the video game on some pre-existing creative work that someone else came up with (Roger Rabbit's Raucous Riot or something), you WILL retain the rights. Termination of copyright doesn't apply to works made for hire [0] (i.e., if you pay your employees to create the IP, it doesn't apply). TLDR; fuck the mouse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976#Termination_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976#Terminat...
  - charcircuit 11mo ago
    >Unless you based the video game on some pre-existing creative work that someone else came up with Licensing assets like rocks, foliage, random textures or sounds is extremely common in the game industry, even among big games.
- KPGv2 11mo ago
  > What's the point of buying something if the other person is allowed to steal it back. Well in the case of the very thing we're talking about, the point was apparently to make $330 million in a single year in the 1980s
- kennywinker 11mo ago
  They didn’t buy it. They licensed it, and these are the terms of copyright - which is what they used to license it. If you rent a house, and your lease expires, that’s not the landlord stealing the house back from you.
  - deleted 11mo ago
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- deleted 11mo ago
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- axiolite 11mo ago
  > What's the point of buying something if the other person is allowed to steal it back. If you can't make a profit off of a licensed property after 35 years of exclusive control, you've done something horribly wrong. If you sit on a licensed property and do nothing with it for decades, it should be allowed to revert to someone else, or better yet go into public domain.
  - charcircuit 11mo ago
    Termination of Transfer has nothing to do with how much profit a work is making.
    - olalonde 11mo ago
      Interesting. The article certainly gave that impression. It's strange that the process isn't automatic when the main requirement is simply submitting a notice.
  - protocolture 11mo ago
    3 months is too long. 35 years is crazy.
    - NetMageSCW 11mo ago
      Why would anyone invest millions in something that they can’t make money with after three months?
      - protocolture 11mo ago
        I dont care
  - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
    The issue is, what happens if you have a work where e.g. the music and the script were written by different people? If one of them can terminate the license then you create a situation where nobody can distribute it because nobody has the rights to all of it anymore. Of course, what they should do is have the copyright expire after 35 years. Then if the original creators want to make sequel at that point they're entitled to -- just like everybody else.
- BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
  Not sure if sarcasm. If not: Is 35 years not long enough? Disney knew the terms going in. I think it should go back to the 25-year automatic ownership back to the actual creator.
- Fricken 11mo ago
  Copyright was originally intended to last 14 years, after which the work is transferred to public domain. That was back in the 1700s, when the pace of life moved much faster than it does now. If it weren't for Disney's success at regulatory capture, the copyright would be expired and anybody would be able to produce a fictional work featuring Roger Rabbit, including Disney.
Exoristos 11mo ago
Direct link to the article: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/#im-just-drawn-that-way https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/#im-just-drawn... It's a long-winded article, even for a lawyer, but the payload seems to be a crack at the head of the RIAA, which is suing Midjouney. "In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods."
- jonplackett 11mo ago
  I don’t find it long winded. It just gives background and makes a bunch of valid points. Mainly that creatives are being screwed because every time they get given extra rights they’re bullied into selling them for nothing. So this right that they get the copyright back after 35y is different - because you can’t be forced to sell it for nothing. We need more laws like this to help creative people make the money they deserve. Most creative people make a pitiful amount of money while studios / publishers / labels do better and better. It’s not sustainable.
- troupo 11mo ago
  It's a readable and enjoyable text about a complex issue. You can't really distill anything about copyright without actually talking about history, relevant examples, and how it affects other industries, or other creative works, or...
october8140 11mo ago
This should work for video game developers right? Can they reclaim ownership of the games they created in the 80s/90s that have been abandoned?
- monkeywork 11mo ago
  If the developer was a work for hire and never owned the copyright then no. If the developer licensed the game to a publisher then maybe.
- crooked-v 11mo ago
  Video game copyrights were rarely ever held by a single person, even in the early days of the industry.
- 0110101001 11mo ago
  Not exactly the same, but in Japan (where obviously many of the great games of the 80s and 90s were authored) there's a mechanism to acquire a license from the government to publish abandonware. The government collects a royalty from the new distributor that it holds in case a valid copyright holder comes forward. Little Samson, a late-era NES game that because of its rarity can sell for thousands, was developed by a now-defunct company and is getting a re-release next year using this process. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/10/daunting-limited-run-explains-how-it-resurrected-one-of-the-most-expensive-nes-games-of-all-time https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/10/daunting-limited-...
bsimpson 11mo ago
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- EdwardDiego 11mo ago
  > I admittedly haven't read that rambling post, but... ...you probably should.
joecool1029 11mo ago
Sorta related since Disney held a share in it previously but Dick Tracy exclusive rights are still held by Warren Beatty who produced and starred in the role back in 1990. He had to fight off a challenge from Tribune Media in court decades ago but stipulation was he had to produce new Dick Tracy stuff every few years. It’s lead to a series of increasingly surreal late night specials on TCM where he appears in character and talks about random stuff and the 1990 movie, last time was in 2023: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKncYwtec4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKncYwtec4
- HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
  Wow, TIL. I had assumed that Warren Beatty was suffering from dementia due to his great age and his retirement from cinema. I had no idea he was still making media appearances.
  - mattmaroon 11mo ago
    You assume he has dementia because he’s old and retired?
    - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
      Sad as it is, when stars from classic Hollywood stop being visible but are still known to be alive at a highly advanced age, dementia is often the case. Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, and Jack Nicholson are notable cases, and I just assumed Beatty was similar.
      - mattmaroon 11mo ago
        Do you think perhaps there is a sample bias because old actors who retire and don't have dementia don't get written about?
        HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
        By the time the actors I mentioned were written about as having dementia, many film fans had already assumed they were dealing with dementia precisely because they were no longer being written about or seen in the media much. Such speculation about Jack Nicholson, for example, was rife on film forums well before those paparazzi images appeared.
littlestymaar 11mo ago
> copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power, which means that copyright becomes something we bargain away. This quote sums up a lot of the issues with current copyright laws in a very elegant way.
parineum 11mo ago
> This is a nightmare scenario for a creator: you make a piece of work that turns out to be incredibly popular, but you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them. This nightmare scenario involves selling the rights to your character to a company that has the ability to produce, advertise and cast a movie with talented actors. I'm certain I never would have heard of Roger rabbit had it not been sold.
- eastbound 11mo ago
  > that has the ability to produce, advertise and cast a movie with talented actors. Isn’t that most of the work? You get: A lumpsum for your initial research that ended up as a character that people like, They get: The idea of a character, but then they have to invest billions, build projects that work, tie relationships with cinemas and actors, advertise worldwide and maybe they make billions if they worked properly, but sometimes they make losses. Sounds like they worked for it, and building the initial character is like 0.0…1% of the talent involved. Unionist gets: A nice story about how it’s always multibillion dollars companies that have all the money. Maybe ideas are free and implementation is everything?
  - elondaits 11mo ago
    For over one decade now, maybe two, seemingly every big (or mid?) budget movie Hollywood has produced is based on existing IP: a comic book, novel, previous movie, TV show, or even non fiction article. I’ve been surprised many times by movies which seem original but are actually based on a French comic, or some other semi-obscure (internationally) source. That tells me that ideas aren’t free. There’s a value to a fully cooked, ready to wear, tried and tested ideas. As a second point, many good Hollywood pitches remain in development hell, unable to get a satisfying script, or a “second act that works”.
    - expedition32 11mo ago
      Ofcourse ideas are not free. Are we arguing Disney did not write a check? Plenty of people earn lots of money licensing their art to Hollywood. Some people just have more business acumen than others. And yes if you are selling art for money you are a businessman. Get an agent if you cannot hack it for crying out loud.
nebula8804 11mo ago
This is so freakin awesome! Roger Rabbit was actually played in 35mm just last Thursday in Central NJ. What a treat it would have been to known that the original author got his characters back. I was lamenting on all the time that had passed since release. This cheered me right up! Will we see a whole Roger Rabbit universe now?
- bitwize 11mo ago
  He's got a book out with a Jessica Rabbit origin story, that he's trying to shop a film adaptation of. The RRCU may be go.
mayoff 11mo ago
I don’t know if Cory Doctorow has read the “fantastic 1981 novel”, but I have (decades ago) and as I recall the plot of the book and the plot of the movie are very different from each other. The author of the book didn’t write the screenplay and I doubt he had much (if anything) to do the character designs in the movie. So even if he has the rights to his novel back, it’s not at all clear to me that he could just make (or sell a license to make) a straight, recognizable sequel to Disney’s movie without getting back into bed with Disney, and clearly Disney isn’t interested or they’d have done something by now.
- deleted 11mo ago
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- bryanrasmussen 11mo ago
  >clearly Disney isn’t interested often big media companies aren't interested in exploiting specific properties if there is ongoing litigation regarding them.
  - philistine 11mo ago
    In this case it’s not that there is litigation. It’s that Steven Spielberg must approve any and all content featuring Roger Rabbit. The delinquent partner who sits on their hands and does nothing is Spielberg.
- pavlov 11mo ago
  Disney definitely owns the character designs, so Roger and Jessica Rabbit will have to look different if a new movie is made using the IP owned by the book's author.
  - deleted 11mo ago
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- jajuuka 11mo ago
  Yeah the Roger Rabbit is a miracle where multiple major studios came together and allowed their IP to be in the same work. Disney, Warner Bros, Fleischer Studios, Harvey Comics, King Features Syndicate, Felix the Cat Productions, Turner Entertainment, and Universal Pictures/Walter Lantz Productions all agreed to share their characters. One of Steven Spielbergs great accomplishments was negotiating this. With how protective these studios are about their IP anymore I doubt we'd see anything close to the Roger Rabbit movie sadly. Not to mention some of the actors have passed like Paul Reuben who really sold the cartoon aspect of Roger Rabbit.
devsda 11mo ago
> Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audio books. > when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business. Beautifully explained the complex situation and its kind of scary how it applies to tech as well in some areas. The second point is also true w.r.t big tech & privacy regulations.
- lotsofpulp 11mo ago
  How can Congress make it any easier to access an audience? The Internet made it so there is zero friction between a media consumer and a media creator. Having to compete with a billion other content creators (including hits from the past) is inherently hard. The most valuable service the big media sellers provide these days is curation. Reducing copyright length would be the best thing to reduce the big companies’ power though. That way, they can’t sway buyers to their silos using content from the past, and therefore have to invest in the future.
  - brainwad 11mo ago
    Shortening copyright terms would reduce the power of any given media company; but I think it might disadvantage creators of new works overall. Right now each company has a smaller back-catalogue than they would under a shorter term regime, and so the relative value to them of new content is higher. Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content), which would then reduce the number of buyers for new content, increasing the monopsony effects.
    - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
      I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content. Currently, people give a ton of money to Comcast/Disney for stuff made decades ago, which in turn gives Comcast/Disney more power, since people are far likelier to stay within those silos. If friends/seinfeld/whatever could be accessible via multiple sources, then other groups of content creators could emerge, offering $15 to $25 per month of new stuff, rather than compete for a smaller portion of the budget since the old content takes up so much. The creators of new work don’t earn much from 130 year copyrights anyway, to fund any decent production, they will need outside investors such as Disney or Apple or whoever to make the gamble. In exchange, Disney and Apple are going to want the ability to sell it for 130 years, but few if any new content creators is able to negotiate gross royalties, those days are long gone. >Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content) This is the opposite of what would happen. If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.
NoboruWataya 11mo ago
I loved WFRR as a kid, and of all the movies I loved as a kid, it has definitely held up the best. I re-watched it recently and it is still great. Hilarious, thoughtful and just the right amount of dark. One of the reasons I still love it is that it hasn't fallen prey to the usual Hollywood practice of taking something you love and shovelling it down your throat until you're sick of it. It saddens me when you see a really good movie with a bunch of bad sequels, or TV series that were once great but ran for 10 seasons too long.
- lkramer 11mo ago
  The 8 most terrifying words in the English language are "Let us turn this movie into a franchise"
- vintermann 11mo ago
  Yeah. One thing is what's good for the author, one thing is what's good for the publisher. But what's good for us as viewers/end users (and every "creative" ought to remember that's what they are 99.9% of the time!) is often a third thing entirely.
k__ 11mo ago
35 years seem quite excessive. Taking half your life to get your stuff back?
- brainwad 11mo ago
  I mean, it's pretty generous. In most other domains, if you sell something of yours, it's gone and you have no right to claw it back later.
- vessenes 11mo ago
  it's a double edged sword -- media companies are generally franchise/lifetime hits oriented businesses - they pay (and generally lose, per investment, btw) for a shot at a hit. On the one hand, imagine they could only negotiate rights to monetize that hit for, say, one year, and then this termination right kicked in. What do you think would be the top offer they could make an author? The fraction of creatives that are great creatives and also great marketers/producers/runners of media companies is small, really small. So, creatives have an incentive to have a system where some amount of time is contractable. And media licensors rely on this hits-based model to fund all their development and betting on things that don't work out. And also to fund their jets and cool Bel-Air homes.
  - k__ 11mo ago
    Sure, but what about 10 or 15 years?
    - vessenes 11mo ago
      very reasonable ideas! Of course creators could license for this term right now, but generally they do not have the bargaining power when they need it.
  - zelphirkalt 11mo ago
    They could simply set up contracts that give some percentage to the author over time. But they don't want to sign away percentages, I guess.
olalonde 11mo ago
> Remember, Termination is one of the only copyright policies that solely benefits creative workers. To play devil's advocate, this provision probably lowers how much media companies are willing to pay when acquiring copyrights.
- SiempreViernes 11mo ago
  Why? A publishers goal is always to pay nothing at all for the rights, at best this is simply another excuse.
  - deleted 11mo ago
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  - olalonde 11mo ago
    For the same reason a 35-year lease on a house is cheaper than buying it outright. If you know you won't own it forever, you won't pay as much.
    - citizenkeen 11mo ago
      That’s not the right comparison. Is a 35 year lease that much cheaper than a 70 year lease? Copyright isn’t forever.
- vintermann 11mo ago
  Probably not, because of the monopoly power mentioned - and also because you can't count on a copyright to be worth anything after 35 years.
- vessenes 11mo ago
  It doesn't, in practice. Consider the NPV of year 36 with, say, a 10% discount rate. It's low. Also, having watched directly some fairly famous friends deal with property coming up on the 35 year mark, media companies are adept at tying in other deals, finally getting projects financed, cutting a deal for a different project with some agreements made about the original property.. You can imagine.
latexr 11mo ago
> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office. You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law. > when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business. That’s the sign of a deeply broken system. It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
- nandomrumber 11mo ago
  How is business supposed to be conducted under those conditions?
  - latexr 11mo ago
    Fairly, respectfully, and without exploitation? Most business conducted in the world does not require someone to reject their lawful rights. For consumers in the EU, for example, the law even offers explicit protections by stating specifically that contract terms which are unfair have no legal binding. https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treatment/unfair-contract-terms/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...
    - philipallstar 11mo ago
      [flagged]
      - latexr 11mo ago
        > "Exploitation" isn't an objective term. It means “the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work”. If you’re having someone reject their rights in a contract because that benefits you, that’s a form of exploitation. You’re making someone worse explicitly so you benefit. > It often just means "I don't like what I signed up for freely". From my first post: > If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them. If you’re swindled, you’re not given them away freely.
strogonoff 11mo ago
> In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods. He wants there to be a new copyright that allows creators to decide whether their work can be used to train AI models, and then he wants that right transferred to media companies who will sell it to AI companies in a bid to stop paying artists <…> There’s a timeline where big media publishers at least accidentally defend the rights of small-time IP holders (individual creators)—they’d go to court with the likes of OpenAI and Midjourney and put an end to training commercial ML solutions on unlicensed material. Specifically, if they would owe a large media company for training on their original works, presumably they just as well owe an average Jane. (Granted, assuming that Jane has not signed away her rights to a large media company she works with, but that would not apply to a massive number of small-time creators.)
isodev 11mo ago
> The answer lies in the structure of creative labor markets, which are brutally concentrated. Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks. > The media industry isn't just a monopoly, in other words – it's also a monopsony, which is to say, a collection of powerful buyers. The middlemen who control access to our audiences have all the power I'm happy to see apps included here, I feel sometimes folks forget these are also a form of creative works and having the two gatekeepers constantly filter and influece what can and can't be released is absolute nightmare for both developers and consumers (who don't even know the things they could've had but were denied by big A or big G).
Gormanu 11mo ago
With Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it’s not really clear whether the author originally came up with such a great idea and script, or if Disney just brought it to life so brilliantly on screen. I’m leaning toward the second. It’s cool that he got the rights back, but without Disney this idea just isn’t going to "sing" again.
- havblue 11mo ago
  It would be difficult. Aside from the characters and the cast, one of the biggest heroes of the movie was the script. It was dense with irony, jokes about the noir genre, straight man/funny man jokes and physical humor. You don't need the original cast to make a new Chinatown comedy with toons. It's a matter of assembling a story that's interesting and funny, with associated recognizable cartoon characters.
deleted 11mo ago
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jgalt212 11mo ago
> Copyright is a very weak tool for protecting creators' interests, because copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power, This is drivel written by someone who doesn't understand the mechanism of supply and demand. If you don't like the price, don't sell. If you don't like the terms, propose alternative ones. The real risk to creators is artificially suppressed demand through industry consolidation, not nuances to copyright law.
gorgoiler 11mo ago
Hot damn I’m a sucker for a good analogy… ”Giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. You're just enriching the bullies.” The big “5,4,3,2,1” is also a powerful piece of rhetoric. Who is this Doctorow person? He has my attention! :)
- _whiteCaps_ 11mo ago
  You're today's lucky 10,000! https://craphound.com/category/redteamblues/ https://craphound.com/category/redteamblues/
neves 11mo ago
The phrase below is worth the read: > giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money you can give that kid that will buy them lunch – you're just enriching the bullies
- skybrian 11mo ago
  Misleading phrases like this are why I dislike Doctorow. Just before that he tries to sell us on the idea that there are no alternatives when actually there are. For example, you don’t have to publish a book through the Big Five. There are many large and small independent publishers, and some authors have had good luck with self-publishing. I do think copyright law needs reform, but don’t trust Doctorow to explain it properly.
  - badlibrarian 11mo ago
    His book "Why None Of My Books Are Available On Audible: And why Amazon owes me $3,218.55" captures the soul, heart, nuance (and grammar) that he repeatedly brings to these issues. He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection. Resulting in twice compressed 128k MP3s and innumerable blog posts.
    - chimeracoder 11mo ago
      > He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection What are you referring to here?
      - badlibrarian 11mo ago
        He set up two computers and manually played low-res DRM-protected MP3 files out of one and into the other for weeks, documenting the process on BoingBoing. He touted this not only as freedom but "preservation."
        11mo ago
kwanbix 11mo ago
35 years seems to be a lot of time. Make it 15 maybe. Which is still a lot of time with your creation collecting dust. Or am I missing something?
- layer8 11mo ago
  You’re missing who had the better lobbyists. ;)
CuriouslyC 11mo ago
It amazes me the number of people who are raging at how AI is hurting creators, and will make long videos and posts about this subject, without touching on the fact that the __ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY__ is the single largest abuser of creators, and it's far worse than AI is or probably will ever be. That's how you can tell that the RIAA/MPAA propaganda campaign against AI to protect its racket is working.
- kmeisthax 11mo ago
  The RIAA isn't opposed to AI as much as they're saying "join me, and together we can destroy indie music forever". The RIAA is a cartel monopsony that demands songwriters and singers negotiate away all equity in their work as a condition of market entry. But there are alternative markets for music, and successful musicians that have navigated them. This is why, for example, mainstream music has been so strangely stagnant while the independent space is a lot more innovative. The labels don't pay good money for innovation; hell, they don't even want it. They want a sure hit saleable product every time. As nerds, we're predisposed to look at generative AI through the framing of the Napster Wars. Except file sharing wasn't doing what generative AI does. P2P gave you a more or less faithful, if lossy, reproduction of a specific work. It might have missing or wrong metadata, but it was still clearly identifiable as that work. A generative AI system is instead producing legally distinct work - which is why all the AI training lawsuits are failing - using the creative input of the data the company scraped to train on. It infringes on the moral grounding of copyright but not the copyright itself. The threat that generative AI systems pose to artists is twofold: spam and standardization. Generative AI makes it far easier to churn out samey-looking outputs, while losing utility as you try to get more interesting or innovative styles out of it. It's a slop machine. And, notably, these are exactly the sort of things the RIAA wants out of mainstream music: - AI music is safe and approachable. If you ask it for jazz, you're getting a stereotype of the jazz genre. - AI music can be mass-produced at scale without needing to advance an artist royalties. That means you can spam it on Spotify and destroy the discoverability of independent musicians. - More importantly, generative AI turns the act of music production into ownable equity. The artist is cut out of the picture completely, there is not even the need to find a naive artist that will sign their life away in a 360 deal for peanuts. The ideal world that the RIAA wants to live in is one where each label sues and then buys out an AI music company, and then has that company train a fully-owned "house model" on their back catalog only. No other entities will be allowed to train models, either through aggressive copyright litigation or through some new "AI safety law" that conveniently exempts them. They'll own the streaming sites and digital marketplaces, and any independent musician making real music will get crushed under the weight of AI slop.
dec0dedab0de 11mo ago
So does this mean that the developers of abandonware can get legal rights to their old work?
- layer8 11mo ago
  Only if they didn’t work for hire.
randallsquared 11mo ago
> Termination is a powerful copyright policy, and unlike most copyright, it solely benefits creative workers and not our bosses. That's an interesting framing. I know why Doctorow wants to import the boss/worker concept here, but it just doesn't apply. Disney wasn't Wolf's boss in any sense that is usually understood, and it just obscures the picture with a bunch of class-based chaff.
- shadowgovt 11mo ago
  They can tell him he can't use the IP he created. That may not be precisely a "boss" but it's a powerful constraint on his freedom.
- peepee1982 11mo ago
  I read it more like "workers" being the ones who actually produce the good stuff, and "the boss" as being the entity to stick it to (as explained in the classic film "School of Rock").
- dragonwriter 11mo ago
  You can make a case that the relation with creators and media/publishing is,in formal structure, more petit bourgeois/haut bourgeois than proletarian/bourgeois, but even if strictly the class dynamic is different, the essential dynamic is broadly similar between those who do the work and those who purchase it and functionally, if not strictly necessarily, provide access to the broader market.
glroyal 11mo ago
Let me get this straight: the author is angry that Disney didn't release a series of shitty Roger Rabbit sequels, prequels, and shared cinematic universe pictures with Pixar and Marvel, so he's re-taking his copyright in order to sell it to another studio who will exploit and debase his creative works more rapaciously?
scotty79 11mo ago
> .... by waiting 35 years ... Should be 3.5
Scott-David 11mo ago
[dead]
scotty79 11mo ago
It's really nice to read about the side of things that sheepish defenders of copyright seem to always be blissfully not aware of.
thayne 11mo ago
> The original US copyright lasted for 14 years, and could be renewed for another 14 years, but only by the creator (not by the publisher). I wish we would go back to that.
- aidenn0 11mo ago
  Yes, I always preferred the short term with renewals; I didn't realize that it used to be the creator not the publisher. I wonder how that would interact with the current "work fore hire" laws that exist.
  - thayne 11mo ago
    > I wonder how that would interact with the current "work fore hire" laws that exist. The simplest interaction would be "it's practically impossible to renew copyright on something created by a large number of employees", but IMO, that's not a bad thing.
crazygringo 11mo ago
> Under Termination, a media company can force you to sign away your rights in perpetuity, but you can still claim those rights back after 35 years. Termination isn't just something to bargain away, it's a new power to bargain with. It's sentences like these that make it hard for me to take Doctorow seriously. No media company is "forcing" anyone to do anything. They're paying creatives for their work. Every creative is free to say no. Musicians are free to shop their music to different record labels for the best deal. Authors pitch their books to different publishers to see which one offers the best deal. And there's always self-publishing as well. We can have a reasonable conversation about copyright without saying silly untrue things like media companies are "forcing" creators to take deals.
CivBase 11mo ago
Does this takeback include the likeness of Roger and Jessica Rabbit from Disney's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or just the content from the original 1981 novel? From what I can tell, the familiar cartoon movie designs are unique to the Disney movie and affiliated Disney shorts.
jmpman 11mo ago
Disney has the Roger Rabbit themed rides at Disneyland. How is that not considered using the IP?
rickdeckard 11mo ago
Really interesting read, but I wonder if the character design everyone associates with the story isn't still owned by Disney even after termination. As I understand the original work is a written novel (and not a graphic novel), and I assume Disney designed the characters. Otherwise ("creative works" based on the original material also transfer to the author of the original material) would mean that the author suddenly owns the MOVIE as well...
tptacek 11mo ago
There's something very weird in this editorial. Doctorow implies that he's unhappy that copyright renewability became assignable in 1909†. Assignability to publishers is, by implication, bad for creators. How exactly could that be the case? Assignment isn't automatic. Creators have to agree to assign to publishers. It's not clear to me how this doesn't make them strictly better off. Assignment of renewability, in Doctorow's framing, is valuable. How are creators made better off for not being able to sell it? †(he refers to the framer's original term of 14 years + renewability for 14 years, leaving out that the term was extended to base 28 + 14 year renewal in 1831 --- he also leaves out that assignability predates the modern media industry by decades).
wilg 11mo ago
> But at the same time, the amount of money being earned by creative workers has only fallen over this period [50 years, so since 1975], both in real terms (how much money an average creative worker brings home) and as a share of the total (what percentage of the revenues from a creator's work the creator gets to keep). Is there evidence this is true? It doesn't sound very true.
WalterBright 11mo ago
Intellectual property rights should go away after 10 years.
canucker2016 11mo ago
Eddie Murphy talked about the three movies that he regretted turning down: - Ghostbusters (he was filming Beverly Hills Cop at the same time) - Rush Hour - Who Framed Roger Rabbit
tomcam 11mo ago
So now Roger Rabbit's creator has the rights back, which is awesome. There will never again be a movie version with as outrageous a cast as the original movie. Somehow they managed to get rights to the biggest characters from competing IP owners. It was a stunning, very much unheralded achievement. These days it would be roughly akin to DC getting to use Darth Vader, Captain Kirk, Spock, Iron Man, and the Hulk in one of their movies.

500 points by leephillips 11mo ago

A great article on how awfully twisted copyright has become away from its intended goal, or at least the publicly stated intended goal. Much reform is needed, seems to apply to everything...

mathgeek 11mo ago

Lots of fun ranting (the good kind) about the ills of the industries built to take advantage of creators, but for those who just want to know more about the state of Roger Rabbit: https://www.imnotbad.com/2025/11/roger-rabbit-copyright-reverts-to.html?m=1 https://www.imnotbad.com/2025/11/roger-rabbit-copyright-reve...

TitaRusell 11mo ago
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charcircuit 11mo ago

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consp 11mo ago
I honestly can't tell if this is meant sarcastic or not. The power offset is so huge you need clauses like this to keep the power at some form of equilibrium.
monkeywork 11mo ago
Is that what is happening? My understanding of Termination of Transfer is that it keeps you from being able to make a sequel to your video game using the characters you licensed from me, but that the game you have already created you can continue to sell. What the termination allows me to do as the creator of that character in this analogy is say - charcircuit isn't doing anything with my character for 35 years - I'm going to take back control and maybe do something myself with it or license it to someone else to do something with...
- charcircuit 11mo ago
  I can't keep selling it if you terminate the distribution right to some texture you made that I used in my game.
  - blendergeek 11mo ago
    I don't think you are correct here. From the FAQ [0] on the website linked by the post: “Derivative works” exception – although a successful termination causes all of the rights to revert, this will not affect exploitation of derivative works created during the lifetime of the agreement, even after that agreement has been terminated. Once the agreement has been terminated, the grantee (see the glossary) may continue after termination to utilize “derivative works prepared under authority of the grant before its termination…[consistent with] the term of the grant” (to quote from the U.S. Copyright Act). This means that if, for example, an author granted a company a 50-year exclusive license to create a movie based on the author’s novel, that company can continue to use and exploit the movie even after the author successfully terminates the exclusive license. The company may not prepare a new movie based on the novel; it may only continue to use the existing movie that it created when the exclusive license was still current. [0]: https://rightsback.org/faq/#So.2C_I_get_all_of_my_rights_back.3F https://rightsback.org/faq/#So.2C_I_get_all_of_my_rights_bac...
    - charcircuit 11mo ago
      Thank you, I was wrong. This does seem more reasonable. But it would be nice if minor changes were still allowed. For example patching security issues of a video game should be allowed.
    - jrmg 11mo ago
      I wish this were further up in the comments. Most people seem to be assuming that you get all the marbles back. Imagine the chaos if someone were able to say ‘whoops, all those books you bought are no longer sellable!’. Imagine if Alan Cox took back all the bits of Linux he wrote and decided they were no longer to be licensed under the GPL! …although maybe it’s only a matter of time before that second thing happens somewhere? “The company may not prepare a new movie based on the novel; it may only continue to use the existing movie that it created when the exclusive license was still current” seems problematic for open source software (or commercial software! What if the original authors of the FAT file system decided to try to start getting royalties from new derivative works?…)
invl 11mo ago
this happens with eg licensed music or product tie-ins or whatever, and the game just stops being sold
- charcircuit 11mo ago
  And I think it would be best if they could license the content in perpetuity so it doesn't come to that. But that's impossible as even if the studio gets a perpetual license, it can still be terminated.
  - alt227 11mo ago
    Thats up to whatever you agree with the owner when you license it.
wpm 11mo ago
Oh noooo it isn't fair to Disney! Oh, wait, I actually don't care about that at all.
water-data-dude 11mo ago
The power dynamic is very asymmetrical. Disney is ABSOLUTELY free to negotiate with him to continue distributing the movie, running the ride, etc. It has been 35 YEARS and Disney's failed to do anything else with the IP. The original creator wants to make a sequel, and now he's able to. Also: you mentioned a scenario where you might make a video game and wanted to be able to distribute it in perpetuity. Unless you based the video game on some pre-existing creative work that someone else came up with (Roger Rabbit's Raucous Riot or something), you WILL retain the rights. Termination of copyright doesn't apply to works made for hire [0] (i.e., if you pay your employees to create the IP, it doesn't apply). TLDR; fuck the mouse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976#Termination_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976#Terminat...
- charcircuit 11mo ago
  >Unless you based the video game on some pre-existing creative work that someone else came up with Licensing assets like rocks, foliage, random textures or sounds is extremely common in the game industry, even among big games.
KPGv2 11mo ago
> What's the point of buying something if the other person is allowed to steal it back. Well in the case of the very thing we're talking about, the point was apparently to make $330 million in a single year in the 1980s
kennywinker 11mo ago
They didn’t buy it. They licensed it, and these are the terms of copyright - which is what they used to license it. If you rent a house, and your lease expires, that’s not the landlord stealing the house back from you.
- deleted 11mo ago
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deleted 11mo ago
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axiolite 11mo ago
> What's the point of buying something if the other person is allowed to steal it back. If you can't make a profit off of a licensed property after 35 years of exclusive control, you've done something horribly wrong. If you sit on a licensed property and do nothing with it for decades, it should be allowed to revert to someone else, or better yet go into public domain.
- charcircuit 11mo ago
  Termination of Transfer has nothing to do with how much profit a work is making.
  - olalonde 11mo ago
    Interesting. The article certainly gave that impression. It's strange that the process isn't automatic when the main requirement is simply submitting a notice.
- protocolture 11mo ago
  3 months is too long. 35 years is crazy.
  - NetMageSCW 11mo ago
    Why would anyone invest millions in something that they can’t make money with after three months?
    - protocolture 11mo ago
      I dont care
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  The issue is, what happens if you have a work where e.g. the music and the script were written by different people? If one of them can terminate the license then you create a situation where nobody can distribute it because nobody has the rights to all of it anymore. Of course, what they should do is have the copyright expire after 35 years. Then if the original creators want to make sequel at that point they're entitled to -- just like everybody else.
BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
Not sure if sarcasm. If not: Is 35 years not long enough? Disney knew the terms going in. I think it should go back to the 25-year automatic ownership back to the actual creator.
Fricken 11mo ago
Copyright was originally intended to last 14 years, after which the work is transferred to public domain. That was back in the 1700s, when the pace of life moved much faster than it does now. If it weren't for Disney's success at regulatory capture, the copyright would be expired and anybody would be able to produce a fictional work featuring Roger Rabbit, including Disney.

Exoristos 11mo ago

Direct link to the article: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/#im-just-drawn-that-way https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/#im-just-drawn... It's a long-winded article, even for a lawyer, but the payload seems to be a crack at the head of the RIAA, which is suing Midjouney. "In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods."

jonplackett 11mo ago
I don’t find it long winded. It just gives background and makes a bunch of valid points. Mainly that creatives are being screwed because every time they get given extra rights they’re bullied into selling them for nothing. So this right that they get the copyright back after 35y is different - because you can’t be forced to sell it for nothing. We need more laws like this to help creative people make the money they deserve. Most creative people make a pitiful amount of money while studios / publishers / labels do better and better. It’s not sustainable.
troupo 11mo ago
It's a readable and enjoyable text about a complex issue. You can't really distill anything about copyright without actually talking about history, relevant examples, and how it affects other industries, or other creative works, or...

october8140 11mo ago

This should work for video game developers right? Can they reclaim ownership of the games they created in the 80s/90s that have been abandoned?

monkeywork 11mo ago
If the developer was a work for hire and never owned the copyright then no. If the developer licensed the game to a publisher then maybe.
crooked-v 11mo ago
Video game copyrights were rarely ever held by a single person, even in the early days of the industry.
0110101001 11mo ago
Not exactly the same, but in Japan (where obviously many of the great games of the 80s and 90s were authored) there's a mechanism to acquire a license from the government to publish abandonware. The government collects a royalty from the new distributor that it holds in case a valid copyright holder comes forward. Little Samson, a late-era NES game that because of its rarity can sell for thousands, was developed by a now-defunct company and is getting a re-release next year using this process. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/10/daunting-limited-run-explains-how-it-resurrected-one-of-the-most-expensive-nes-games-of-all-time https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/10/daunting-limited-...

bsimpson 11mo ago

[flagged]

EdwardDiego 11mo ago
> I admittedly haven't read that rambling post, but... ...you probably should.

joecool1029 11mo ago

Sorta related since Disney held a share in it previously but Dick Tracy exclusive rights are still held by Warren Beatty who produced and starred in the role back in 1990. He had to fight off a challenge from Tribune Media in court decades ago but stipulation was he had to produce new Dick Tracy stuff every few years. It’s lead to a series of increasingly surreal late night specials on TCM where he appears in character and talks about random stuff and the 1990 movie, last time was in 2023: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKncYwtec4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKncYwtec4

HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
Wow, TIL. I had assumed that Warren Beatty was suffering from dementia due to his great age and his retirement from cinema. I had no idea he was still making media appearances.
- mattmaroon 11mo ago
  You assume he has dementia because he’s old and retired?
  - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
    Sad as it is, when stars from classic Hollywood stop being visible but are still known to be alive at a highly advanced age, dementia is often the case. Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, and Jack Nicholson are notable cases, and I just assumed Beatty was similar.
    - mattmaroon 11mo ago
      Do you think perhaps there is a sample bias because old actors who retire and don't have dementia don't get written about?
      - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
        By the time the actors I mentioned were written about as having dementia, many film fans had already assumed they were dealing with dementia precisely because they were no longer being written about or seen in the media much. Such speculation about Jack Nicholson, for example, was rife on film forums well before those paparazzi images appeared.

littlestymaar 11mo ago

> copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power, which means that copyright becomes something we bargain away. This quote sums up a lot of the issues with current copyright laws in a very elegant way.

parineum 11mo ago

> This is a nightmare scenario for a creator: you make a piece of work that turns out to be incredibly popular, but you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them. This nightmare scenario involves selling the rights to your character to a company that has the ability to produce, advertise and cast a movie with talented actors. I'm certain I never would have heard of Roger rabbit had it not been sold.

eastbound 11mo ago
> that has the ability to produce, advertise and cast a movie with talented actors. Isn’t that most of the work? You get: A lumpsum for your initial research that ended up as a character that people like, They get: The idea of a character, but then they have to invest billions, build projects that work, tie relationships with cinemas and actors, advertise worldwide and maybe they make billions if they worked properly, but sometimes they make losses. Sounds like they worked for it, and building the initial character is like 0.0…1% of the talent involved. Unionist gets: A nice story about how it’s always multibillion dollars companies that have all the money. Maybe ideas are free and implementation is everything?
- elondaits 11mo ago
  For over one decade now, maybe two, seemingly every big (or mid?) budget movie Hollywood has produced is based on existing IP: a comic book, novel, previous movie, TV show, or even non fiction article. I’ve been surprised many times by movies which seem original but are actually based on a French comic, or some other semi-obscure (internationally) source. That tells me that ideas aren’t free. There’s a value to a fully cooked, ready to wear, tried and tested ideas. As a second point, many good Hollywood pitches remain in development hell, unable to get a satisfying script, or a “second act that works”.
  - expedition32 11mo ago
    Ofcourse ideas are not free. Are we arguing Disney did not write a check? Plenty of people earn lots of money licensing their art to Hollywood. Some people just have more business acumen than others. And yes if you are selling art for money you are a businessman. Get an agent if you cannot hack it for crying out loud.

nebula8804 11mo ago

This is so freakin awesome! Roger Rabbit was actually played in 35mm just last Thursday in Central NJ. What a treat it would have been to known that the original author got his characters back. I was lamenting on all the time that had passed since release. This cheered me right up! Will we see a whole Roger Rabbit universe now?

bitwize 11mo ago
He's got a book out with a Jessica Rabbit origin story, that he's trying to shop a film adaptation of. The RRCU may be go.

mayoff 11mo ago

I don’t know if Cory Doctorow has read the “fantastic 1981 novel”, but I have (decades ago) and as I recall the plot of the book and the plot of the movie are very different from each other. The author of the book didn’t write the screenplay and I doubt he had much (if anything) to do the character designs in the movie. So even if he has the rights to his novel back, it’s not at all clear to me that he could just make (or sell a license to make) a straight, recognizable sequel to Disney’s movie without getting back into bed with Disney, and clearly Disney isn’t interested or they’d have done something by now.

deleted 11mo ago
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bryanrasmussen 11mo ago
>clearly Disney isn’t interested often big media companies aren't interested in exploiting specific properties if there is ongoing litigation regarding them.
- philistine 11mo ago
  In this case it’s not that there is litigation. It’s that Steven Spielberg must approve any and all content featuring Roger Rabbit. The delinquent partner who sits on their hands and does nothing is Spielberg.
pavlov 11mo ago
Disney definitely owns the character designs, so Roger and Jessica Rabbit will have to look different if a new movie is made using the IP owned by the book's author.
- deleted 11mo ago
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jajuuka 11mo ago
Yeah the Roger Rabbit is a miracle where multiple major studios came together and allowed their IP to be in the same work. Disney, Warner Bros, Fleischer Studios, Harvey Comics, King Features Syndicate, Felix the Cat Productions, Turner Entertainment, and Universal Pictures/Walter Lantz Productions all agreed to share their characters. One of Steven Spielbergs great accomplishments was negotiating this. With how protective these studios are about their IP anymore I doubt we'd see anything close to the Roger Rabbit movie sadly. Not to mention some of the actors have passed like Paul Reuben who really sold the cartoon aspect of Roger Rabbit.

devsda 11mo ago

> Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audio books. > when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business. Beautifully explained the complex situation and its kind of scary how it applies to tech as well in some areas. The second point is also true w.r.t big tech & privacy regulations.

lotsofpulp 11mo ago
How can Congress make it any easier to access an audience? The Internet made it so there is zero friction between a media consumer and a media creator. Having to compete with a billion other content creators (including hits from the past) is inherently hard. The most valuable service the big media sellers provide these days is curation. Reducing copyright length would be the best thing to reduce the big companies’ power though. That way, they can’t sway buyers to their silos using content from the past, and therefore have to invest in the future.
- brainwad 11mo ago
  Shortening copyright terms would reduce the power of any given media company; but I think it might disadvantage creators of new works overall. Right now each company has a smaller back-catalogue than they would under a shorter term regime, and so the relative value to them of new content is higher. Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content), which would then reduce the number of buyers for new content, increasing the monopsony effects.
  - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
    I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content. Currently, people give a ton of money to Comcast/Disney for stuff made decades ago, which in turn gives Comcast/Disney more power, since people are far likelier to stay within those silos. If friends/seinfeld/whatever could be accessible via multiple sources, then other groups of content creators could emerge, offering $15 to $25 per month of new stuff, rather than compete for a smaller portion of the budget since the old content takes up so much. The creators of new work don’t earn much from 130 year copyrights anyway, to fund any decent production, they will need outside investors such as Disney or Apple or whoever to make the gamble. In exchange, Disney and Apple are going to want the ability to sell it for 130 years, but few if any new content creators is able to negotiate gross royalties, those days are long gone. >Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content) This is the opposite of what would happen. If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.

NoboruWataya 11mo ago

I loved WFRR as a kid, and of all the movies I loved as a kid, it has definitely held up the best. I re-watched it recently and it is still great. Hilarious, thoughtful and just the right amount of dark. One of the reasons I still love it is that it hasn't fallen prey to the usual Hollywood practice of taking something you love and shovelling it down your throat until you're sick of it. It saddens me when you see a really good movie with a bunch of bad sequels, or TV series that were once great but ran for 10 seasons too long.

lkramer 11mo ago
The 8 most terrifying words in the English language are "Let us turn this movie into a franchise"
vintermann 11mo ago
Yeah. One thing is what's good for the author, one thing is what's good for the publisher. But what's good for us as viewers/end users (and every "creative" ought to remember that's what they are 99.9% of the time!) is often a third thing entirely.

k__ 11mo ago

35 years seem quite excessive. Taking half your life to get your stuff back?

brainwad 11mo ago
I mean, it's pretty generous. In most other domains, if you sell something of yours, it's gone and you have no right to claw it back later.
vessenes 11mo ago
it's a double edged sword -- media companies are generally franchise/lifetime hits oriented businesses - they pay (and generally lose, per investment, btw) for a shot at a hit. On the one hand, imagine they could only negotiate rights to monetize that hit for, say, one year, and then this termination right kicked in. What do you think would be the top offer they could make an author? The fraction of creatives that are great creatives and also great marketers/producers/runners of media companies is small, really small. So, creatives have an incentive to have a system where some amount of time is contractable. And media licensors rely on this hits-based model to fund all their development and betting on things that don't work out. And also to fund their jets and cool Bel-Air homes.
- k__ 11mo ago
  Sure, but what about 10 or 15 years?
  - vessenes 11mo ago
    very reasonable ideas! Of course creators could license for this term right now, but generally they do not have the bargaining power when they need it.
- zelphirkalt 11mo ago
  They could simply set up contracts that give some percentage to the author over time. But they don't want to sign away percentages, I guess.

olalonde 11mo ago

> Remember, Termination is one of the only copyright policies that solely benefits creative workers. To play devil's advocate, this provision probably lowers how much media companies are willing to pay when acquiring copyrights.

SiempreViernes 11mo ago
Why? A publishers goal is always to pay nothing at all for the rights, at best this is simply another excuse.
- deleted 11mo ago
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- olalonde 11mo ago
  For the same reason a 35-year lease on a house is cheaper than buying it outright. If you know you won't own it forever, you won't pay as much.
  - citizenkeen 11mo ago
    That’s not the right comparison. Is a 35 year lease that much cheaper than a 70 year lease? Copyright isn’t forever.
vintermann 11mo ago
Probably not, because of the monopoly power mentioned - and also because you can't count on a copyright to be worth anything after 35 years.
vessenes 11mo ago
It doesn't, in practice. Consider the NPV of year 36 with, say, a 10% discount rate. It's low. Also, having watched directly some fairly famous friends deal with property coming up on the 35 year mark, media companies are adept at tying in other deals, finally getting projects financed, cutting a deal for a different project with some agreements made about the original property.. You can imagine.

latexr 11mo ago

> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office. You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law. > when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business. That’s the sign of a deeply broken system. It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.

nandomrumber 11mo ago
How is business supposed to be conducted under those conditions?
- latexr 11mo ago
  Fairly, respectfully, and without exploitation? Most business conducted in the world does not require someone to reject their lawful rights. For consumers in the EU, for example, the law even offers explicit protections by stating specifically that contract terms which are unfair have no legal binding. https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treatment/unfair-contract-terms/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...
  - philipallstar 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - latexr 11mo ago
      > "Exploitation" isn't an objective term. It means “the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work”. If you’re having someone reject their rights in a contract because that benefits you, that’s a form of exploitation. You’re making someone worse explicitly so you benefit. > It often just means "I don't like what I signed up for freely". From my first post: > If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them. If you’re swindled, you’re not given them away freely.

strogonoff 11mo ago

> In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods. He wants there to be a new copyright that allows creators to decide whether their work can be used to train AI models, and then he wants that right transferred to media companies who will sell it to AI companies in a bid to stop paying artists <…> There’s a timeline where big media publishers at least accidentally defend the rights of small-time IP holders (individual creators)—they’d go to court with the likes of OpenAI and Midjourney and put an end to training commercial ML solutions on unlicensed material. Specifically, if they would owe a large media company for training on their original works, presumably they just as well owe an average Jane. (Granted, assuming that Jane has not signed away her rights to a large media company she works with, but that would not apply to a massive number of small-time creators.)

isodev 11mo ago

> The answer lies in the structure of creative labor markets, which are brutally concentrated. Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks. > The media industry isn't just a monopoly, in other words – it's also a monopsony, which is to say, a collection of powerful buyers. The middlemen who control access to our audiences have all the power I'm happy to see apps included here, I feel sometimes folks forget these are also a form of creative works and having the two gatekeepers constantly filter and influece what can and can't be released is absolute nightmare for both developers and consumers (who don't even know the things they could've had but were denied by big A or big G).

Gormanu 11mo ago

With Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it’s not really clear whether the author originally came up with such a great idea and script, or if Disney just brought it to life so brilliantly on screen. I’m leaning toward the second. It’s cool that he got the rights back, but without Disney this idea just isn’t going to "sing" again.

havblue 11mo ago
It would be difficult. Aside from the characters and the cast, one of the biggest heroes of the movie was the script. It was dense with irony, jokes about the noir genre, straight man/funny man jokes and physical humor. You don't need the original cast to make a new Chinatown comedy with toons. It's a matter of assembling a story that's interesting and funny, with associated recognizable cartoon characters.

deleted 11mo ago

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jgalt212 11mo ago

> Copyright is a very weak tool for protecting creators' interests, because copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power, This is drivel written by someone who doesn't understand the mechanism of supply and demand. If you don't like the price, don't sell. If you don't like the terms, propose alternative ones. The real risk to creators is artificially suppressed demand through industry consolidation, not nuances to copyright law.

gorgoiler 11mo ago

Hot damn I’m a sucker for a good analogy… ”Giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. You're just enriching the bullies.” The big “5,4,3,2,1” is also a powerful piece of rhetoric. Who is this Doctorow person? He has my attention! :)

_whiteCaps_ 11mo ago
You're today's lucky 10,000! https://craphound.com/category/redteamblues/ https://craphound.com/category/redteamblues/

neves 11mo ago

The phrase below is worth the read: > giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money you can give that kid that will buy them lunch – you're just enriching the bullies

skybrian 11mo ago
Misleading phrases like this are why I dislike Doctorow. Just before that he tries to sell us on the idea that there are no alternatives when actually there are. For example, you don’t have to publish a book through the Big Five. There are many large and small independent publishers, and some authors have had good luck with self-publishing. I do think copyright law needs reform, but don’t trust Doctorow to explain it properly.
- badlibrarian 11mo ago
  His book "Why None Of My Books Are Available On Audible: And why Amazon owes me $3,218.55" captures the soul, heart, nuance (and grammar) that he repeatedly brings to these issues. He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection. Resulting in twice compressed 128k MP3s and innumerable blog posts.
  - chimeracoder 11mo ago
    > He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection What are you referring to here?
    - badlibrarian 11mo ago
      He set up two computers and manually played low-res DRM-protected MP3 files out of one and into the other for weeks, documenting the process on BoingBoing. He touted this not only as freedom but "preservation."
      - 11mo ago

kwanbix 11mo ago

35 years seems to be a lot of time. Make it 15 maybe. Which is still a lot of time with your creation collecting dust. Or am I missing something?

layer8 11mo ago
You’re missing who had the better lobbyists. ;)

CuriouslyC 11mo ago

It amazes me the number of people who are raging at how AI is hurting creators, and will make long videos and posts about this subject, without touching on the fact that the __ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY__ is the single largest abuser of creators, and it's far worse than AI is or probably will ever be. That's how you can tell that the RIAA/MPAA propaganda campaign against AI to protect its racket is working.

kmeisthax 11mo ago
The RIAA isn't opposed to AI as much as they're saying "join me, and together we can destroy indie music forever". The RIAA is a cartel monopsony that demands songwriters and singers negotiate away all equity in their work as a condition of market entry. But there are alternative markets for music, and successful musicians that have navigated them. This is why, for example, mainstream music has been so strangely stagnant while the independent space is a lot more innovative. The labels don't pay good money for innovation; hell, they don't even want it. They want a sure hit saleable product every time. As nerds, we're predisposed to look at generative AI through the framing of the Napster Wars. Except file sharing wasn't doing what generative AI does. P2P gave you a more or less faithful, if lossy, reproduction of a specific work. It might have missing or wrong metadata, but it was still clearly identifiable as that work. A generative AI system is instead producing legally distinct work - which is why all the AI training lawsuits are failing - using the creative input of the data the company scraped to train on. It infringes on the moral grounding of copyright but not the copyright itself. The threat that generative AI systems pose to artists is twofold: spam and standardization. Generative AI makes it far easier to churn out samey-looking outputs, while losing utility as you try to get more interesting or innovative styles out of it. It's a slop machine. And, notably, these are exactly the sort of things the RIAA wants out of mainstream music: - AI music is safe and approachable. If you ask it for jazz, you're getting a stereotype of the jazz genre. - AI music can be mass-produced at scale without needing to advance an artist royalties. That means you can spam it on Spotify and destroy the discoverability of independent musicians. - More importantly, generative AI turns the act of music production into ownable equity. The artist is cut out of the picture completely, there is not even the need to find a naive artist that will sign their life away in a 360 deal for peanuts. The ideal world that the RIAA wants to live in is one where each label sues and then buys out an AI music company, and then has that company train a fully-owned "house model" on their back catalog only. No other entities will be allowed to train models, either through aggressive copyright litigation or through some new "AI safety law" that conveniently exempts them. They'll own the streaming sites and digital marketplaces, and any independent musician making real music will get crushed under the weight of AI slop.

dec0dedab0de 11mo ago

So does this mean that the developers of abandonware can get legal rights to their old work?

layer8 11mo ago
Only if they didn’t work for hire.

randallsquared 11mo ago

> Termination is a powerful copyright policy, and unlike most copyright, it solely benefits creative workers and not our bosses. That's an interesting framing. I know why Doctorow wants to import the boss/worker concept here, but it just doesn't apply. Disney wasn't Wolf's boss in any sense that is usually understood, and it just obscures the picture with a bunch of class-based chaff.

shadowgovt 11mo ago
They can tell him he can't use the IP he created. That may not be precisely a "boss" but it's a powerful constraint on his freedom.
peepee1982 11mo ago
I read it more like "workers" being the ones who actually produce the good stuff, and "the boss" as being the entity to stick it to (as explained in the classic film "School of Rock").
dragonwriter 11mo ago
You can make a case that the relation with creators and media/publishing is,in formal structure, more petit bourgeois/haut bourgeois than proletarian/bourgeois, but even if strictly the class dynamic is different, the essential dynamic is broadly similar between those who do the work and those who purchase it and functionally, if not strictly necessarily, provide access to the broader market.

glroyal 11mo ago

Let me get this straight: the author is angry that Disney didn't release a series of shitty Roger Rabbit sequels, prequels, and shared cinematic universe pictures with Pixar and Marvel, so he's re-taking his copyright in order to sell it to another studio who will exploit and debase his creative works more rapaciously?

scotty79 11mo ago

> .... by waiting 35 years ... Should be 3.5

Scott-David 11mo ago

[dead]

scotty79 11mo ago

It's really nice to read about the side of things that sheepish defenders of copyright seem to always be blissfully not aware of.

thayne 11mo ago

> The original US copyright lasted for 14 years, and could be renewed for another 14 years, but only by the creator (not by the publisher). I wish we would go back to that.

aidenn0 11mo ago
Yes, I always preferred the short term with renewals; I didn't realize that it used to be the creator not the publisher. I wonder how that would interact with the current "work fore hire" laws that exist.
- thayne 11mo ago
  > I wonder how that would interact with the current "work fore hire" laws that exist. The simplest interaction would be "it's practically impossible to renew copyright on something created by a large number of employees", but IMO, that's not a bad thing.

crazygringo 11mo ago

> Under Termination, a media company can force you to sign away your rights in perpetuity, but you can still claim those rights back after 35 years. Termination isn't just something to bargain away, it's a new power to bargain with. It's sentences like these that make it hard for me to take Doctorow seriously. No media company is "forcing" anyone to do anything. They're paying creatives for their work. Every creative is free to say no. Musicians are free to shop their music to different record labels for the best deal. Authors pitch their books to different publishers to see which one offers the best deal. And there's always self-publishing as well. We can have a reasonable conversation about copyright without saying silly untrue things like media companies are "forcing" creators to take deals.

CivBase 11mo ago

Does this takeback include the likeness of Roger and Jessica Rabbit from Disney's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or just the content from the original 1981 novel? From what I can tell, the familiar cartoon movie designs are unique to the Disney movie and affiliated Disney shorts.

jmpman 11mo ago

Disney has the Roger Rabbit themed rides at Disneyland. How is that not considered using the IP?

rickdeckard 11mo ago

Really interesting read, but I wonder if the character design everyone associates with the story isn't still owned by Disney even after termination. As I understand the original work is a written novel (and not a graphic novel), and I assume Disney designed the characters. Otherwise ("creative works" based on the original material also transfer to the author of the original material) would mean that the author suddenly owns the MOVIE as well...

tptacek 11mo ago

There's something very weird in this editorial. Doctorow implies that he's unhappy that copyright renewability became assignable in 1909†. Assignability to publishers is, by implication, bad for creators. How exactly could that be the case? Assignment isn't automatic. Creators have to agree to assign to publishers. It's not clear to me how this doesn't make them strictly better off. Assignment of renewability, in Doctorow's framing, is valuable. How are creators made better off for not being able to sell it? †(he refers to the framer's original term of 14 years + renewability for 14 years, leaving out that the term was extended to base 28 + 14 year renewal in 1831 --- he also leaves out that assignability predates the modern media industry by decades).

wilg 11mo ago

> But at the same time, the amount of money being earned by creative workers has only fallen over this period [50 years, so since 1975], both in real terms (how much money an average creative worker brings home) and as a share of the total (what percentage of the revenues from a creator's work the creator gets to keep). Is there evidence this is true? It doesn't sound very true.

WalterBright 11mo ago

Intellectual property rights should go away after 10 years.

canucker2016 11mo ago

Eddie Murphy talked about the three movies that he regretted turning down: - Ghostbusters (he was filming Beverly Hills Cop at the same time) - Rush Hour - Who Framed Roger Rabbit

tomcam 11mo ago

So now Roger Rabbit's creator has the rights back, which is awesome. There will never again be a movie version with as outrageous a cast as the original movie. Somehow they managed to get rights to the biggest characters from competing IP owners. It was a stunning, very much unheralded achievement. These days it would be roughly akin to DC getting to use Darth Vader, Captain Kirk, Spock, Iron Man, and the Hulk in one of their movies.