> "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.
I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us.
With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought of getting a lot of plays is a little scary.
> I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live.
Correct. Which is why I worded it as a lifetime instead of your lifetime.
> Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us.
Indeed. You can even die before you’re 35, meaning you’d never even be able to exercise this right, even if you had created a piece of art literally as you were being born.
Estimates suggest around 117–120 billion people have ever been born, while only about 8 billion are alive today, meaning roughly 93% of all humans are dead. So statistically, if you're alive today, there's a 7% chance that you'll live forever.
That's why it's called copyright. You can perfectly sign it away.
In Germany the right is called "Urheberrecht" which literally translates to "author's right". And while you can license your work and sign away the usage, you cannot by definition sign away the fact that you are the author of a work.
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.
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.
Your posts read like “it’s too hard to precisely define these things so why bother” this is what case law is for. To precisely define in the context of real cases what the precise contours of the law are.
Clearly the EU has figured some of this out and might even have some of the specificity you are looking for.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The vast majority of money for any given copyrighted work comes within the first few years of its existence. (This is extra true for things like video games.)
Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator.
You seem to be thinking of copyright purely in terms of vast media conglomerates, but it affects literally every work created by every human in the country. That includes these HN discussion posts!
Additionally, I find it hard to see how your second paragraph holds. If the amount of exclusive content a given entity holds affects their odds of being bought by a larger conglomerate, I would think it would be in the opposite direction: having more exclusive content would make them more likely to be a target for acquisition, so that the larger company could then hold all of that exclusively.
If everything older than, say, 35 years were suddenly in the public domain, available to be distributed by any of the distribution companies, and Hypothetical Media Corp had half the back catalogue that they used to, then surely that would make big conglomerates less interested in buying up Hypothetical Media Corp?
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.
> 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.
Because this syllogism doesn't hold. There's not a fixed pot of money that must be spent on content. If now every streaming service has access to a bigger pool of old hits, then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.
> 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.
Each service will just become sameier and compete more on their UX than their exclusive content. You can see this in music, for instance, where the big streamers already have more or less identical catalogues. Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.
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.
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."
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.
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...
> 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).
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.
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.
Creators are often dumb enough to trade away their rights. They have dollar signs in their eyes too.
So many popstars selling their music because the label paid for their coke habit for a few years.
Besides as much as we all hate Disney they are a machine that can make global hits.
Would we still talk about Bambi without the movie?
> 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.)
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
You quoted one of the key sentences from the piece, and yet missed the point. It's the "you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them." part that is important. In the case of Roger Rabbit, the problem is the Disney has not made any new Roger Rabbit movies or other media in 35 years, despite the first movie being very successful. No doubt other concept, that could be successful, never even get to that point. See stories of "stuck in develompent hell".
This seems like one of those scenarios where you find out Disney did make a Roger Rabbit sequel, but they never marketed it, or it had a limited release in 12 California cinemas, and it only existed as a pro forma device to show they still controlled the character and would have the option to make sequels for another 35 years.
Bonus if it randomly starred or was directed by someone who later became famous, or if there are blog posts calling it an unknown masterpiece.
Nice to hear that didn't happen in this case and the author gets a second chance!
> 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?
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”.
This isn't fair to Disney. What's the point of buying something if the other person is allowed to steal it back.
If I made a video game, it would be a annoying for it for it to be illegal for me to sell because something I licensed for it got revoked. I don't want the extra headaches of needing to do extra work down the line. I want to have a video game that I am allowed to sell and do stuff with for the rest of time.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Yeah, if you license something to use in your game then that item comes with a license term. You did not buy it and you do not own it. If you did buy it instead of license it, you would be free to do whatever you wanted with it forever. But you didnt buy it, you licensed its use.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> "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.
> You have to wait half a lifetime?!
I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us.
With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought of getting a lot of plays is a little scary.
(Note: Statistically, people don’t live forever.)
> I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live.
Correct. Which is why I worded it as a lifetime instead of your lifetime.
> Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us.
Indeed. You can even die before you’re 35, meaning you’d never even be able to exercise this right, even if you had created a piece of art literally as you were being born.
Estimates suggest around 117–120 billion people have ever been born, while only about 8 billion are alive today, meaning roughly 93% of all humans are dead. So statistically, if you're alive today, there's a 7% chance that you'll live forever.
> should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
So, if I sell you my house or car I can't sign away my rights on it? - Sure, there is a difference between material and intellectual property ...
Against swindling there needs to be protection from fraud, but that exists in most legislative systems.
That's why it's called copyright. You can perfectly sign it away.
In Germany the right is called "Urheberrecht" which literally translates to "author's right". And while you can license your work and sign away the usage, you cannot by definition sign away the fact that you are the author of a work.
So how does ghostwriting work then? Lots of books have unaccredited ghostwriters.
How is business supposed to be conducted under those conditions?
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-treat...
> I don't like what I signed up for freely
I believe the post makes a good case that "freely" doesn't mean by choice at all. In other words, not what people consider freely.
I think you meant to reply to a different post?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46032573
Oh yes, it was peer comment. Oh well, too late now and you made the same point :)
"Exploitation" isn't an objective term. It often just means "I don't like what I signed up for freely".
> "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.
> If you’re swindled, you’re not given them away freely.
How do you define "swindle"?
Your posts read like “it’s too hard to precisely define these things so why bother” this is what case law is for. To precisely define in the context of real cases what the precise contours of the law are.
Clearly the EU has figured some of this out and might even have some of the specificity you are looking for.
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
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.
You assume he has dementia because he’s old and retired?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The vast majority of money for any given copyrighted work comes within the first few years of its existence. (This is extra true for things like video games.)
Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator.
You seem to be thinking of copyright purely in terms of vast media conglomerates, but it affects literally every work created by every human in the country. That includes these HN discussion posts!
Additionally, I find it hard to see how your second paragraph holds. If the amount of exclusive content a given entity holds affects their odds of being bought by a larger conglomerate, I would think it would be in the opposite direction: having more exclusive content would make them more likely to be a target for acquisition, so that the larger company could then hold all of that exclusively.
If everything older than, say, 35 years were suddenly in the public domain, available to be distributed by any of the distribution companies, and Hypothetical Media Corp had half the back catalogue that they used to, then surely that would make big conglomerates less interested in buying up Hypothetical Media Corp?
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.
> 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.
Because this syllogism doesn't hold. There's not a fixed pot of money that must be spent on content. If now every streaming service has access to a bigger pool of old hits, then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.
> 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.
Each service will just become sameier and compete more on their UX than their exclusive content. You can see this in music, for instance, where the big streamers already have more or less identical catalogues. Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.
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.
>clearly Disney isn’t interested
often big media companies aren't interested in exploiting specific properties if there is ongoing litigation regarding them.
Direct link to the article: 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."
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.
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...
> 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).
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.
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.
The 8 most terrifying words in the English language are "Let us turn this movie into a franchise"
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-reve...
Creators are often dumb enough to trade away their rights. They have dollar signs in their eyes too. So many popstars selling their music because the label paid for their coke habit for a few years.
Besides as much as we all hate Disney they are a machine that can make global hits. Would we still talk about Bambi without the movie?
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...
> 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.)
35 years seem quite excessive.
Taking half your life to get your stuff back?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Video game copyrights were rarely ever held by a single person, even in the early days of the industry.
> 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.
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.
Why? A publishers goal is always to pay nothing at all for the rights, at best this is simply another excuse.
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.
That’s not the right comparison. Is a 35 year lease that much cheaper than a 70 year lease? Copyright isn’t forever.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
You quoted one of the key sentences from the piece, and yet missed the point. It's the "you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them." part that is important. In the case of Roger Rabbit, the problem is the Disney has not made any new Roger Rabbit movies or other media in 35 years, despite the first movie being very successful. No doubt other concept, that could be successful, never even get to that point. See stories of "stuck in develompent hell".
This seems like one of those scenarios where you find out Disney did make a Roger Rabbit sequel, but they never marketed it, or it had a limited release in 12 California cinemas, and it only existed as a pro forma device to show they still controlled the character and would have the option to make sequels for another 35 years.
Bonus if it randomly starred or was directed by someone who later became famous, or if there are blog posts calling it an unknown masterpiece.
Nice to hear that didn't happen in this case and the author gets a second chance!
> 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?
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”.
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> I admittedly haven't read that rambling post, but...
...you probably should.
This isn't fair to Disney. What's the point of buying something if the other person is allowed to steal it back.
If I made a video game, it would be a annoying for it for it to be illegal for me to sell because something I licensed for it got revoked. I don't want the extra headaches of needing to do extra work down the line. I want to have a video game that I am allowed to sell and do stuff with for the rest of time.
> 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.
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.
Termination of Transfer has nothing to do with how much profit a work is making.
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.
3 months is too long. 35 years is crazy.
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.
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...
I can't keep selling it if you terminate the distribution right to some texture you made that I used in my game.
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_bac...
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.
Yeah, if you license something to use in your game then that item comes with a license term. You did not buy it and you do not own it. If you did buy it instead of license it, you would be free to do whatever you wanted with it forever. But you didnt buy it, you licensed its use.
this happens with eg licensed music or product tie-ins or whatever, and the game just stops being sold
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.
Thats up to whatever you agree with the owner when you license it.
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.
> 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
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#Terminat...
>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.
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.
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.
Oh noooo it isn't fair to Disney!
Oh, wait, I actually don't care about that at all.