Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   James Gleick (jamesgleick@zirk.us)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jan-2024 08:03:06 JST James Gleick

   I know this is an unpopular opinion, especially here on the open social web, but I really don’t think the longtime copyright protection for the Walt Disney mouse cartoon dampened American artistry or creativity.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jan-2024 08:03:05 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @JamesGleick I don't think the use of Mickey Mouse in particular was a huge loss for creative work. But Disney lobbied hard to extend copyright in the 1990s, and that kept thousands of other works from entering the public domain. In aggregate, a lot of creativity was stifled in order to preserve the rights to Mickey Mouse.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jan-2024 08:35:15 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     • Alan (he/him)

     @drwex @JamesGleick I think the "orphan works" argument is pretty strong, especially for collective media like film, TV or music. It can be hard to contact all the rights holders and get them to agree.

   • Embed this notice
     Alan (he/him) (drwex@toot.boston)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jan-2024 08:35:17 JST Alan (he/him)

     in reply to

     @JamesGleick At a bare minimum it vastly exacerbated the 'orphan works' problem in which the use and republication of many creations was made impossible because the original copyright holder could not be found. That has gone on for decades longer than it needed to and continues to this day. Thousands upon thousands of books are out of print, films are not shown, compositions are not played because their rights are unobtainable.

     More directly, it led to a vast impoverishment of the public domain commons. It's that commons that contributed to the creation of massive numbers of works - including vast swathes of Disney's own archive. You're asking someone to point to what was missed and that's impossible, directly. We can simply point to all that got created in the past by drawing on the commons and then point out that if you starve that commons, as the CTEA did, you deprive every artist and every possible creator of that rich source material.

     If that doesn't convince you, well, so be it.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jan-2024 08:41:47 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @JamesGleick I think you've really struck on an interesting question.

     Did the 1998 copyright extension act, for example, result in less creative work in total being made?

     For example, were there measurably fewer books, films, paintings, photographs, record albums or other creative works? Maybe controlling for population.

     I think confounding factors like the growth of the Internet, social media, streaming audio make it impossible to tease out what the effects of copyright extension were.

   • Embed this notice
     Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jan-2024 08:53:03 JST Evan Prodromou

     in reply to

     @JamesGleick just poking at various archives, it looks like there are quite a few papers published on the topic.