When I see the word cable, my mind goes to linear tv. A consolidated streaming service would be vastly superior to the consolidated linear tv packages of old cable.
I dunno, if I build a house, I can leave it to my family for generations. Indeed, barring something interfering with that ownership, it will be passed along. Maybe they’ll sell it, or take out a loan against it and default, or a disaster could strike, or whatever.
Why would any other creation be less portable to my heirs?
Mind you, I’m definitely of the belief that artistic creations like books should eventually go public domain. I’m fine with any number of possible restrictions on that duration. But it is strange that one of the only things that automatically gets removed from a family are things like writing. Ideas, if you want to break it down. We treat them different than other things we create.
Again, I’m fine with there’s being limits on holding ideas restricted. That’s necessary to prevent loss of such things, that are harder to preserve than something like a piece of jewelry, or a statue, or a house. That’s why patents and copyrights need to expire, but I can’t agree that the limits as they exist are fucked up/bad/wrong.
Seriously, I’m a published author, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about such things.
Now, I would love to see the laws change so that any copyright held by a publicly traded company, or that has been sold/abandoned by the actual heirs of the author is shorter than when held by the heirs of the author.
And, any popular work is going to have the issue of who gets to decide what is and isn’t done to the works before or after public domain. You can end up with something wonderful being shat on by asshats. So it isn’t like copyrights expiring is without drawbacks. When what’s at stake is only keeping the works published and available, that’s a clear cut thing that benefits everyone.
But adaptations, expansions, “fanfic”? I would definitely prefer someone that at least has some chance of the author’s intent being known than some shitty company looking to milk the work for every possible dime.
Why shouldn’t authors be able to build generational wealth the way a business can? You’re talking about people profiting off a dead man, but that’s what investments and properties and such are. It’s future generations profiting off a dead person’s work. There’s billionaires out there that are sitting on wealth that was amassed not just decades ago, but sometimes centuries. Why do authors not have that possibility?
I understand that at a personal level you would want to share wealth with your children and their children, but that is not what copyright is about. The intention is that the creator gets to make their earnings out of their original product for a limited time only. So that they can continue to make original products and make a living. It is not intended to provide for your family for generations. While this may be what it has become with the help of corporations, in my opinion this is not it’s intended use.
Aside from that I think your works should become public domain after a limited time, prefferedly during your lifetime. So that as much as possible people get to enjoy your original works of art.
You make a good point about generational wealth in business and I think there should be limits to that as well. It doesn’t help the world at all if wealth just stagnates like that and in my opinion it should be shared with those doing the actual work, instead of a select few who were born in it, were extremely lucky, or gained money in immoral ways.
I’ll leave it at that since I am not the right person to go into a discussion with you about all of these things. I do want to thank you for your work and for gifting us with your books entertaining us and giving us an escape of daily problems, expanding our knowledge with educational content or whatever else. Know that you are valued and there are people out there being touched by your work.
Remember, the only reason we can still watch the highly influential 1922 vampire movie Nosferatu today is because some people didn’t destroy all their copies despite a court saying they had to.
Even with several details altered, Stoker’s heirs sued over the adaptation, and a court ruling ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed. However, several prints of Nosferatu survived, and the film came to be regarded as an influential masterpiece of cinema and the horror genre.
The author in question here was pretty shitty. He wrote his own sequel to called “Fellowship of the King”, and then sued Amazon and the Tolkien estate saying they stole elements from his book. He lost, and the Tolkien estate countersued.
The guy played stupid games and won stupid prizes.
Some older dutch movies were released as rentals to the theaters that had to be returned after they stopped playing the movie. These copies were all destroyed and re-releases on DVD now look worse than what it looked like in movie theatres.
The good news is that some theatres hung on to some movies.
I don’t know how many might be still be around, but I know for a couple of movies where they are. I don’t think they have been properly archived and/or converted to digital media yet. I would like to see if there are people in The Netherlands that can do these things and if the current owners of the rolls of film are willing to.
I never understand this shit. Like even if you have absolutely no morals, you’re Vin Diesel. You can pretty much have consensual sex whenever you want to. Why do you have to resort to assaulting people?
This right here. Rape is not about arousal, it’s about power. I highly recommend Roy Hazelwood’s books on the matter if anyone, like me, has a morbid curiosity about why people commit certain violent crimes.
My uneducated guess would be that if you can have “normal” women at any time you want; or more generally have any needs met at any time because you are rich and famous, the things you cant have are much more appealing. A “no” or “not for sale” becomes “you don’t offer enough yet”.
I kinda stopped liking him when the whole beef with the Rock happened because boy did that make him look like an arrogant bitch
That’s also when I learned he made directors shoot scenes with them together in such a way that made them look the same height which is just…how self conscious can you be? You’re Vin Diesel. Nobody gives a shit that you’re “only” 5’11"
He also has a contract term limiting how badly fights can go for him. But apparently that’s common for action stars, so whatever.
I did find it amusing that during his feud with the Rock, they had to count the exact numbers of hits each took while fighting each other on screen so neither would look bad. It’s like, Vin is a D&D nerd who turned his horror franchise into a science fantasy opera and started his own video game company because he was frustrated at bad movie tie-ins (side note: Escape From Butcher Bay is one of, if not the, best prison games ever made). Embrace nerdity, reject this toxic masculinity crap. There’s a massive audience for that thing now - just look at Ryan Reynolds, nobody talks shit about him being a massive nerd.
Though this lawsuit is about events from thirteen years ago, so he was already too far gone early in his career. If it’s true, fuck him. Rapists and sexual assaulters get no sympathy.
I promise you that if the stuff I’ve written and published could be used by anyone, however they wanted, it would not have been published. I would have kept that shit to myself.
If anything, copyright laws encourage creativity because the person knows they can take their time to build things up. You don’t have to worry about fifteen sequels to your book being spammed by hacks trying to profit from your work
Everything else is a fanfiction. Even the Silmarillion. By far the most obnoxious reaction to the show is from “Tolkien purists” who got their entire Tolkien knowledge base from Peter Jackson.
The show is a perfectly Tolkienish story, despite the gratuitous lack of random singing, it’s just not a good one. Like, okay, you need to compress the timeline for the show, fair enough, just do a good job of that.
Wrong Durins to fight both the War of the Rings and the Balrog?
Then don’t tease the fucking Moria Balrog. If you want to use a Balrog, because Balrogs are fucking sweet, there was more than one…
Honestly, the weirdest part of the show is that they’ll follow a lore deep cut with something that could only possibly fool someone that missed the deep cut, but also doesn’t know or care who Gandalf or Isildur is, so what’s the payoff for the reveal?
Look, I agree his works shouldn’t be destroyed, just not monetizable.
But the dude poked a bear with a sharp stick… Suing the creators of the story/characters you’ve built your content on for copyright infringement? Brilliant move…
However; simply disagreeing with reality doesn’t change it.
But; go ahead and continue to personally attack strangers on the internet instead of actually working towards the change you want to see. I’m sure it’ll be effective.
Working toward change, but not making normative statements or highlighting problems in rationale. Obviously a real copyright reformist goes around tutting at those “semantics” while parroting the status quo.
You don’t think that for the copyright laws to change we also need to change how we view it? How could you be properly critical of the copyright law if you refuse to make the distinction necessary for a certain type of criticism?
I get the “that’s not how the world is” argument, but you can’t talk about how the world could/should be by using only the word that describe the current state of the world. If you want to be critical of the existing system you need to develop a vocabulary that allows for such criticism.
For instance if you don’t make the distinction between the creator and copyright holder you can’t make criticism such as “you shouldn’t be able to copyright works that you haven’t created”. You can’t tell the difference between copyright owned by the creator and copyright owned by copyright owner because those two people are indistinguishable, so the entire criticism becomes nonsense.
If the estate had gone after the author, this would be a very different conversation; but that’s not what happened. The author chose to involve Tolkiens estate, knowing the current climate around copyright.
I struggle to find sympathy for that.
Then you add on direct personal insults instead of constructive conversation and I completely check out. It’s not worth my energy to have a discussion with such people.
You’ve clearly already checked out considering I’m not even the person who insulted you. Here’s an idea, maybe don’t partake in conversations you’re not going to bother to even pay attention. I guarantee you’ll automatically come across as less of an asshole.
You can’t just extend copyright indefinitely. It’s not like a patent, where you can make minute changes and claim it’s a new product. The original works have a copyright limit of 95 years after the first date of publish (thanks Disney and other corporate lobbyists).
If we go by The Return of the King, it was published in 1955. That means the words, the story, the settings, and the characters will be public domain in 2050. Steamboat Willie, on the other hand, was published in 1928. That means it expires at the end of this year. Unless Disney can convince Congress to change copyright law again, these copyrights all have hard expiration dates.
ETA: Disney might have a case where they can claim copyright on the information they added or changed from the original works, just like how they can still claim copyright over Mickey after losing Steamboat Willie.
And I’m sure they will, because fuck society, amirite? /s
Works made for hire are 95 years from publication. LotR is not a work for hire, so it goes by life of the author plus 75 years. It goes public domain in 2044.
I think an argument could be made to set it to the date of death of the author. I agree with the other guy that it should only apply to commercial works though.
I also don’t think that the copyright should be transferable. The trading of ideas is an absurd concept to me. But then us humans do a lot of absurd things so I guess it’s just par for the course.
not exactly. You can of course still get existing works by pirating them.
But if the Tolkien works entered the public domain, anyone could use them for any creative purposes freely. And yes, a lot of the new material would be trash. But some excellent works would appear to.
A good example of this is Lovecraft’s works and the Cthulhu Mythos, that although not public domain until recent years, Lovecraft encouraged others to use his own creations on their own stories, thus expanding the literary universe of his own creation. Some stories are awful, but there has also been a ton of great works based on Lovecraft’s creations that couldn’t have existed otherwise.
Also Sherlock Holmes. Now, the BBC might have done a terrible job, but a lot of other people have written great stories because Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain
Another character in the public domain is Zeus, and the rest of his family. Liked Disney’s Hercules? Supergiant’s Hades? Netflix’s Blood of Zeus? Riordan’s Percy Jackson? Only possible because of public domain.
Well how else are we supposed to encourage people to be related to people who develop intellectual property? It makes sense from a neponomic standpoint.
Believe it or not, some people do work extra hard in order to ensure their descendants have an easy life. I’m not weighing in on whether that is wise or not but it is definitely a thing.
Yeah, and that’s why white people are richer than black people today, even though slavery ostensibly ended 200 years ago. It’s time that we outlaw this behaviour.
you’re gonna get downvoted but no amount of downvotes will change the fact that black people weren’t allowed to own things in america until most things were already owned by white people.
Honestly I don’t really care, I’m more inclined to strategy and 4x games.
If you don mind me recommending a game, check out against the storm, it’s a city builder with rogue like elements, and it came out recently out of early access, it’s reaaaaally addicting
The books go into public domain in 20 years. Now that Christopher Tolkien is out of the way (who tended to block a lot of stuff, for better or worse) , the current heirs want as much out of it as they can.
20 years might sound like a lot, but that’s about as much time as between the Peter Jackson movies and now.
Tbh they seem to be a lot more “hands off” with non-canon stuff, which I think includes all of the LOTR/middle earth licensed games, and that’s not a bad thing imo.
People without friends or family with a jellyfin server need their escape from this shit capitalism. Looks like they are willing to pay a little more. Wonder how long that will last.
I liked “Leave the World Behind”. It felt like an art movie and I’m always impressed by movies that show how confusing and frustrating it is to be in a crisis situation
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