I’ve felt a strong urge to sell “healing crystals” to people which they need to put up their butts to work properly ever since all those anti mask and anti vax nutjobs became very loud all over the media.
When the ball drops in Times Square, I’m going to yell “Steamboat Willie’s in the public domain (in the U.S. at least)” instead of “Happy New Year.”
Yes Disney is using clips from Steamboat Willie at the beginning of all movies and such to try to establish a case for trademark protections (again at least in the U.S.), but it’s still a bit of a victory.
They use a different version of it though, while based on the original they don’t only use it. You can’t claim only part of a intellectual work. That’s why Winnie the pooh in blood and honey is allowed, because its different from the Disney verison
I’m not sure I fully understand your statement here.
(For purpuoses of this conversation, I’ll be limiting my comments to U.S. law. I can’t say I’m any expert on that, even, but as little as I know about U.S. law, I know far less about any other country’s law. IANAL. Not legal advice.)
I’m referring to this intro sequence that they’ve started adding at the beginning of the significant majority of Disney movies and TV shows. (I don’t think they add it to Marvel or Star Wars things, for instance. Only to more explicitly Disney-branded ones.) It’s probably restored, but it’s the clip from the original Steamboat Willie short.
When you say “you can’t claim only part of an intellectual work” I assume you’re referring to copyright. But what I’m saying is that Disney has finally accepted that they can’t prevent copyright protections on the original Steamboat Willie short from expiring on January 1st 2024 (I don’t think there’s any likelihood of them pulling out a last-minute surprise before then) and are changing their approach. They’re trying to establish a case that they’re using Steamboat Willie (or that clip, at least) as a trademark. (Trademark law and copyright law are different. The rules are different.) I don’t think there’s any reason to suspect that a part/clip of the original Steamboat Willie short couldn’t be used as a trademark.
If someone made/released a film featuring Steamboat-Willie art of the Steamboat-Willie Mickey Mouse on January 2nd 2024, that would be fine from a copyright perspective. (So long as they didn’t do something else that infringed on copyright somewhere.) But it looks like Disney has specifically taken steps to ensure they have an option to come after such a person on trademark grounds.
Now (oh blast, I said I wasn’t going to talk about non-U.S. law, didn’t I? I guess I lied), my understanding about Blood and Honey is that a) it was made in Great Britain and b) the copyright in Great Britain technically hadn’t expired when Blood and Honey was released. Basically, Blood and Honey was (technically) a pirate film. It wasn’t (technically) allowed. (Any more so than would be an unlicensed romcom starring Darth Vader and Jar Jar Binks would be in the U.S. – both characters from works that are fully covered by copyright.) In fact the director of Blood and Honey has said he’s shocked he hasn’t been sued yet and that if Disney did sue, they’d probably have a case.
Now, theoretically, if someone had made a movie in the U.S. with Winnie the Pooh as a character after January 1st 2022, that wouldn’t have infringed any copyright so long as they used only art styles and story elements and such from what Winnie The Pooh works had entered the public domain. Mostly just the original Milne book.
There was a court case where someone made an unlicensed Sherlock Holmes book while some of the original Sherlock books were still in copyright but others had passed out of copyright protections and the courts basically said that you can use any element of Sherlock from the public domain books, but not any elements (such as his dog or his bipolar (which I’m guessing they called “manic depression”) diagnosis) that were from works still covered by copyright. (And it sounds like you understand that last bit. Just wanted to add clarification for other folks that might see this thread.)
So you basically just can’t use the character in the exact same way? How far does that go though? What if I made a Winnie the Pooh show that’s exactly the same but instead of Christopher Robbins it’s Kristoffer Robkins?
How close does it have to be? Is any shirt not allowed? Would a red tank top be OK? Or maybe put him in a maroon shirt? What if he wears a red shirt with a white collar? Feels like splitting hairs, but there IS a line somewhere.
This is Disney we talk about so getting sued is probably expected, they will explain in court how your character ripped of theirs, you defend. Court decides.
If you can point to a non Disney older source where these same details are present you have a likely win.
If there is a Christopher Robbins in the original you can use the name but if there is not it then having roughly the same letters or sound will likely be a loss.
Of course this more assumed law theory of not a layer. Some rich dudes can just trademark the name of fruit, a basic word or even a single letter and we just let them.
Thinking of “fake Winnie Poohs”, I was gaslit by my parents into thinking that the Soviet version of Winnie the Pooh I grew up watching was the OG and that the yellow bear in a red shirt was derivative of it. I couldn’t believe it when I found out that the Soviet version was the “fake” lol
Ah yes. The poorest people are the smokers, let’s just make them more miserable. Sounds about right.
You should work at a place that sells cigarettes for awhile and scope out the customers. I’ve seen people count pennies and cry because they’re hungry but they’d rather not experience the anxiety of nicotine withdrawal.
You can have a look at some places that implemented the policy you’re putting forward to check if it works though, right?
Have a look at Australia & New Zealand. Taxed at around 65-70% respectively with intent to make cigarettes cost prohibitive
A summary of some outcomes following a decade or so of implementation of these policies:
No acceleration in the overall decline of smoking rates at any stage following policy implementation
Reversal of trend in Australia where tobacco use is currently increasing
The disproportionality in smoking rates between Europeans and the countries’ respective indigenous groups is now higher
Politicians (even the health minister himself in Aus) now champion increases to tobacco excise as a means to secure the financial stability of the country
All this while cost of living increases, rate of poverty increases. I mean not all of these things are solely attributable to periodic tobacco excise increases but it hasn’t fixed a thing. The government got some more money to blow on some antiquated nuclear submarines to defend our massive island, surrounded by allied nations and thousands of miles from the nearest potential adversary. They’ll be ready in about 20 years. Great to see the extra tax dollars at work!
Unless I’m mistaken but correlation isn’t causation. Meaning that an increase in tax revenue from cigarettes around the time some new subs were ordered doesn’t mean that one is paying for the other.
Is it unreasonable to make the assumption that the extra tax revenue in fact goes into public health to combat the effects of smoking on an aging population?
The current excise policies were implemented around 2010, at which point the global decline was already well underway. As I mentioned originally, there has been no stage following implementation of the respective policies in which the decline in smoking accelerated. It has only slowed since that time, and in Australia is increasing as of 2023.
It’s unreasonable to assume that allocations of tax contributed by smokers and tobacco companies is proportionately allocated to areas relevant to the stated intent of the tax policy. That just isn’t a thing for really any tax policy in any government - there’s no point at which the public health cost of using tobacco nationally is reconciled against the tax income from those products to see if things are evening out. They’re entirely separate vectors that are unrelated.
correlation isn’t causation
Do you think these are magic words or something? The entire stated intent of the policy is to cause a correlation that is inverse to the one that’s been observed since. Nowhere above did I say that tobacco excise causes the problems I mentioned - I responded to someone putting forward the idea that it is a viable solution to those same problems. I have trouble considering your response to be in good faith, since I already disclaimed this in my original comment. I’m sorry, I misread yours. I was just making a joke dude - it’s just meant to be an example of how 1. government expenditures are fundamentally disconnected from the tax funding source and 2. the government having an excess in tax funding often doesn’t result in them doing anything of significant benefit to anyone with it. Who are the subs meant to to protect us from, Indonesia? Wait, that’s right, it was just to piss off our #1 trading partner
Hey I misunderstood you there and corrected my comment. Just in case you didn’t see that. I thought you were referring to a correlation of increased tobacco usage not equalling a causation by the excise tax policies, given the sub thing was kinda completely aside from the central point of what I’m saying
That is patently false. There is only one single risk factor for cancer generally that is bigger problem than smoking unprocessed tobacco - that is smoking processed tobacco. If you charted endemic cancer risk factors in order of risk, with smoking processed tobacco at the top, then smoking unprocessed/organic/raw tobacco would be about 5% away from the top. The next biggest risk factor would be obesity about halfway down the chart (close to smokeless tobacco products like dip, which has a higher specific risk for mouth cancers). Turns out lighting something on fire and inhaling the combusted free radicals is universally a terrible idea, who’d have thunk? Personally I’m amazed that this kind of misinformation still propagates, on Lemmy of all places, sixty years following the surgeon general’s warning.
Imagine looking at the war on drugs, prohibition in the US, etc then thinking “I think we should ban this drug that’s already normalised and used by millions. Then nobody will use it and everything will be fine.”
It. Doesn’t. Work.
It especially wouldn’t for something as addictive as nicotine and so trivially purchasable abroad and easy to import.
Tobacco is already dying. Just let it continue to run its course.
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