> There are vile ethnic caricatures and slurs in those patriotic cartoons from the Second World War, and to its immense credit, Warner Bros. has often worked to contextualize and preserve those shorts. In several cases, it has included those works in separate subsections on home-video releases, so that they won’t autoplay with the rest of the cartoons.
If only more shared this view that we should thoughtfully and critically engage with problematic elements of classic works rather than summarily banishing them.
Do you have a list of these classic, summarily-banished works? In a world where Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is available on mainstream streaming services, it's hard to imagine what atrocities you're thinking of.
They worst of them are referred to as the Censored Eleven, although you can easily find them intact (albeit, with a warning). It's not a complete list - others have been added to the list since, such as WWII cartoons with highly racist anti-Japanese charactures.
An example of one illustrates why the content might be considered problematic: "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs". A contemporary review said, "A satire on Snow White done in blackface, set in modern swing, this is the best in a long time. It's very funny."
The "atrocities" include rampant racism, sexism, and other needless offenses with the intent of comedy. Other media of the time, such as Theodore Geisel/Dr Suess' wartime cartoons, often show up on these lists as well.
In my opinion, it's good that these cartoons are accessible, with content warnings, yet kept out of normal playback rotation. They're relics of an age gone, thankfully, past.
My avatar for the longest time was the Minah Bird in the short Inki and the Minah Bird.
For those who are unaware, the Inki character in this short was a small tribal African child in a grass skirt who spent his days attempting to hunt various animals with a spear. And by African, I mean the blackface depiction with the white lips that is reminiscent of old Al Jolson films.
Now, I didn't remember ANYTHING about this part of the video. I had last watched it when I was a small child. But I enjoyed the part I did remember, namely the Minah bird, because the bird was methodical, walked in step with Mendelssohn's "The Hebrides," and could whup the crap out of anything. So when it came time to choose an avatar during a period of time when people were not using their faces as screen shots, I used this character.
It wasn't until years later that my girlfriend, who happened to be black, asked me why the cartoon bird was my avatar. So I looked it up and... let's just say I discontinued use of the avatar before the topic was broached again.
Oof, I was hoping you weren't talking and the black bird that did the little hop thing I remember from the cartoons. You were. I didn't remember and probably didn't understand the context of it at the time.
I don't think the show is necessarily THAT offensive, for what it's worth. Yes, the depiction of the child's physical appearance is stereotypical of the era (the child's name is problematic too), but the story being told is that of a young child from a hunting community who is learning to hunt by terrorizing insects with his spear until he runs across something (a lion with false teeth) that makes HIM the prey. The lion is just unlucky because he keeps running into the Minah bird whenever he's actually got the child in his grasp.
What's sad about the racist aspect of the show is that the depiction of a child at play in this show totally mirrors the behavior of children when they get a bug catching net. It's a Merrie Melodie, so there's no speech or inner monologue that is forced upon all children's shows day. Just a kid being a kid.
The story is alright. The way they drew the character, definitely not alright. And you know the lovely associations racists make between black people and spears.
Could have been a cute animation about a kid biting off more than they could chew. And a hapless lion and a bird that takes not shit. It's a shame they had to shove the nastiness in there.
> And by African, I mean the blackface depiction with the white lips that is reminiscent of old Al Jolson films.
Not trying to excuse anything, but I wonder how much this kind of depiction was an artefact of animation/video production in a black-and-white or early-colour era, much like how old cartoon animals with black fur often wear white gloves, to give hands/mouths some contrast and make movement visible.
Arguably, even "modern" cameras are apparently not designed with noncaucasian skintones in mind, something interest groups do not tire to bring up.
There's a ton of cartoons from the era clearly blackface.
However, to your point, even recent photographs in color and black and white depict the tonal contrast one could imagine inspiring the cartoon character in question:
Black Face is older then cameras. And as far as modern cameras go, with my limited experience in digital photo post processing, I'd say that the skin tone issue might have something to do with White Balancing. This is tricky in landscapes already, because not everybody carries normal grey cards with them (some people do apparently). And I know from people that shoot a lot more portraits that getting skin tones is always tricky.
Not saying it isn't related to cameras, so. But if it is, I'd suspect it to be much more of an issue with in-camera created JPEGs, RAW files don't do white balancing (at least all my Nikons don't). I have zero clue how dedicated video cameras work, so...
Not so long ago, film processes and machines were optimized and calibrated for reference images of only white faces[1]. Darker-skinned people often found their skin tones were badly reproduced. The analogous thing happened again in digital processes, up to and including AI image processing trained on datasets where white skin is overrepresented. The industry's awareness of this issue is now pretty high. I don't know if the issue is solved in practice on current-gen cameras/phones/software or not. Anyone have latest info?
That's interesting, I hadn't really thought of it that way.
I wonder if that's why the first colour grading exercise in the training material for BMD DaVinci Resolve is an excerpt from a documentary about rhinos, where you need to balance a reasonably clean shot of a white woman, a gorgeous but fairly tricky shot of a black man (in profile, strong sunlight on his nose, eyes and cheek, rest in deep shadow), and a couple of mid and long shots of black gamekeepers walking around.
There's a lot to get right and a lot to get wrong, and you can end up making everyone look a pretty sickly colour.
Here's a good example. I rememeber seeing this back in the 90's when they would have weekend "mini-Cons" in L.A. at places like the Ambassador Hotel for animation and Anime fans. They had to project it on 16mm film.
Even on all known re-releases, we know that some Tom and Jerry episodes have been altered. And 2 episodes, even in their "complete set," are completely absent.
And that is, IMHO, totally fine. We have Tom & Jerry DVD at home, bought years ago for the kids. I loved Tom and Jerry as a kid, the kids loved stuff like Willy E. Coyote, so I thought the DVD set was a good idea. Oh dear, that was the first time I realized that as kid I never saw the old episodes...
Those are good in a historical context to show just how racist cartoons can be, but certainly not for entertainment. Same goes for the early Tintin comics, especially those set in colonial Africa have serious racist undertones. Something even the author acknowledged. And those undertones are completely (?) absent from the later ones. Just shows how subversive racism can be when it is part of everyday culture, and that even non racist people fall prey to using those racist stereotypes in their work. The same goes for sexism and any other kind of systematic discrimination.
For a home release, I get it... and at the same time, I don't.
I'd like to quote the philosopher George Santayana, who I don't agree with that much but certainly agree with on this quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
If we, to use the expression, whitewash all that happened in the past... we'll forget how terrible a place it used to be. So, I would agree that Tom and Jerry cartoons might not belong in a home audience - but that doesn't mean Warner should be incapable of, saying, releasing a true "for collectors" limited-release version of all the unedited shorts with a warning ahead of time.
> Any Tom and Jerry episode involving Mammy Two Shoes
Since I watched Tom and Jerry cartoons many, many times, I just looked up who this is (although I kinda had inferred it, there aren't that many characters in Tom and Jerry :)) and why she's a problem.
Curiously, I always thought she was the owner of the house, so any racist undertones were totally lost on me (note that I'm not American). (I did get that they were quite sexist, no man doing housework ever).
I don't deny the racist intent, but it's funny how one needs the cultural context to get that. I hope in a few decades it will be lost on every kid.
Mammy was lost on pretty much every kid, even in America. Her relevance resurfaced when 'problematic' became part of the common nomenclature to describe such caricatures. If she was, as we say, problematic, there would've been a helluva lot more racist kids running around, probably.
>> If she was, as we say, problematic, there would've been a helluva lot more racist kids running around, probably.
That's not how those things work. And from the outside looking in, there seem to be quite a few racists in the age group that crew up with Tom and Jerry...
Pretty much all these old tropes that we today consider stereotypes about who is at what station in life, and what what kinds of businesses and activities various races and nationalities engage in are completely and totally irrelevant in an age where the help may be any color, the laundromat could be run by anybody, the banker's religion is a toss up and the immigrant tradesman could be from almost any corner of the earth. Without the day to day reality of a living in a mostly racially/ethnically segregated (by law or by cultural norm, doesn't really matter) for these tropes to reinforce they are meaningless as stereotypes. Their only use is for people like you to earn a few quick social credit points taking a stand against.
You don't actually even really see her. Mammy appears for like 5-10 seconds in a handful of episodes and all she does is hit Tom or tell him to catch that mouse. At best, as a kid, you could inference that she's mean to Tom and hits him for not catching Jerry. That's literally it. If that's enough to cause people to go into a tirade of unabashed racism, them yeah, America is absolutely fucked and throttled.
But racism today is so much more constrained and things are so much better now that the fact that you think this is problem today is quite frankly offensive.
If Mammy Two Shoes is a racist stereotype and the cone-hatted slitty-eyed "Ching Chong Chinaman" is a racist stereotype (they are, at that) then so are all the bagpipe-playing violent ginger Scotsmen, and all the slow-witted straw-chewing Irishmen, or indeed the "dumb Southerner" stereotypes.
“Song of the South” is a full-length Disney film and the first to mix live action with animation. One might think with that historic meaning, it would be preserved.
But it’s impossible to find. Even eBay has banned sale of the DVD.
Fortunately I have a copy my father ripped to DVD from some unknown source sometime in the 90s. It’s poor quality.
But also worth noting that it _wasn't_ the first to mix live action with animation. It had been used in shorts and experiments all the way back to 1900, but for a full-length film, Warner Bros. released You Ought to Be in Pictures in 1940. And The Three Cabelleros beat it by nearly two years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRIBUlP3GC4
Because it's a value judgement. It's one thing to say "we don't deal in porn and guns" but to then pick specific media they do deal in and say "oh and also this one" imparts the kind of fine-grained value judgement that it's inappropriate for an eCommerce platform to be making.
I see your point, but there's also value judgements with other categories. How is an "adult" or "pornography" item defined?
Personally, I don't have an issue with a business choosing to ban or allow items as it's their platform and their business choice. If they choose to not sell any lithium batteries due to their flammable nature, then that would also be acceptable and not in my mind dystopian. There's arguably some risk in being involved with sending potentially offensive media through the mail.
If you look into it, Disney (because, well... money, not any actual guilt) actually sold VHS tapes from the 90s to the early 00s in many countries except the US. Many "bootleg" copies originate from them.
You can find the VHS on eBay for ~$40-$50 from the UK.
Yea, but it was a common way to describe the story before Disney titled their movie that way.
So, I wasn’t sure if they where suggesting a VHS version of that 2009 movie existed, making reference to the meme around the 2009 movie being a throwback, or just something else.
If you’re interested in purchasing the shorts that have been released on physical home media (nearly half of episodes have not been) I made this outline of the differences between the various sets and recommended purchasing order: https://frdmtoplay.com/maximizing-bugs-bunny/
I just moved out of my apartment. I have a DVD collection I haven't touched in years, but the capriciousness of online streaming makes me reluctant to downsize it.
Amongst my collection are a bunch of old cartoons including the Looney Tunes Golden Collections. This post makes me glad they didn't get tossed.
Incredible work. THANK YOU! Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes trying to share a specific Bugs episode with a son, daughter, niece, nephew, or even grandchild… knows how infuriating it can be.
Thank You. Such an invaluable resource. It sucks that Warner Brothers use these releases to milk as much money from customers, and worse they haven't released all of the shorts.
I've opined here many times that a lot of stuff is not digitized because it is too expensive to do a professional job, so just use your phone camera to take a snap of each page. (I've done this, it works great.)
That's about 15 seconds a page, and requires no expertise and no equipment other than a phone.
I'm always surprised at the horrified reaction people have to this. In my not-so-humble-opinion, a less than perfect photo is far superior to the museum burned it all up in a fire. Like the Hewlett Packard museum.
To set expectations, I'm a proponent of copyright.
Making a copy for yourself via a camera is fine IMO (and by the law). Distributing it while still under copyright is not. Distributing it after copyright expires (or even once it's no longer available for purchase), again perfectly fine.
None of this stuff makes any sense to me. New kids are born every day. My 9 year old watched Tom & Jerry for the first time a few months ago and loved it. It’s an evergreen market.
I cannot fathom how these companies aren’t making money showing cartoons that were made 60 years ago. Everyone’s dead who made them, presumably they own the rights. If they don’t want them on their platforms, put them on YouTube and promote them.
More and more of these are getting censored. Save them while you can. The Black maid in many of the Tom & Jerry cartoons is going to be a reason to cancel these. Funny, we don’t cancel books from the 19th century (eg Tom Sawyer), but we cancel cartoons from mid-20th.
Isn't it also because those books from the 19th century are in the public domain, so it's unlikely (I won't say "impossible") for them to be canceled because no one controls them. The films from the 40s and 50s still belong to someone.
You might be able to make a better case that "we don't cancel books from the 19th century" if you'd used something other than Tom Sawyer as an example, which has been banned/censored at various times in the US.
True. But in 2022, no one bans books like Tom Sawyer et. al. even though they are inarguably more offensive to minorities than Tom & Jerry. Such books are considered art and in the American Parthenon of literature. Perhaps in 50 more years, Tom & Jerry and Looney Tunes will reach similar artful status.
Even the author of Captain Underpants (Dan Pilkey) and his publisher withdrew from sale an entire decade-old issue of a series spinoff due the use of a stock kung-fu master character in a few scenes.
The last one is rather surprising because the Captain Underpants series has been one of the most challenged and censored books. In an article penned by the author himself, he had this to say:
"To set the record straight, I should point out that my books contain no sex, no profanity, no nudity, no drugs, and no graphic violence (at least nothing you wouldn't see in a 1950's Superman comic book). So what's the big deal? Well, most of it boils down to the fact that not every book is right for every person. There are some adults out there who are not amused by the things that make most children laugh, and so they try to stomp these things out. We've all met people like that, haven't we?"
Excellent point. Banning through cancelation. I have “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” by Dr. Suess. It's in bad condition, but I can show my son what the fuss is about. We can talk about it and have a discussion.
As I recall, there is only one "offensive" page (displays a "chinaman" in a way that is not politically correct)
Isn't it possible / even reasonable to assume that every now and again, a publisher will need to re-tool their printing operations to optimize for different things? Are they obligated to continuously produce new copies of each and every previously-sold work in perpetuity? Could the number of existing copies of those works floating around in the world... maybe just be enough already?
Surely there is a difference between 'no longer producing new copies of books we've been printing and selling for decades' and 'retracting / censoring / canceling' the work to erase it from existence. Getting worked up and calling the former the latter seems like an overreaction to me.
> Surely there is a difference between 'no longer producing new copies of books we've been printing and selling for decades' and 'retracting / censoring / canceling' the work to erase it from existence.
Yes there is. And if you read the articles I listed, the motives for the retractions were made quite clear by the respective parties. In both cases, the removal of the work had nothing to do with market saturation.
> Are they obligated to continuously produce new copies of each and every previously-sold work in perpetuity? Getting worked up and calling the former the latter seems like an overreaction to me.
I'm not arguing against an author's or publisher's rights to delist or even destroy a work. It's well within their rights their to do so any reason whatsoever. It doesn't take being worked up to make it clear that books are just as susceptible to creator/owner censorship as cartoons are or that authors can be fickle and hypocritical. What I take issue with is the philosophical reasoning behind the retraction.
> Could the number of existing copies of those works floating around in the world... maybe just be enough already?
New copies must keep being made. Over time, the number of accidentally misplaced or damaged copies will reduce the numbers in circulation.
> Are they obligated to continuously [retool and] produce new copies of each and every previously-sold work in perpetuity?
Without question. If you appoint yourself as a gatekeeper of a piece of content, you better stay alert and willing to let people through the gate. Anything else amounts to culture hoarding or vandalism as people are denied the chance to participate in a shared experience. Access to affordable culture (all of it) is a right, not a privilege, especially when it’s so bloody cheap to duplicate.
Don’t want the responsibility of granting people access in perpetuity? Let people duplicate the content freely. Pirates will do it without grumbling if you just let them.
You can't really compare books and cartoons because of the big difference in how they are consumed, especially by kids.
Kids seek out cartoons and will happily watch them for hours. A problem parents often face is getting their kids to stop consuming so much video entertainment that the kid doesn't want to do things like go outside or exercise.
Most kids on the other hand have no interest in books like "Tom Sawyer" and are only going to read them when they get assigned in school. There the books will be accompanied by lectures and class discussions that put them in historical context.
In the Looney Tunes case, it's because the content was licensed to the HBO Max subsidiary from Warner Bros (now Warner Bros Discovery), and they didn't renew the licensing.
Or, in other words, it's just stupid numbers games to make HBO Max's balance sheet look better, under the premise that consumers are too dumb to realize that it's actively making the service worse.
> Long story short, there are legal rules and regulations allowing a company like WBD to write down costs incurred as part of a post-merger restructuring — but only for a short amount of time. Taking shows such as Minx or Westworld out of the HBO Max and, more importantly, WBD library will apparently help the megacorporation make its future balance sheets look a lot better. This isn’t just about saving a few thousand dollars on residual checks or licensing costs; it’s about writing down millions in amortization costs these titles would have incurred in coming years.
It still doesn’t make sense to me. What do they write down? They already paid for those shows! Several decades ago, in some cases. Can someone that understand accounting more explain?
They are basically doing a clean up of their balance sheet.
Those old WB shows still had value. So they were an asset in the balance sheet. Long lived assets /intangible assets usually have a long life, something like 40 years, and the clock would have started from the moment that remastered show was created.
These costs would have been hitting the income line as amorrization costs for many many years. Making their EPS look worse than it should.
Still, I question the logic, because you can write down an impaired asset without actually retiring it from service. Some beancounter somewhere had the bright idea to write down the asset to improve the balance sheet and P&L... But that should not mean you pull the shows out of circulation, andbecause they are barely driving any traffic, they have a solid accountinh argument for saying that their economic value is zero.
If a car has fully amortized but it still works, you probably dont stop driving it!
It's better for a business to have expenses in depreciation and amortization because it lowers the tax burden on a cash cost that's typically already been paid years before.
I would love an in-depth review on why this move is smart or not.
The question is do you lower taxes today a great deal ( a write off) or do you little by little via amortization.
Ita quite common for companies to shed garbage and bad deals during acquisitions by booking writedowns (sometimes they are even used to hide fraud)... whats unusual in this case is that they are using the deal not ho hide fraud, but to hide good remastered shows they would rather not explain as a writeoff to anyone looking at their financials.
Right now its open season to shed stuff and they are killing good shows in the process.
Its like killing a perfectly healthy child during wartime...because you have too mouths to feed and hes not a particular cute child.
I searched 1337x and TPB. I see something like this but without “project v2022” and the torrent is from 2015. It’s 159.5 GB. How do in find the more recent one you mention?
EDIT: I found a link to it on Reddit r/looney tunes pointing to bt4g.org. 411.93 GB so much larger than the 2015 version. Comments say it has and more and more blu-ray and restored content over older versions.
Warner Bros. takes its goods to market on publicly maintained roads, sells its sitcoms and movies to networks that broadcast on public airwaves, and distributes its movies to theaters and homes through fiber-optic cables that run over and under public land. The company is bound up in our shared history, and it has produced a great deal of art that is essential to that history.
This argument suggests that anything you do partially belongs to the author, as well; airwaves aside, all of us are enabled in some way by public investments.
I was educated at a public school, went to college on tuition funded by scholarships, where I learned things written in public libraries by people studying with public funds, now I commute physically on public roads and digital cables...
Anything I accomplish is tied up in our shared history. To say that the unique things I built are attributable to me and me alone is to ignore that someone else with the same knowledge and the same problems would likely come up with the same ingenious solutions.
I don't want to nerd out on this too much and, like, come up with a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook-style answer to this problem, but we could do something like: if you make up to, like, $10,275, we could ask for 10% of that, and then if you make up to $41,775, we could ask for 12% of that extra money, and then up to, I don't know, $89,075, we could take ownership of maybe 22% of it, and if you're making a cool $170,050, 24%.
I know this seems a little fantastical and engineering-brain-y but it also means we don't have to spend much time thinking about how much of Obi-Wan Kenobi the state of Oklahoma owns; we can just settle the whole obligation back to society in dollars. I don't know, seems simple to me.
I think it’s already covered by a system called “taxation”, in which the government requires we pay for our income, the right to own the house we bought, the amount we made on retail sales, the right to live in our state, the right to live in our county, etc.
Further not everyone learns so much from it. I learned to read before attending public school and was mostly meh at it. I learned math in spite of it (my math teachers would be schockedto learn I use it daily.)
That said the internet is where I learned most things and it exists thanks to the DOD and ISPs have a lot of subsidies to thank for their existence (at least the ones in the rural area I grew up in)
> I disagree quite strongly. It's an inherently collectivist point of view. It enslaves the individual and post-hoc justifies the theft of their property with terms that they never agreed to and which were imposed on them as a child.
Nothing stops you from seceding or overthrowing government if you don't like it. But because what you want won't fly with the rest of society, peaceful options are not feasible.
> Being born in the same country as you does not entitle you to my property and work.
Of course you use collectivist idea that every individual can continue to own things while unable to defend them and themselves from potential new owners. Such idea is enforced by majority through government (it's not perfect especially in USA), it's collectivist idea. In natural state, people will fight for resources and take them from eachother. But such constant warfare also waste a lot of resources. So people compromised.
> Being born in the same country as you does not entitle you to my property and work.
In that case you wouldn't be entitled to any of society's collective work either. Electricity? Sorry you didn't invent it. Fire? Not your intellectual property either, no heat for you. Have you reimbursed anyone for your use of a language you didn't create lately? After all, it's immoral to benefit from someone else's work.
Libertarians have this strange lack of awareness of the fact that the world we live in is built on millennia of other people's work, without which they'd be foraging naked in the mud with sticks.
> It enslaves the individual and post-hoc justifies the theft of their property with terms that they never agreed to and which were imposed on them as a child.
Leave then. You're no longer a child, it's in your power to simply start walking. What's stopping you? Perhaps the "collectivist" society is actually quite comfortable? Perhaps life outside of one isn't all it's cracked up to be.
> In that case you wouldn't be entitled to any of society's collective work either. Electricity? Sorry you didn't invent it.
I buy electricity. I don't tell the people creating that I am entitled to it because we're both members of the same society.
> Fire? Not your intellectual property either, no heat for you. Have you reimbursed anyone for your use of a language you didn't create lately? After all, it's immoral to benefit from someone else's work.
I'm not clear what point you're trying to make here. It's not immoral to benefit from someone else's work. Infact, mutual benefit is sort of the entire point of society. What's immoral is to take someone's work against their will simply because you feel entitled to it.
> Libertarians have this strange lack of awareness of the fact that the world we live in is built on millennia of other people's work, without which they'd be foraging naked in the mud with sticks.
Authoritarians have a complete lack of awareness of history, especially the history of societies that begin treating their productive members as kulaks to be robbed.
> Leave then. You're no longer a child, it's in your power to simply start walking. What's stopping you? Perhaps the "collectivist" society is actually quite comfortable? Perhaps life outside of one isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The US is still relatively individualistic. I quite like it still, for all its faults, and contribute quite a lot to it. Rather than leave, I intend to stay and continue to disagree with the collectivists hoping to change it, and advocate for individualism. Not wanting to live in a collectivist society doesn't mean not wanting to live in a society at all.
> I buy electricity. I don't tell the people creating that I am entitled to it because we're both members of the same society.
Society, through taxation, has put in place the systems that make large scale electricity generation feasible. Without it you'd be unable to buy electricity at all. In fact you'd more likely be bartering the shiny pebbles you'd found while washing in a nearby river.
> I'm not clear what point you're trying to make here. It's not immoral to benefit from someone else's work. In fact, mutual benefit is sort of the entire point of society. What's immoral is to take someone's work against their will simply because you feel entitled to it.
Mutual benefit is exactly what's occurring. Without society you wouldn't be able to carry out that work at all. You willingly engage in the work that society makes possible with the understanding that society will receive a percentage for it's part in enabling it.
What's immoral is feeling entitled to benefit from collective knowledge and effort for nothing. Why shouldn't society expect something in return for providing collective knowledge and infrastructure? I look forward to the independent rediscovery of computation.
> Authoritarians have a complete lack of awareness of history, especially the history of societies that begin treating their productive members as kulaks to be robbed.
It's precisely an awareness of history that reveals the danger of your position. Societies that fail to balance disparity collapse violently. The failures of "collectivist" societies lay clearly in the power imbalance between a small group of individuals and the collective whole.
The irony of your "productive members" largely being slavers or aristocrats of lands won through violence should not be missed. On the other hand, child prostitution and capitalism entered the USSR hand in hand.
To return to a more modern example, disregarding any other potential benefit, taxation keeps me safe from desperate people. I happen to enjoy going about my business safely. In fact I greatly prefer it to fighting off the hungry.
As far as being authoritarian, perhaps we're using varying definitions. I'm happy for people to live their lives as they please to the degree that they don't impose on the freedoms of others. To me, a major factor in that is the management of wealth disparity and the provision of a basic standard of living. Personally, our current system feels coercive in the sense that it puts the majority of people in a situation where they are effectively forced to accept poor treatment and pay. The reticence of most people towards cleaning work illustrates this. The reality of the job is decoupled from how much it pays. This is a result of a huge number of people lacking the freedom to demand better conditions or pay.
But that's conflating property and intellectual property.
If you steal my car, I don't have use of it. If I copy your book, we both have copies.
Further western law for the past 800 years looked dimly on the rights of women. Should we deny women the vote, just because that's how it's alway been done? Is an argument not required to explain why women shouldn't have the vote?
The challenge was against the status quo. It is up to such a challenge to provide a compelling reason to change the law.
Anyone with common sense knows that copying my book is theft (Assuming standard copyright. I have released several books under permissive terms myself.) This goes way back to Dickens and Beethoven, who were damaged by piracy, along with many of their contemporaries.
>The challenge was against the status. It is up to such a challenge to provide a compelling reason to change the law.
Was that done all the times copyright was retroactively increased?
>Anyone with common sense knows that copying my book is theft.
Just because we use the same language for ideas as we do for physical things. Doesn't mean they are equivalent. Calling it intellectual property doesn't magically make it property. And it is common sense that copying is theft.
Further book copying isn't theft, at least in the UK. Theft requires an intent to permanently deprive. If I copy your book I'm not permanently depriving you of it.
I agree it is tied up in our shared history. I hope you take that fact as reason enough to share your work in a reasonably accessible manner. But I cannot compel you to do so, at least not in most circumstances, exceptions being inevitable of course.
I agree with the essential point that no one exists in isolation, we all build on the work of others, but I don't see how your last sentence follows from the previous statements. We can all have the same background, but that doesn't make us all the same. There's strong evidence, for example, that genes play a large role in how we behave.
But we are reacting to society. Hence, clone versions of you living 100 years ago, in current times, and 100 years in the future are going to react differently because there are different inputs and different accepted outputs to their behavior. They all are going to have different assumptions about the world around them because they live in worlds with different sets of knowledge. Schooling would be different (I'm assuming things continue to improve/change over time in the future). Nutrition, healthcare, transportation, communication... all has changed so much.
And this is the same when comparing current times. Three clones of you might act similarly in some respects, but vastly different in others. We've studied this exact thing by studying identical twins, actually, and even growing up in the same country doesn't even out the differences.
At the end of the day, it does mean that even though genes might affect the way we act, the comment you are replying to is absolutely correct.
I don't understand your reply. I didn't say that people growing up in different times would act the same or that people with identical genes would act the same. I'm arguing that different people will act differently in the same circumstances. If you want to establish that OP is absolutely correct, you need to show that people with different inclinations and abilities act the same way as each other when in identical circumstances. This seems self-evidently incorrect to me. People have varying amounts and types of mental faculties and so make different choices, even when presented with the same situations.
I think the stronger argument here is that Warner Bros. has profited from a legal regime that prohibits unlicensed distribution of their work. It's not unreasonable to suggest that they have some kind of reciprocal responsibility to the commons.
The way to really enforce this is to reduce the copyright protection period from essentially forever (thanks to Disney) to being more like patents, ~20 years.
Why any copyright at all? Humanity did perfectly well building modern civilization without it; it’s only been within the last couple hundred years that we have had copyright to any degree, much less it’s innovation-stifling modern format.
So I don’t know if there’s any good answers to this but in a world without any copyright today you would have some $tech_giant scooping all copyrighted content in real time and streaming it for pennies. There would be no avenue at all for someone to make money on the actual content. It would all have to be side-channels like merch and product placements. Distributors would make money on ads and subscription dollars but none of it would get back to the creators. Musicians at least have live performances but the spiritual equivalent, theaters, are no different than the streaming service and wouldn’t pay either. Nobody would have to license art for prints, shirts, use by other businesses.
Copyright sucks in so many ways but replacing it with nothing at all would actually kill creative industries. My personal ideal solution is copyright with fair (as to be determined by courts so you can’t charge $1e100) mandatory licensing. Wanna make a derivative work, use someone’s art, show a movie, have a
show on your streaming service? As long as you pay the royalties nobody can tell you no.
>There would be no avenue at all for someone to make money on the actual content.
Except this is trivially disprovable by simply looking at YouTube.
Copyright plays essentially zero role in the business models of the vast majority of sucessful youtubers, and it is arguably a platform that is far more sucessful than traditional media at producing high quality, relevant content.
Sure, if you get rid of copyright some business models will no longer be possible... but some new business models will now be viable.
You wouldn't argue "we have to protect the baby crushing machine industry because if we don't then the baby crushers won't have a job", so why are you making that argument for copyright?
Copyright hasn't stopped rampant piracy and bootlegging either, but a lot of that is due to super annoying or unavailable legal ways to stream/acquire the same content.
I don't think you'd be able to support with evidence the argument that copyright has stifled innovation, given that the "modern format" of copyright tracks an extraordinarily innovative period.
Even you aren't identifying cause and effect though. Copyright postdates the printing press. Is it copyright or the printing press that led to the explosion in books?
Then if you look at technology like the internet, there's plenty of people creating things, not for monetary reward, but because they enjoy it.
Not that I'm necessarily on the same /page/ as the parent. I would defend copyright as a tool to enable new works to be created and allow creators to make a living, and ultimately get works into the public domain. As such I would limit copyright to a much shorter period.
I am certainly against the continual copyright extensions where things now need to be almost a century old before they enter the public domain (at least in the US), but limited copyright has purpose -- it created the possibility of professional authors, for example. In ancient times the Romans who wrote things were almost entirely noblemen who did it as a hobby and didn't need to support themselves. And the Middle Ages a lot of authors were monks who were likewise supported by their monasteries. But in the early modern era authors were able (through copyright) to make a living doing that. And things like invention of the novel as we know it are from this period. Going back to life + 25 or life + 50 would still allow authors to make money, support their loved ones after their death, and still put things into the public domain while they are still more culturally relevant. Obviously, publishers wouldn't like that of course.
Again with this lifespan stuff. The term of copyright determines much of the value of the work, the very moment is put on the market by the author. The extra value realized by a term of 70 years versus 56 (the 1909 number) is, in significant part, realized during the author's lifetime. It gives them something more valuable to sell.
There are other reasons to argue the term should be shorter, or that creators should be granted a less valuable right for their works. But "the current term doesn't track the lifespan of the author well" seems facially nonsensical. I mean, just to start with, there's the difference between John le Carre, whose last book (before he died) was published when he was 88 years old, and someone like Christopher Paolini, the Guiness record holder as youngest author of a bestseller. How does lifespan even make sense here?
I made no suggestion of a term that ended on the author's death in my previous post. I was simply pointing out that even a span of 20 years is a significant proportion of the period we expect someone to be a productive member of society. I believe it reasonable to require that someone competes with others at least three times in their working life.
Although, now that you've brought it up, 10 years with expiry on death of the author sounds fantastic. Authors are incentivised to create new works and companies are incentivised to purchase them. A balance must be struck between rewarding individuals for their work and preventing corporations from monopolising cultural touchstones.
I feel like you're overestimating the financial longevity of the overwhelming majority of works. Most are forgotten about a few years after their release. The ones that aren't will typically have made more than enough money for the author to live lavishly for the rest of their life.
> The extra value realized by a term of 70 years versus 56 (the 1909 number) is, in significant part, realized during the author's lifetime. It gives them something more valuable to sell.
I sincerely doubt that for the vast majority of works publishers are signing contracts based on anything other than how much they think it'll sell in the first year at most. Given that authors struggle to be paid at all unless they've already found massive commercial success, it seems obvious that the only party benefiting from longer copyright terms is the company.
There seems to be a belief that the expiry of the copyright period precludes the author from monetising the work further, whereas it simply means they will begin to compete with others for that monetisation. With a 10+ year head start and humans typically preferring to reward the original creator they should do okay for themselves.
Our current intellectual property regime is fundamentally opposed to how human culture has developed and progressed. It's difficult to imagine how barren a world we'd live in if our predecessors had sought to limit any retelling of a story that wasn't approved by the original author. It's a condemnation of our society that the retelling of many of these stories has been criminalised by a company that found much of it's success in retelling the very same.
I don't think they were. They were blaming Disney for ever increasing copyright terms.
Then suggested their own copyright term.
Just because the copyright wasn't (someone's idea of) perfect prior to Disney, doesn't absolve Disney of responsibly when they start shifting the term in entirely the wrong way.
Over what period of time do new works make most of their money? Over what period are production companies their payback over when deciding whether to invest in new works?
I would suggest 5 years more than covers the above.
To me the point of copyright, and the only way you can defend a state sponsored monopoly is to encourage creation of new works. If 5 years does that, any more just prevents derivative works, which are new creations in their own right.
I'll grant that perpetual copyright is at least logically sound, but once you move away from that I don't see how you can make an argument for anything more than a minimal (enough to encourage creation) copyright term.
The classic answer to ultra-short copyright terms, and one that I think has some legitimacy, is that short really decreases the cost of just waiting you out.
Let's say you write something brilliant, the next Harry Potter in financial terms. You shop it around but none of the big publishers will touch it, of course they're all owned by 2 or 3 companies. You self publish and it sells a couple hundred copies; 5 years later, bang, a major Hollywood blockbuster and media blitz. No need to pay you a cent.
2 films, the Sherlock and elementary series and now enola Holmes, despite Sherlock Holmes being near (in copyright terms) the end of copyright.
So that would tend to disprove the thesis. Plus it suggests that having the author on board is valueless. Would you want to pay the author a fee and get them on board, or do you want them bad mouthing your new film?
Further, any author that writes a book with any legitimate expectation that it's going to be made in to a film is probably successful enough already.
JK Rowling probably wasn't expecting a film deal. She wrote the books without that expectation. I'm interested in a copyright that encourages and allows her to write books, not make her into a multimillionaire. If anything her success means she can write less books. Is that a good thing? I'm not in favour of keeping her in penury, but copyright should be about allowing them to work, not make it so they can stop.
> 2 films, the Sherlock and elementary series and now enola Holmes, despite Sherlock Holmes being near (in copyright terms) the end of copyright.
He was already mostly public domain, with only a few stories still copyrighted. (And his estate claims that some character traits like "having emotions" are part of those stories.)
The most streamed TV IP on the whole Internet is The Office, whose first episode was shot 18 years ago. Seinfeld is closer to 35 years old.
Houses of the Holy is 50 years old. So is Innervisions. There's A Riot Goin' On? 52.
If you're trying to argue that success at the scale of Zeppelin or Seinfeld isn't somehow an incentive to creation, I mean, OK, but I guess I can rest my case, too.
Yes people do want their work appreciated. I dispute the fact that anyone makes something today based on the financial worth of it 70 years down the road.
Pointing out examples that just so happen to have lasted a long time doesn't mean they made it with that expectation.
Further if that is provably the case, you still have to answer why they have a right to a state sponsored monopoly. And after all that my second suggestion is to have an annual increasing fee. So that only things that the owners are willing to actually make use of and pay to maintain stay copyrighted. That would seem to answer your objection
If you release what you create out into the world, that’s already the way it works. Copyright gives you a monopoly for a while (a long while currently), but ultimately ownership is passed onto the public.
Which is exactly why we pay taxes, go for jury duty, get conscripted in the army and lots more. Individual labor belonging partially to the state isn't some crazy concept but the core idea behind every major political and economic system.
yes, most things should be for the commons. it's unfortunate that we have so few reliable ways to monetize creative output that don't involve fabricated scarcity
Dead people are not known for their appetite, yet copyright lasts 70 years after death.
It's particularly egregious when copyright to some of the most popular works of all time is inherited by people who had nothing to do with the author in his/her lifetime or had not even been born then:
> The composer died unmarried and childless in 1937. His heir was his brother Edouard, who died in 1960, leaving the rights to his former masseuse, Jeanne Taverne, who died four years later. A tangled legal battle in following years saw the rights divided between a number of claimants, including Ms Taverne’s husband’s second wife Georgette. -- https://archive.ph/NOLb7
I've never been able to understand how this is even a colorable argument, and yet it comes up all the time. Yes: the term of copyright lasts long after the death of the artist. But it's that term that gives value to the work in the first place; it's what enables artists to sell their work to distributors.
It doesn't, because nobody knows what works have commercial value 70+ years into the future and thus current business is not conducted on that basis. That's how many popular works end up in random hands in the first place, like in the case of Ravel - they aren't seen as particularly valuable at the time, but become sleeper hits when they earn a special nostalgia or new technologies emerge (television, internet, etc).
Good luck selling a movie to Warner Bros on the premise that it'll be a real money-maker in 2090s on telekinesis-vision platform.
I can make you a list. Cinderella, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Superman, Batman, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, Game of Thrones... You could sell WB the 2090 rights to any one of these, except the ones that are going into the public domain (and those they already own of course). Look at that, the system is 'working'.
This argument requires me to believe that Warner Bros would see no difference in value between a property that becomes public the moment the author dies and a property that has 70 years of exclusivity after that point. Obviously, the difference in value between those two properties is immense, and that value is realized during the author's lifetime.
Only the first few years after publication matter, because that's when virtually all of lifetime revenue is earned. Revenue earned beyond that is usually not enough to even justify proper preservation, leaving huge archives to rot away.
They push for extended copyrights because of a very small number of valuable assets that are nearing expiration, not because they care about increasing the value of content being churned out anew. A prospective term extension's marginal increase in the future present value (FPV) of new works is a rounding error at this point.
Now, for those small number of extremely popular works, an extension does ensure continued investment, at least in the same manner of previous investments. But that has to be weighed against the unfathomable amounts of other content that will continue to rot.
Defenses of patents and copyrights always discuss the theory--how intheory they promote investment. They rarely if ever discuss the empirically proven results. "Against Intellectual Monopoly" does explore the empirically proven results, though they do so more persuasively for patents than with copyrights, if only because there's much more data with patents, and the argument against copyrights is strongest as it concerns reducing terms, not eliminating copyright altogether, IMO. (Also, in their accounting the evidence does justify pharmaceutical drug patents as necessary for recouping costs to overcome other extreme regulatory burdens.)
That's not how that works. Jerry Seinfeld's impressive car collection isn't paying writers' salaries. Which isn't to say he isn't reinvesting some of his windfall, but his dollars don't travel as much as if they otherwise could. It's like the difference between the marginal value of $1 to a pauper vs $1 to a prince; that $1 has much more worth to the pauper (i.e. the struggling artist who could benefit from public domain assets) than it does to the prince, even if the prince spends it on the poor.
As other people keep pointing out, investment decisions don't much care about what might happen 50 years in the future. Windfalls that happen in the future increasingly inure haphazardly; they don't actually figure into the finances of how the industry works, not even as magic helicopter money.
Economists have run the numbers. They have models for this. That's why extension advocates principally hide behind theory, not empirical evidence, because the empirical support is poor at this point.
Jerry Seinfeld's impressive car collection isn't paying writers' salaries; it was rather the other way around. Seinfeld (and Larry David) were the lead writers for the series.
My point is that his car collection isn't paying writers' salaries today. He's not investing all of his windfall back into the entertainment industry. I'm sure he's doing alot of good work, but you don't build an economy around philanthropy; you build it around economic incentives. And Seinfeld and David didn't need the incentive of the multi-billion dollar windfalls, above and beyond what they might have made with shorter terms, to take the risks they took; ditto for NBC's decisions to invest.
EDIT: Let me put it a different way. If all that matters is any marginal effect (and especially if we ignore opportunity costs in the public domain, which is admittedly difficult to quantify), why not make the copyright term 1000 years? Or in perpetuity? If every time someone says, "let's extend it by 10 more years, and here's a hypothetical by which it might incentivize someone in theory", by what principle are you prepared to put your foot down? My principle would be evidence-based, and what evidence exists favors stopping terms extensions, and probably rolling them back somewhat. And fortunately that evidence is also consonant with economic theory, no less so than the hypothetical arguments for continued extension.
> the winners pay for the enormous number of losers.
The original point from someone else way upthread was that the vast majority of revenue streams from published works, especially film and TV, are front-loaded. Yes, most works don't return much value; and, yes, the big winners cover the losers. But the context of this whole subthread is prospective marginal values of copyrights decades in the future (including windfalls in the distant future--I'm trying to strongman your argument) and the degree to which they incentive production of more content.
Your original point (AFAICT) was that people ignore the prospective value of extended terms and its effect on pricing and incentives in the present. And my point was that the FPV of such marginal returns are de minimis, even taking as a given that they're positive and include huge windfalls. Your point makes most sense as a retort to people wishing to roll back copyrights to, say, 20 years or especially 0 years--i.e. only have the right of first publication.
The more meta point is that we could argue hypotheticals all day, but what matters most of all is the quantifiable. Arguments from strong patent and copyright advocates are often analogous to, e.g., the shoe bomber hypothetical in security theater--yes, shoe bombers pose a hypothetical threat, and in fact a shoe bombing incident has even come to pass, but that alone doesn't necessarily justify the airport security regime established in response. To justify it we must look (as best we can) at the quantified costs + benefits, and then make judgements accordingly. So the fact that, hypothetically, marginal returns from copyright extending past 50+ years in the future might effect pricing regimes in the present--or even if we know they in fact do--doesn't resolve the question; it only begs the relevant question: does that value exceed the costs?
The parents point I think is that if you make 100 films today you don't know which will be hits but you can expect X to be and they will pay for the losers.
I don't think that requires the trickle down effect that you seem to be referring to with Seinfeld.
Ok. What's the long term value of farm land? It's going to last forever so it's value should be approaching infinity right?
Or is it based on a 10 year ish payback, with some modifiers for interest rates, the prospect of getting planning permission?
Companies do not think that long term. They are not basing their investment decision on the residuals after 10 years, much less 70
Further what's the point of copyright? Is it to post hoc reward those that have already made successful things? Or is to encourage the creation of new works? If it's the latter, then the value after a year is entirely irrelevant.
Further most new works basically make all their money in the first 12 months. 95% of copyrighted works are basically worthless after 12 months. So again you're just optimising this for a handful of big companies.
Content vanishing is the reason I archive e.g. favorite podcasts and some YouTube videos. For example, the whole cracked.com podcast's back catalogue seems to have effectively vanished from (useful) streaming now, for monetary reasons.
Though even here, backup copies gets increasingly harder to create. Another podcast I listen to has now stopped having an RSS/xml feed and while it seemingly is available still, it's available only in a proprietary player on ne web site.
Warehouse fires are one thing. But increasingly, change of distribution model is ruining the availability of stuff that was free to access when created, for purely profit reasons.
The cracked.com podcast, specifically the episodes with Jason Pargin were God-tier.
I can't see a world in which I would re-listen to the archive, but they were foundational to so much of my thinking. And to this day I follow Pargin on whatever podcast episode he goes on, and on any subject, knowing it'll be incredible.
If you somehow haven't heard, the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating Podcast has him as a regular guest: https://sifpod.podbean.com/
Each of these are by former Cracked employees, so when Jason Pargin is on, the conversation gravitates to a lot of the same big subjects - society, art, culture, science, and all the ways in which we take it for granted, or don't understand nearly the way we should.
Jason Pargin, aka David Wong, is the main reason I listen to (and yes, re-listen) the Cracked podcast. I have recommended some of his articles to many folks over the years for it's insightful content, and occasionally revisit them myself. It's literally a case of "come for the jokes, stay for the insightfulness".
Sadly I never really got into his comedy horror books (even though I own one or two). But Pargin has said so many insightful things that are meaningful to me and my psyche, I have once asked him to compile these things into a genuine self-help book. But the man's to humble, I recall he essentially said that there are likely people better suited to do this.
I knew of his new ventures, glad he's still going strong, and yes, of course I do listen to 1-900 with him (as guest) and the incredibly funny Seanbaby. But thanks so much for mentioning it!
Yes, I never got into his comedy horror books either. But I buy every single one because he's contributed ENDLESS hours of engaging entertainment for me, and the books are the only way I can give him money.
One more link to show to friends, who ask me, why I'm not using streaming platforms for music and buy all my music in downloadable or material format (or, yes, pirate it if buying in such formats is impossible). And own huge NAS. And pay hefty price (more than typical streaming subscription) for (encrypted) cloud backup.
Preservation is piracy, piracy is preservation. Always has been. Anything less risks not fulfilling the “preservation” end of it (such as hoarding rare media because it’s illegal to redistribute).
I find it weird that the article takes turn into portraying this as some kind of "woke"-driven decision by Warner Bros Discovery, when (as noted in a linked article) it's actually just part of the nonsense service-worsening clear-cutting that the company is doing to try and make its short-term financials look better.
They will probably resurface somewhere. While HBOmax was shelving some content for good for tax write offs—this is probably about selling rights to the highest bidder.
I've read a couple of commentators speculating that the cartoons will go to one of those "free ad-supported streaming television" (FAST) platforms like Tubi or Pluto. The ad model is supposedly more profitable for stuff where people will put it on and let it run for hours.
>"I don’t relish explaining to my son why he can occasionally catch me absent-mindedly whistling Stephen Foster’s “Shortnin" Bread” but will never, ever hear me sing the lyrics."
This really seems like an odd comment. "Shortnin Bread" is not a Stephen Foster song.
It seems that someone who would take the time to point something like this out would actually know this. Further, the original plantation lyrics were no longer in use in the popular recorded versions of this song at the time Looney Tunes was producing cartoons. Perhaps the author was thinking of Camp Town Races? But again by this time the minstrel show lyric stylings had long been removed in recorded versions and the words in the lyrics themselves are just as silly as they are obscure but not racist in themselves. Both of these songs are basically part of the traditional American folk canon. I mean the Beach Boys recorded a well-known version of "Shortnin Bread."
It's time for the Copyright Term Reduction Act. 50 years from first publication. That's it.
Incidentally, all the Private Snafu cartoons have been uploaded to YouTube in high quality by the Library of Congress. Most of them are also on the Internet Archive.
Whatever happened to the supposed future where information wanted to be free, and we would have these video libraries of the future that would contain virtually infinite selection? It did seem for a few years at least that we were headed in that direction.
It would be interesting if there was a Popcorn Time style app that only streamed content older than 20-30 years and required you to do oAuth login for paid services that support independent artists. It might not be any less illegal, but it might seem reasonable to a lot of people that wouldn't support a less targeted form of piracy.
The pirates will always be free, and control freaks who can't control their own feelings will always impose their will on the rest of the world in the name of decorum, or civility or whatever word they want to attach to their elitism so they can see themselves as "better" even when it is less sophisticated and nuanced (ham-fisted).
I find the article content infuriating and thus only skimmed. I don’t know if copyright is a factor somewhere here, but to me personally it is irrelevant. I shall look for a complete collection online with the best possible restoration / transfer. Surely someone has compiled such a set. I appreciate the archive link shared here in another comment.
I am getting a ton of adverts for "Velma" when watching YouTube. My YouTube habit is exclusively mountain biking, woodworking and home improvement. I am not sure how targeted YouTube's advertising is but have come up with three theories:
1) Data sharing with Netflix (I do love Big Mouth)
2) Using the content I watch as a correlation for my age, and therefore susceptibility to Scooby-Doo nostalgia.
3) Wide net, no targeting. YouTube is just blasting these ads to everyone.
Nothing in the advertisements has piqued my interest in the show either. It looks uninspired.
I had never heard of it, but with an imdb rating of 1.7 for 10k votes [1], it makes it to the top 20 worst shows/movies (with over 10k votes) in history.
The worst movie in that category seems to be a biography of Erdogan [2].
At least some of that (maybe a lot of it) is just reflexive hate-voting... but by all accounts the show is also just genuinely bad. Probably not all-time bad, but bad.
I haven’t watched it yet, but it’s been out for less than a week, so I suspect that rating may change going forward. (Or maybe it really is awful? Feels like brigading to me, though.)
It's a Scooby-Doo property...without Scooby-Doo (think the explanation for that is it's meant to be a "Velma origin story").
This is the kindof remake/re-imagining that gets made ostensibly for a different audience...but in the process alienates the traditional audience...which makes it end up with no audience.
Mindy Kaling was a big part of the success of the American Office and has other successes in a relatively short career, so it's not hard to see why it was green-lit...but frankly it's rating is probably about what it should expected to be.
From what I've heard, it is unlikely to go up much. Absolute mess of a show that seems to go out of its way to insult any audience likely to watch it and who's only redeeming feature is that when the animators are trying they're doing a really good job.
I have yet to encounter a single person defending the show on these grounds, and I know or follow a lot of progressive/feminist/queer/etc. type people.
This one has the complete 1000 episode collection as well as movies and specials. Magnet link when you click “Open”. It’s got about a dozen seeders and I’m getting about 8 MB/sec download rate:
Notably, this project combines the best possible video and audio to obtain a single best version of each episode (things combining foreign DVD video and English LaserDisc audio for some). So, as is often the case with piracy, it likely has strictly better technical characteristics than any streaming offering.
> There are vile ethnic caricatures and slurs in those patriotic cartoons from the Second World War, and to its immense credit, Warner Bros. has often worked to contextualize and preserve those shorts. In several cases, it has included those works in separate subsections on home-video releases, so that they won’t autoplay with the rest of the cartoons.
If only more shared this view that we should thoughtfully and critically engage with problematic elements of classic works rather than summarily banishing them.
Do you have a list of these classic, summarily-banished works? In a world where Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is available on mainstream streaming services, it's hard to imagine what atrocities you're thinking of.
They worst of them are referred to as the Censored Eleven, although you can easily find them intact (albeit, with a warning). It's not a complete list - others have been added to the list since, such as WWII cartoons with highly racist anti-Japanese charactures.
An example of one illustrates why the content might be considered problematic: "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs". A contemporary review said, "A satire on Snow White done in blackface, set in modern swing, this is the best in a long time. It's very funny."
The "atrocities" include rampant racism, sexism, and other needless offenses with the intent of comedy. Other media of the time, such as Theodore Geisel/Dr Suess' wartime cartoons, often show up on these lists as well.
In my opinion, it's good that these cartoons are accessible, with content warnings, yet kept out of normal playback rotation. They're relics of an age gone, thankfully, past.
My avatar for the longest time was the Minah Bird in the short Inki and the Minah Bird.
For those who are unaware, the Inki character in this short was a small tribal African child in a grass skirt who spent his days attempting to hunt various animals with a spear. And by African, I mean the blackface depiction with the white lips that is reminiscent of old Al Jolson films.
Now, I didn't remember ANYTHING about this part of the video. I had last watched it when I was a small child. But I enjoyed the part I did remember, namely the Minah bird, because the bird was methodical, walked in step with Mendelssohn's "The Hebrides," and could whup the crap out of anything. So when it came time to choose an avatar during a period of time when people were not using their faces as screen shots, I used this character.
It wasn't until years later that my girlfriend, who happened to be black, asked me why the cartoon bird was my avatar. So I looked it up and... let's just say I discontinued use of the avatar before the topic was broached again.
Oof, I was hoping you weren't talking and the black bird that did the little hop thing I remember from the cartoons. You were. I didn't remember and probably didn't understand the context of it at the time.
I don't think the show is necessarily THAT offensive, for what it's worth. Yes, the depiction of the child's physical appearance is stereotypical of the era (the child's name is problematic too), but the story being told is that of a young child from a hunting community who is learning to hunt by terrorizing insects with his spear until he runs across something (a lion with false teeth) that makes HIM the prey. The lion is just unlucky because he keeps running into the Minah bird whenever he's actually got the child in his grasp.
What's sad about the racist aspect of the show is that the depiction of a child at play in this show totally mirrors the behavior of children when they get a bug catching net. It's a Merrie Melodie, so there's no speech or inner monologue that is forced upon all children's shows day. Just a kid being a kid.
The story is alright. The way they drew the character, definitely not alright. And you know the lovely associations racists make between black people and spears.
Could have been a cute animation about a kid biting off more than they could chew. And a hapless lion and a bird that takes not shit. It's a shame they had to shove the nastiness in there.
> And by African, I mean the blackface depiction with the white lips that is reminiscent of old Al Jolson films.
Not trying to excuse anything, but I wonder how much this kind of depiction was an artefact of animation/video production in a black-and-white or early-colour era, much like how old cartoon animals with black fur often wear white gloves, to give hands/mouths some contrast and make movement visible.
Arguably, even "modern" cameras are apparently not designed with noncaucasian skintones in mind, something interest groups do not tire to bring up.
> I wonder how much this kind of depiction was an artefact of animation/video production in a black-and-white or early-colour era
Zero. Nada, Nothing.
The history of blackface begins with stage and musical performances "aping" actual black musicians and banjo players [1].
There wasn't a lot of film work happening in 1848 . . .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minstrel_show
There's a ton of cartoons from the era clearly blackface.
However, to your point, even recent photographs in color and black and white depict the tonal contrast one could imagine inspiring the cartoon character in question:
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-3e50441087256791f079ff...
https://get.pxhere.com/photo/black-and-white-people-white-ph...
Until you get to the name Inki... tips their hand a bit.
Black Face is older then cameras. And as far as modern cameras go, with my limited experience in digital photo post processing, I'd say that the skin tone issue might have something to do with White Balancing. This is tricky in landscapes already, because not everybody carries normal grey cards with them (some people do apparently). And I know from people that shoot a lot more portraits that getting skin tones is always tricky.
Not saying it isn't related to cameras, so. But if it is, I'd suspect it to be much more of an issue with in-camera created JPEGs, RAW files don't do white balancing (at least all my Nikons don't). I have zero clue how dedicated video cameras work, so...
> Arguably, even "modern" cameras are apparently not designed with noncaucasian skintones in mind, something interest groups do not tire to bring up.
That doesn't make a lot of sense. Can you give an example of why you think that?
Not so long ago, film processes and machines were optimized and calibrated for reference images of only white faces[1]. Darker-skinned people often found their skin tones were badly reproduced. The analogous thing happened again in digital processes, up to and including AI image processing trained on datasets where white skin is overrepresented. The industry's awareness of this issue is now pretty high. I don't know if the issue is solved in practice on current-gen cameras/phones/software or not. Anyone have latest info?
[1] https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s...
That's interesting, I hadn't really thought of it that way.
I wonder if that's why the first colour grading exercise in the training material for BMD DaVinci Resolve is an excerpt from a documentary about rhinos, where you need to balance a reasonably clean shot of a white woman, a gorgeous but fairly tricky shot of a black man (in profile, strong sunlight on his nose, eyes and cheek, rest in deep shadow), and a couple of mid and long shots of black gamekeepers walking around.
There's a lot to get right and a lot to get wrong, and you can end up making everyone look a pretty sickly colour.
Here's a good example. I rememeber seeing this back in the 90's when they would have weekend "mini-Cons" in L.A. at places like the Ambassador Hotel for animation and Anime fans. They had to project it on 16mm film.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6q8qen
The "Scat" version of Nagasaki was provided by Leo "Zoot" Watson: https://looneytunes.fandom.com/wiki/Leo_Watson
Even on all known re-releases, we know that some Tom and Jerry episodes have been altered. And 2 episodes, even in their "complete set," are completely absent.
And that is, IMHO, totally fine. We have Tom & Jerry DVD at home, bought years ago for the kids. I loved Tom and Jerry as a kid, the kids loved stuff like Willy E. Coyote, so I thought the DVD set was a good idea. Oh dear, that was the first time I realized that as kid I never saw the old episodes...
Those are good in a historical context to show just how racist cartoons can be, but certainly not for entertainment. Same goes for the early Tintin comics, especially those set in colonial Africa have serious racist undertones. Something even the author acknowledged. And those undertones are completely (?) absent from the later ones. Just shows how subversive racism can be when it is part of everyday culture, and that even non racist people fall prey to using those racist stereotypes in their work. The same goes for sexism and any other kind of systematic discrimination.
For a home release, I get it... and at the same time, I don't.
I'd like to quote the philosopher George Santayana, who I don't agree with that much but certainly agree with on this quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
If we, to use the expression, whitewash all that happened in the past... we'll forget how terrible a place it used to be. So, I would agree that Tom and Jerry cartoons might not belong in a home audience - but that doesn't mean Warner should be incapable of, saying, releasing a true "for collectors" limited-release version of all the unedited shorts with a warning ahead of time.
Ohhhh nooooo not a cartoon Asian man - we need to erase this from history.
Songs of the south
Any Tom and Jerry episode involving Mammy Two Shoes
A few WW2 era animations, Hitler-Donald duck springs to mind.
> Any Tom and Jerry episode involving Mammy Two Shoes
Since I watched Tom and Jerry cartoons many, many times, I just looked up who this is (although I kinda had inferred it, there aren't that many characters in Tom and Jerry :)) and why she's a problem.
Curiously, I always thought she was the owner of the house, so any racist undertones were totally lost on me (note that I'm not American). (I did get that they were quite sexist, no man doing housework ever).
I don't deny the racist intent, but it's funny how one needs the cultural context to get that. I hope in a few decades it will be lost on every kid.
Mammy was lost on pretty much every kid, even in America. Her relevance resurfaced when 'problematic' became part of the common nomenclature to describe such caricatures. If she was, as we say, problematic, there would've been a helluva lot more racist kids running around, probably.
>> If she was, as we say, problematic, there would've been a helluva lot more racist kids running around, probably.
That's not how those things work. And from the outside looking in, there seem to be quite a few racists in the age group that crew up with Tom and Jerry...
Oh please.
Pretty much all these old tropes that we today consider stereotypes about who is at what station in life, and what what kinds of businesses and activities various races and nationalities engage in are completely and totally irrelevant in an age where the help may be any color, the laundromat could be run by anybody, the banker's religion is a toss up and the immigrant tradesman could be from almost any corner of the earth. Without the day to day reality of a living in a mostly racially/ethnically segregated (by law or by cultural norm, doesn't really matter) for these tropes to reinforce they are meaningless as stereotypes. Their only use is for people like you to earn a few quick social credit points taking a stand against.
I mean here's the problem:
You don't actually even really see her. Mammy appears for like 5-10 seconds in a handful of episodes and all she does is hit Tom or tell him to catch that mouse. At best, as a kid, you could inference that she's mean to Tom and hits him for not catching Jerry. That's literally it. If that's enough to cause people to go into a tirade of unabashed racism, them yeah, America is absolutely fucked and throttled.
But racism today is so much more constrained and things are so much better now that the fact that you think this is problem today is quite frankly offensive.
If Mammy Two Shoes is a racist stereotype and the cone-hatted slitty-eyed "Ching Chong Chinaman" is a racist stereotype (they are, at that) then so are all the bagpipe-playing violent ginger Scotsmen, and all the slow-witted straw-chewing Irishmen, or indeed the "dumb Southerner" stereotypes.
> Curiously, I always thought she was the owner of the house...
Same here. I always thought she was the "mom" of the house. It wasn't until I was an adult that I had enough context to understand the undertones.
“Song of the South” is a full-length Disney film and the first to mix live action with animation. One might think with that historic meaning, it would be preserved.
But it’s impossible to find. Even eBay has banned sale of the DVD.
Fortunately I have a copy my father ripped to DVD from some unknown source sometime in the 90s. It’s poor quality.
I mean, it's available right here: https://archive.org/details/SongOfTheSouthHD
But also worth noting that it _wasn't_ the first to mix live action with animation. It had been used in shorts and experiments all the way back to 1900, but for a full-length film, Warner Bros. released You Ought to Be in Pictures in 1940. And The Three Cabelleros beat it by nearly two years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRIBUlP3GC4
More on that history here: https://www.motionpictures.org/2013/07/from-gene-kelly-to-th...
https://ok.ru/video/2507546102438
eBay banning the sale of the DVD is extremely dystopian
Is there any more dystopian than Google editing Frank Zappa’s track listings because of a single track?
Why is it an issue for eBay to ban it when there's already a list of prohibited categories of items?
It's easy enough to download a copy of it if you're interested in banned items.
Because it's a value judgement. It's one thing to say "we don't deal in porn and guns" but to then pick specific media they do deal in and say "oh and also this one" imparts the kind of fine-grained value judgement that it's inappropriate for an eCommerce platform to be making.
I see your point, but there's also value judgements with other categories. How is an "adult" or "pornography" item defined?
Personally, I don't have an issue with a business choosing to ban or allow items as it's their platform and their business choice. If they choose to not sell any lithium batteries due to their flammable nature, then that would also be acceptable and not in my mind dystopian. There's arguably some risk in being involved with sending potentially offensive media through the mail.
it's a private company
If you look into it, Disney (because, well... money, not any actual guilt) actually sold VHS tapes from the 90s to the early 00s in many countries except the US. Many "bootleg" copies originate from them.
You can find the VHS on eBay for ~$40-$50 from the UK.
Interesting. I guess VHS is the low-quality source of my DVD rip.
Another thing you can look into, here's the secret words: Canción del sur.
The film went public domain in Spain. And surprise, there's some boutique resellers in Spain who do DVDs and Blu-rays... and add language tracks...
https://www.amazon.com/Song-South-Blu-Ray-Reg-Spain/dp/B09BD...
Thanks!!
Also “ The Princess and the Frog “ and “ Mary Poppins “ (1964)
What about them? The Princess and the Frog is from 2009.
There’s many earlier versions of that story ex: “The Frog (1908)”
But I don’t know which is being referred to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frog_Prince
Sure. But the one titled The Princess and the Frog is 2009.
Yea, but it was a common way to describe the story before Disney titled their movie that way.
So, I wasn’t sure if they where suggesting a VHS version of that 2009 movie existed, making reference to the meme around the 2009 movie being a throwback, or just something else.
forbidding/removing/censoring bad things eventually leads to people forgetting the understanding of why it was considered bad
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If you’re interested in purchasing the shorts that have been released on physical home media (nearly half of episodes have not been) I made this outline of the differences between the various sets and recommended purchasing order: https://frdmtoplay.com/maximizing-bugs-bunny/
I just moved out of my apartment. I have a DVD collection I haven't touched in years, but the capriciousness of online streaming makes me reluctant to downsize it.
Amongst my collection are a bunch of old cartoons including the Looney Tunes Golden Collections. This post makes me glad they didn't get tossed.
DVDs rot after a while, you may want to check those discs and maybe back them up or something.
Get a nas. Put them on there.
Bought the Golden Collection during its original release. In retrospect it seems to have been a worthwhile purchase.
Incredible work. THANK YOU! Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes trying to share a specific Bugs episode with a son, daughter, niece, nephew, or even grandchild… knows how infuriating it can be.
“I wanna Easta egg! I wanna Easta egg!”
Thank You. Such an invaluable resource. It sucks that Warner Brothers use these releases to milk as much money from customers, and worse they haven't released all of the shorts.
Thank you. Ordered some of them!
> LOCKSS, for Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe
I've opined here many times that a lot of stuff is not digitized because it is too expensive to do a professional job, so just use your phone camera to take a snap of each page. (I've done this, it works great.)
That's about 15 seconds a page, and requires no expertise and no equipment other than a phone.
I'm always surprised at the horrified reaction people have to this. In my not-so-humble-opinion, a less than perfect photo is far superior to the museum burned it all up in a fire. Like the Hewlett Packard museum.
I’m surprised the article didn’t mention the 2008 Universal Studios fire, instead deciding to mention much older fires:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire
It was mostly audio masters that were lost, but also some video.
List of what was burned is in the Wikipedia page. I can almost guarantee you’ll recognize some of the names.
To set expectations, I'm a proponent of copyright.
Making a copy for yourself via a camera is fine IMO (and by the law). Distributing it while still under copyright is not. Distributing it after copyright expires (or even once it's no longer available for purchase), again perfectly fine.
None of this stuff makes any sense to me. New kids are born every day. My 9 year old watched Tom & Jerry for the first time a few months ago and loved it. It’s an evergreen market.
I cannot fathom how these companies aren’t making money showing cartoons that were made 60 years ago. Everyone’s dead who made them, presumably they own the rights. If they don’t want them on their platforms, put them on YouTube and promote them.
More and more of these are getting censored. Save them while you can. The Black maid in many of the Tom & Jerry cartoons is going to be a reason to cancel these. Funny, we don’t cancel books from the 19th century (eg Tom Sawyer), but we cancel cartoons from mid-20th.
Isn't it also because those books from the 19th century are in the public domain, so it's unlikely (I won't say "impossible") for them to be canceled because no one controls them. The films from the 40s and 50s still belong to someone.
I hadn’t thought of that. But they can still be “canceled” by libraries and schools choosing to exclude them.
You might be able to make a better case that "we don't cancel books from the 19th century" if you'd used something other than Tom Sawyer as an example, which has been banned/censored at various times in the US.
True. But in 2022, no one bans books like Tom Sawyer et. al. even though they are inarguably more offensive to minorities than Tom & Jerry. Such books are considered art and in the American Parthenon of literature. Perhaps in 50 more years, Tom & Jerry and Looney Tunes will reach similar artful status.
> no one bans books like Tom Sawyer et. al. even though they are inarguably more offensive to minorities than Tom & Jerry.
Not in the traditional sense of the word. The strategy used today is more of a soft damnatio memoriae.
For example, the estate of Dr.Seuss has decided not to publish or sell certain titles over supposedly racist content.
https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/books/exclusive-dr-seuss-st...
Even the author of Captain Underpants (Dan Pilkey) and his publisher withdrew from sale an entire decade-old issue of a series spinoff due the use of a stock kung-fu master character in a few scenes.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-race-captain-underpan...
The last one is rather surprising because the Captain Underpants series has been one of the most challenged and censored books. In an article penned by the author himself, he had this to say:
"To set the record straight, I should point out that my books contain no sex, no profanity, no nudity, no drugs, and no graphic violence (at least nothing you wouldn't see in a 1950's Superman comic book). So what's the big deal? Well, most of it boils down to the fact that not every book is right for every person. There are some adults out there who are not amused by the things that make most children laugh, and so they try to stomp these things out. We've all met people like that, haven't we?"
Rather ironic.
Excellent point. Banning through cancelation. I have “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” by Dr. Suess. It's in bad condition, but I can show my son what the fuss is about. We can talk about it and have a discussion.
As I recall, there is only one "offensive" page (displays a "chinaman" in a way that is not politically correct)
Isn't it possible / even reasonable to assume that every now and again, a publisher will need to re-tool their printing operations to optimize for different things? Are they obligated to continuously produce new copies of each and every previously-sold work in perpetuity? Could the number of existing copies of those works floating around in the world... maybe just be enough already?
Surely there is a difference between 'no longer producing new copies of books we've been printing and selling for decades' and 'retracting / censoring / canceling' the work to erase it from existence. Getting worked up and calling the former the latter seems like an overreaction to me.
> Surely there is a difference between 'no longer producing new copies of books we've been printing and selling for decades' and 'retracting / censoring / canceling' the work to erase it from existence.
Yes there is. And if you read the articles I listed, the motives for the retractions were made quite clear by the respective parties. In both cases, the removal of the work had nothing to do with market saturation.
> Are they obligated to continuously produce new copies of each and every previously-sold work in perpetuity? Getting worked up and calling the former the latter seems like an overreaction to me.
I'm not arguing against an author's or publisher's rights to delist or even destroy a work. It's well within their rights their to do so any reason whatsoever. It doesn't take being worked up to make it clear that books are just as susceptible to creator/owner censorship as cartoons are or that authors can be fickle and hypocritical. What I take issue with is the philosophical reasoning behind the retraction.
> Could the number of existing copies of those works floating around in the world... maybe just be enough already?
New copies must keep being made. Over time, the number of accidentally misplaced or damaged copies will reduce the numbers in circulation.
> Are they obligated to continuously [retool and] produce new copies of each and every previously-sold work in perpetuity?
Without question. If you appoint yourself as a gatekeeper of a piece of content, you better stay alert and willing to let people through the gate. Anything else amounts to culture hoarding or vandalism as people are denied the chance to participate in a shared experience. Access to affordable culture (all of it) is a right, not a privilege, especially when it’s so bloody cheap to duplicate.
Don’t want the responsibility of granting people access in perpetuity? Let people duplicate the content freely. Pirates will do it without grumbling if you just let them.
You can't really compare books and cartoons because of the big difference in how they are consumed, especially by kids.
Kids seek out cartoons and will happily watch them for hours. A problem parents often face is getting their kids to stop consuming so much video entertainment that the kid doesn't want to do things like go outside or exercise.
Most kids on the other hand have no interest in books like "Tom Sawyer" and are only going to read them when they get assigned in school. There the books will be accompanied by lectures and class discussions that put them in historical context.
Crazy parents don't read books.
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In the Looney Tunes case, it's because the content was licensed to the HBO Max subsidiary from Warner Bros (now Warner Bros Discovery), and they didn't renew the licensing.
Or, in other words, it's just stupid numbers games to make HBO Max's balance sheet look better, under the premise that consumers are too dumb to realize that it's actively making the service worse.
But Warner Bros owns HBO Max! How does this change the balance sheet at all?
I still don’t understand the accounting logic, under which it makes sense for Warner Bross to stop putting shows they own on a service they own.
It’s not like it’s costing them any money!
The linked article says this
> Long story short, there are legal rules and regulations allowing a company like WBD to write down costs incurred as part of a post-merger restructuring — but only for a short amount of time. Taking shows such as Minx or Westworld out of the HBO Max and, more importantly, WBD library will apparently help the megacorporation make its future balance sheets look a lot better. This isn’t just about saving a few thousand dollars on residual checks or licensing costs; it’s about writing down millions in amortization costs these titles would have incurred in coming years.
It still doesn’t make sense to me. What do they write down? They already paid for those shows! Several decades ago, in some cases. Can someone that understand accounting more explain?
They are basically doing a clean up of their balance sheet.
Those old WB shows still had value. So they were an asset in the balance sheet. Long lived assets /intangible assets usually have a long life, something like 40 years, and the clock would have started from the moment that remastered show was created.
These costs would have been hitting the income line as amorrization costs for many many years. Making their EPS look worse than it should.
Still, I question the logic, because you can write down an impaired asset without actually retiring it from service. Some beancounter somewhere had the bright idea to write down the asset to improve the balance sheet and P&L... But that should not mean you pull the shows out of circulation, andbecause they are barely driving any traffic, they have a solid accountinh argument for saying that their economic value is zero.
If a car has fully amortized but it still works, you probably dont stop driving it!
It's better for a business to have expenses in depreciation and amortization because it lowers the tax burden on a cash cost that's typically already been paid years before.
I would love an in-depth review on why this move is smart or not.
The question is do you lower taxes today a great deal ( a write off) or do you little by little via amortization.
Ita quite common for companies to shed garbage and bad deals during acquisitions by booking writedowns (sometimes they are even used to hide fraud)... whats unusual in this case is that they are using the deal not ho hide fraud, but to hide good remastered shows they would rather not explain as a writeoff to anyone looking at their financials.
Right now its open season to shed stuff and they are killing good shows in the process.
Its like killing a perfectly healthy child during wartime...because you have too mouths to feed and hes not a particular cute child.
Residuals and royalties are still ongoing payments.
The people watching the shows are ongoing income.
Is this related to the Batgirl situation, where they shelved a practically finished movie for accounting reasons?
The efficiency of capitalism at its finest.
You mean the efficiency of government legal regulations.
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Search "Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies HQ Project v2022" and then fire up your favorite BitTorrent client :)
I searched 1337x and TPB. I see something like this but without “project v2022” and the torrent is from 2015. It’s 159.5 GB. How do in find the more recent one you mention?
EDIT: I found a link to it on Reddit r/looney tunes pointing to bt4g.org. 411.93 GB so much larger than the 2015 version. Comments say it has and more and more blu-ray and restored content over older versions.
Even the old version will be a fine watching experience if you don't want to burn that much HDD space.
It's so sad that in this day and age of broadband we have to resort to pirating instead of streaming.
It's v2020:
That's an older version, yeah. There's also a v2021.
Warner Bros. takes its goods to market on publicly maintained roads, sells its sitcoms and movies to networks that broadcast on public airwaves, and distributes its movies to theaters and homes through fiber-optic cables that run over and under public land. The company is bound up in our shared history, and it has produced a great deal of art that is essential to that history.
This argument suggests that anything you do partially belongs to the author, as well; airwaves aside, all of us are enabled in some way by public investments.
Do you disagree?
I was educated at a public school, went to college on tuition funded by scholarships, where I learned things written in public libraries by people studying with public funds, now I commute physically on public roads and digital cables...
Anything I accomplish is tied up in our shared history. To say that the unique things I built are attributable to me and me alone is to ignore that someone else with the same knowledge and the same problems would likely come up with the same ingenious solutions.
You can attribute your success to that, but that doesn't mean anyone gets ownership over a thing.
How much ownership though? 50%? 1%? 0.05%?
I don't want to nerd out on this too much and, like, come up with a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook-style answer to this problem, but we could do something like: if you make up to, like, $10,275, we could ask for 10% of that, and then if you make up to $41,775, we could ask for 12% of that extra money, and then up to, I don't know, $89,075, we could take ownership of maybe 22% of it, and if you're making a cool $170,050, 24%.
I know this seems a little fantastical and engineering-brain-y but it also means we don't have to spend much time thinking about how much of Obi-Wan Kenobi the state of Oklahoma owns; we can just settle the whole obligation back to society in dollars. I don't know, seems simple to me.
> I don't know, seems simple to me.
I think it’s already covered by a system called “taxation”, in which the government requires we pay for our income, the right to own the house we bought, the amount we made on retail sales, the right to live in our state, the right to live in our county, etc.
whoooooosh
Public school wasn't a choice.
Further not everyone learns so much from it. I learned to read before attending public school and was mostly meh at it. I learned math in spite of it (my math teachers would be schockedto learn I use it daily.)
That said the internet is where I learned most things and it exists thanks to the DOD and ISPs have a lot of subsidies to thank for their existence (at least the ones in the rural area I grew up in)
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> I disagree quite strongly. It's an inherently collectivist point of view. It enslaves the individual and post-hoc justifies the theft of their property with terms that they never agreed to and which were imposed on them as a child.
Nothing stops you from seceding or overthrowing government if you don't like it. But because what you want won't fly with the rest of society, peaceful options are not feasible.
> Being born in the same country as you does not entitle you to my property and work.
Of course you use collectivist idea that every individual can continue to own things while unable to defend them and themselves from potential new owners. Such idea is enforced by majority through government (it's not perfect especially in USA), it's collectivist idea. In natural state, people will fight for resources and take them from eachother. But such constant warfare also waste a lot of resources. So people compromised.
> Being born in the same country as you does not entitle you to my property and work.
In that case you wouldn't be entitled to any of society's collective work either. Electricity? Sorry you didn't invent it. Fire? Not your intellectual property either, no heat for you. Have you reimbursed anyone for your use of a language you didn't create lately? After all, it's immoral to benefit from someone else's work.
Libertarians have this strange lack of awareness of the fact that the world we live in is built on millennia of other people's work, without which they'd be foraging naked in the mud with sticks.
> It enslaves the individual and post-hoc justifies the theft of their property with terms that they never agreed to and which were imposed on them as a child.
Leave then. You're no longer a child, it's in your power to simply start walking. What's stopping you? Perhaps the "collectivist" society is actually quite comfortable? Perhaps life outside of one isn't all it's cracked up to be.
> In that case you wouldn't be entitled to any of society's collective work either. Electricity? Sorry you didn't invent it.
I buy electricity. I don't tell the people creating that I am entitled to it because we're both members of the same society.
> Fire? Not your intellectual property either, no heat for you. Have you reimbursed anyone for your use of a language you didn't create lately? After all, it's immoral to benefit from someone else's work.
I'm not clear what point you're trying to make here. It's not immoral to benefit from someone else's work. Infact, mutual benefit is sort of the entire point of society. What's immoral is to take someone's work against their will simply because you feel entitled to it.
> Libertarians have this strange lack of awareness of the fact that the world we live in is built on millennia of other people's work, without which they'd be foraging naked in the mud with sticks.
Authoritarians have a complete lack of awareness of history, especially the history of societies that begin treating their productive members as kulaks to be robbed.
> Leave then. You're no longer a child, it's in your power to simply start walking. What's stopping you? Perhaps the "collectivist" society is actually quite comfortable? Perhaps life outside of one isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The US is still relatively individualistic. I quite like it still, for all its faults, and contribute quite a lot to it. Rather than leave, I intend to stay and continue to disagree with the collectivists hoping to change it, and advocate for individualism. Not wanting to live in a collectivist society doesn't mean not wanting to live in a society at all.
> I buy electricity. I don't tell the people creating that I am entitled to it because we're both members of the same society.
Society, through taxation, has put in place the systems that make large scale electricity generation feasible. Without it you'd be unable to buy electricity at all. In fact you'd more likely be bartering the shiny pebbles you'd found while washing in a nearby river.
> I'm not clear what point you're trying to make here. It's not immoral to benefit from someone else's work. In fact, mutual benefit is sort of the entire point of society. What's immoral is to take someone's work against their will simply because you feel entitled to it.
Mutual benefit is exactly what's occurring. Without society you wouldn't be able to carry out that work at all. You willingly engage in the work that society makes possible with the understanding that society will receive a percentage for it's part in enabling it.
What's immoral is feeling entitled to benefit from collective knowledge and effort for nothing. Why shouldn't society expect something in return for providing collective knowledge and infrastructure? I look forward to the independent rediscovery of computation.
> Authoritarians have a complete lack of awareness of history, especially the history of societies that begin treating their productive members as kulaks to be robbed.
It's precisely an awareness of history that reveals the danger of your position. Societies that fail to balance disparity collapse violently. The failures of "collectivist" societies lay clearly in the power imbalance between a small group of individuals and the collective whole.
The irony of your "productive members" largely being slavers or aristocrats of lands won through violence should not be missed. On the other hand, child prostitution and capitalism entered the USSR hand in hand.
To return to a more modern example, disregarding any other potential benefit, taxation keeps me safe from desperate people. I happen to enjoy going about my business safely. In fact I greatly prefer it to fighting off the hungry.
As far as being authoritarian, perhaps we're using varying definitions. I'm happy for people to live their lives as they please to the degree that they don't impose on the freedoms of others. To me, a major factor in that is the management of wealth disparity and the provision of a basic standard of living. Personally, our current system feels coercive in the sense that it puts the majority of people in a situation where they are effectively forced to accept poor treatment and pay. The reticence of most people towards cleaning work illustrates this. The reality of the job is decoupled from how much it pays. This is a result of a huge number of people lacking the freedom to demand better conditions or pay.
Who is John Galt?
So you don't use public roads as an adult? Or expect public courts to uphold your (copy)rights?
I don't necessarily agree with the GP, but I don't think you can reject the argument out of hand because you don't like the answer.
The GP has provided an argument as to why they are entitled to your copyrighted work. You haven't provided an argument in response.
> The GP has provided an argument as to why they are entitled to your copyrighted work. You haven't provided an argument in response.
Other way around. Western law has looked dimly for about the last 800 years on having property rights abridged.
But that's conflating property and intellectual property.
If you steal my car, I don't have use of it. If I copy your book, we both have copies.
Further western law for the past 800 years looked dimly on the rights of women. Should we deny women the vote, just because that's how it's alway been done? Is an argument not required to explain why women shouldn't have the vote?
The challenge was against the status quo. It is up to such a challenge to provide a compelling reason to change the law.
Anyone with common sense knows that copying my book is theft (Assuming standard copyright. I have released several books under permissive terms myself.) This goes way back to Dickens and Beethoven, who were damaged by piracy, along with many of their contemporaries.
>The challenge was against the status. It is up to such a challenge to provide a compelling reason to change the law.
Was that done all the times copyright was retroactively increased?
>Anyone with common sense knows that copying my book is theft.
Just because we use the same language for ideas as we do for physical things. Doesn't mean they are equivalent. Calling it intellectual property doesn't magically make it property. And it is common sense that copying is theft.
Further book copying isn't theft, at least in the UK. Theft requires an intent to permanently deprive. If I copy your book I'm not permanently depriving you of it.
I agree it is tied up in our shared history. I hope you take that fact as reason enough to share your work in a reasonably accessible manner. But I cannot compel you to do so, at least not in most circumstances, exceptions being inevitable of course.
I agree with the essential point that no one exists in isolation, we all build on the work of others, but I don't see how your last sentence follows from the previous statements. We can all have the same background, but that doesn't make us all the same. There's strong evidence, for example, that genes play a large role in how we behave.
> There's strong evidence, for example, that genes play a large role in how we behave.
I’ve heard this said before. Can you link to some science about this please?
https://www.livescience.com/47288-twin-study-importance-of-g...
Ok. Genes play a large role in how we behave.
But we are reacting to society. Hence, clone versions of you living 100 years ago, in current times, and 100 years in the future are going to react differently because there are different inputs and different accepted outputs to their behavior. They all are going to have different assumptions about the world around them because they live in worlds with different sets of knowledge. Schooling would be different (I'm assuming things continue to improve/change over time in the future). Nutrition, healthcare, transportation, communication... all has changed so much.
And this is the same when comparing current times. Three clones of you might act similarly in some respects, but vastly different in others. We've studied this exact thing by studying identical twins, actually, and even growing up in the same country doesn't even out the differences.
At the end of the day, it does mean that even though genes might affect the way we act, the comment you are replying to is absolutely correct.
I don't understand your reply. I didn't say that people growing up in different times would act the same or that people with identical genes would act the same. I'm arguing that different people will act differently in the same circumstances. If you want to establish that OP is absolutely correct, you need to show that people with different inclinations and abilities act the same way as each other when in identical circumstances. This seems self-evidently incorrect to me. People have varying amounts and types of mental faculties and so make different choices, even when presented with the same situations.
I think the stronger argument here is that Warner Bros. has profited from a legal regime that prohibits unlicensed distribution of their work. It's not unreasonable to suggest that they have some kind of reciprocal responsibility to the commons.
The way to really enforce this is to reduce the copyright protection period from essentially forever (thanks to Disney) to being more like patents, ~20 years.
Why any copyright at all? Humanity did perfectly well building modern civilization without it; it’s only been within the last couple hundred years that we have had copyright to any degree, much less it’s innovation-stifling modern format.
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...
So I don’t know if there’s any good answers to this but in a world without any copyright today you would have some $tech_giant scooping all copyrighted content in real time and streaming it for pennies. There would be no avenue at all for someone to make money on the actual content. It would all have to be side-channels like merch and product placements. Distributors would make money on ads and subscription dollars but none of it would get back to the creators. Musicians at least have live performances but the spiritual equivalent, theaters, are no different than the streaming service and wouldn’t pay either. Nobody would have to license art for prints, shirts, use by other businesses.
Copyright sucks in so many ways but replacing it with nothing at all would actually kill creative industries. My personal ideal solution is copyright with fair (as to be determined by courts so you can’t charge $1e100) mandatory licensing. Wanna make a derivative work, use someone’s art, show a movie, have a show on your streaming service? As long as you pay the royalties nobody can tell you no.
>There would be no avenue at all for someone to make money on the actual content.
Except this is trivially disprovable by simply looking at YouTube.
Copyright plays essentially zero role in the business models of the vast majority of sucessful youtubers, and it is arguably a platform that is far more sucessful than traditional media at producing high quality, relevant content.
Sure, if you get rid of copyright some business models will no longer be possible... but some new business models will now be viable.
You wouldn't argue "we have to protect the baby crushing machine industry because if we don't then the baby crushers won't have a job", so why are you making that argument for copyright?
Copyright hasn't stopped rampant piracy and bootlegging either, but a lot of that is due to super annoying or unavailable legal ways to stream/acquire the same content.
I don't think you'd be able to support with evidence the argument that copyright has stifled innovation, given that the "modern format" of copyright tracks an extraordinarily innovative period.
Even you aren't identifying cause and effect though. Copyright postdates the printing press. Is it copyright or the printing press that led to the explosion in books?
Then if you look at technology like the internet, there's plenty of people creating things, not for monetary reward, but because they enjoy it.
Not that I'm necessarily on the same /page/ as the parent. I would defend copyright as a tool to enable new works to be created and allow creators to make a living, and ultimately get works into the public domain. As such I would limit copyright to a much shorter period.
I am certainly against the continual copyright extensions where things now need to be almost a century old before they enter the public domain (at least in the US), but limited copyright has purpose -- it created the possibility of professional authors, for example. In ancient times the Romans who wrote things were almost entirely noblemen who did it as a hobby and didn't need to support themselves. And the Middle Ages a lot of authors were monks who were likewise supported by their monasteries. But in the early modern era authors were able (through copyright) to make a living doing that. And things like invention of the novel as we know it are from this period. Going back to life + 25 or life + 50 would still allow authors to make money, support their loved ones after their death, and still put things into the public domain while they are still more culturally relevant. Obviously, publishers wouldn't like that of course.
That's less than half the copyright term we had before Disney even existed.
20 years is still roughly a third of someone's working life. I'm not sure what the argument is for longer, even 20 years seems too long personally.
Again with this lifespan stuff. The term of copyright determines much of the value of the work, the very moment is put on the market by the author. The extra value realized by a term of 70 years versus 56 (the 1909 number) is, in significant part, realized during the author's lifetime. It gives them something more valuable to sell.
There are other reasons to argue the term should be shorter, or that creators should be granted a less valuable right for their works. But "the current term doesn't track the lifespan of the author well" seems facially nonsensical. I mean, just to start with, there's the difference between John le Carre, whose last book (before he died) was published when he was 88 years old, and someone like Christopher Paolini, the Guiness record holder as youngest author of a bestseller. How does lifespan even make sense here?
I made no suggestion of a term that ended on the author's death in my previous post. I was simply pointing out that even a span of 20 years is a significant proportion of the period we expect someone to be a productive member of society. I believe it reasonable to require that someone competes with others at least three times in their working life.
Although, now that you've brought it up, 10 years with expiry on death of the author sounds fantastic. Authors are incentivised to create new works and companies are incentivised to purchase them. A balance must be struck between rewarding individuals for their work and preventing corporations from monopolising cultural touchstones.
I feel like you're overestimating the financial longevity of the overwhelming majority of works. Most are forgotten about a few years after their release. The ones that aren't will typically have made more than enough money for the author to live lavishly for the rest of their life.
> The extra value realized by a term of 70 years versus 56 (the 1909 number) is, in significant part, realized during the author's lifetime. It gives them something more valuable to sell.
I sincerely doubt that for the vast majority of works publishers are signing contracts based on anything other than how much they think it'll sell in the first year at most. Given that authors struggle to be paid at all unless they've already found massive commercial success, it seems obvious that the only party benefiting from longer copyright terms is the company.
There seems to be a belief that the expiry of the copyright period precludes the author from monetising the work further, whereas it simply means they will begin to compete with others for that monetisation. With a 10+ year head start and humans typically preferring to reward the original creator they should do okay for themselves.
Our current intellectual property regime is fundamentally opposed to how human culture has developed and progressed. It's difficult to imagine how barren a world we'd live in if our predecessors had sought to limit any retelling of a story that wasn't approved by the original author. It's a condemnation of our society that the retelling of many of these stories has been criminalised by a company that found much of it's success in retelling the very same.
Sounds good to me!
And....?
And at the very least you can factor Disney out of your argument if you think copyright terms should be less than half of what they were in 1909.
I don't think they were. They were blaming Disney for ever increasing copyright terms. Then suggested their own copyright term.
Just because the copyright wasn't (someone's idea of) perfect prior to Disney, doesn't absolve Disney of responsibly when they start shifting the term in entirely the wrong way.
Why even 20 though?
Over what period of time do new works make most of their money? Over what period are production companies their payback over when deciding whether to invest in new works?
I would suggest 5 years more than covers the above.
To me the point of copyright, and the only way you can defend a state sponsored monopoly is to encourage creation of new works. If 5 years does that, any more just prevents derivative works, which are new creations in their own right.
I'll grant that perpetual copyright is at least logically sound, but once you move away from that I don't see how you can make an argument for anything more than a minimal (enough to encourage creation) copyright term.
The classic answer to ultra-short copyright terms, and one that I think has some legitimacy, is that short really decreases the cost of just waiting you out.
Let's say you write something brilliant, the next Harry Potter in financial terms. You shop it around but none of the big publishers will touch it, of course they're all owned by 2 or 3 companies. You self publish and it sells a couple hundred copies; 5 years later, bang, a major Hollywood blockbuster and media blitz. No need to pay you a cent.
We've just had a thing with Sherlock Holmes.
2 films, the Sherlock and elementary series and now enola Holmes, despite Sherlock Holmes being near (in copyright terms) the end of copyright.
So that would tend to disprove the thesis. Plus it suggests that having the author on board is valueless. Would you want to pay the author a fee and get them on board, or do you want them bad mouthing your new film?
Further, any author that writes a book with any legitimate expectation that it's going to be made in to a film is probably successful enough already.
JK Rowling probably wasn't expecting a film deal. She wrote the books without that expectation. I'm interested in a copyright that encourages and allows her to write books, not make her into a multimillionaire. If anything her success means she can write less books. Is that a good thing? I'm not in favour of keeping her in penury, but copyright should be about allowing them to work, not make it so they can stop.
> 2 films, the Sherlock and elementary series and now enola Holmes, despite Sherlock Holmes being near (in copyright terms) the end of copyright.
He was already mostly public domain, with only a few stories still copyrighted. (And his estate claims that some character traits like "having emotions" are part of those stories.)
Some companies at least have paid for the rights recently though, which still argues against your stance.
Then there's the seven percent solution which came out shortly before Sherlock Holmes went public domain.
The price doesn't matter much vs the annoyance of them suing you for putting emotions in your show.
The most streamed TV IP on the whole Internet is The Office, whose first episode was shot 18 years ago. Seinfeld is closer to 35 years old.
Houses of the Holy is 50 years old. So is Innervisions. There's A Riot Goin' On? 52.
If you're trying to argue that success at the scale of Zeppelin or Seinfeld isn't somehow an incentive to creation, I mean, OK, but I guess I can rest my case, too.
Define 'success'? Financial or something else?
Yes people do want their work appreciated. I dispute the fact that anyone makes something today based on the financial worth of it 70 years down the road.
Pointing out examples that just so happen to have lasted a long time doesn't mean they made it with that expectation.
Further if that is provably the case, you still have to answer why they have a right to a state sponsored monopoly. And after all that my second suggestion is to have an annual increasing fee. So that only things that the owners are willing to actually make use of and pay to maintain stay copyrighted. That would seem to answer your objection
Do you feel that if you produce work you are later ashamed of that you should be forced to sell it against your wishes, if others demand it?
If you release what you create out into the world, that’s already the way it works. Copyright gives you a monopoly for a while (a long while currently), but ultimately ownership is passed onto the public.
Which is exactly why we pay taxes, go for jury duty, get conscripted in the army and lots more. Individual labor belonging partially to the state isn't some crazy concept but the core idea behind every major political and economic system.
yes, most things should be for the commons. it's unfortunate that we have so few reliable ways to monetize creative output that don't involve fabricated scarcity
I think it has something to do with creators needing to, like, eat and protect themselves from the rain.
Dead people are not known for their appetite, yet copyright lasts 70 years after death.
It's particularly egregious when copyright to some of the most popular works of all time is inherited by people who had nothing to do with the author in his/her lifetime or had not even been born then:
> The composer died unmarried and childless in 1937. His heir was his brother Edouard, who died in 1960, leaving the rights to his former masseuse, Jeanne Taverne, who died four years later. A tangled legal battle in following years saw the rights divided between a number of claimants, including Ms Taverne’s husband’s second wife Georgette. -- https://archive.ph/NOLb7
I've never been able to understand how this is even a colorable argument, and yet it comes up all the time. Yes: the term of copyright lasts long after the death of the artist. But it's that term that gives value to the work in the first place; it's what enables artists to sell their work to distributors.
It doesn't, because nobody knows what works have commercial value 70+ years into the future and thus current business is not conducted on that basis. That's how many popular works end up in random hands in the first place, like in the case of Ravel - they aren't seen as particularly valuable at the time, but become sleeper hits when they earn a special nostalgia or new technologies emerge (television, internet, etc).
Good luck selling a movie to Warner Bros on the premise that it'll be a real money-maker in 2090s on telekinesis-vision platform.
I can make you a list. Cinderella, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Superman, Batman, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, Game of Thrones... You could sell WB the 2090 rights to any one of these, except the ones that are going into the public domain (and those they already own of course). Look at that, the system is 'working'.
This argument requires me to believe that Warner Bros would see no difference in value between a property that becomes public the moment the author dies and a property that has 70 years of exclusivity after that point. Obviously, the difference in value between those two properties is immense, and that value is realized during the author's lifetime.
Only the first few years after publication matter, because that's when virtually all of lifetime revenue is earned. Revenue earned beyond that is usually not enough to even justify proper preservation, leaving huge archives to rot away.
Do you buy anything based on what it may be worth 70 years after your death? Do you think any company thinks that long term?
1 year probably. 5 years pushing it. 10 years is basically off any reasonable financial projection any company is going to make.
Yes, clearly they all do. Media companies don't push for extended copyright terms just to spite you. They have easier ways of spiting you than that.
They push for extended copyrights because of a very small number of valuable assets that are nearing expiration, not because they care about increasing the value of content being churned out anew. A prospective term extension's marginal increase in the future present value (FPV) of new works is a rounding error at this point.
Now, for those small number of extremely popular works, an extension does ensure continued investment, at least in the same manner of previous investments. But that has to be weighed against the unfathomable amounts of other content that will continue to rot.
Defenses of patents and copyrights always discuss the theory--how in theory they promote investment. They rarely if ever discuss the empirically proven results. "Against Intellectual Monopoly" does explore the empirically proven results, though they do so more persuasively for patents than with copyrights, if only because there's much more data with patents, and the argument against copyrights is strongest as it concerns reducing terms, not eliminating copyright altogether, IMO. (Also, in their accounting the evidence does justify pharmaceutical drug patents as necessary for recouping costs to overcome other extreme regulatory burdens.)
The marginal value of any random piece of content is a rounding error. It's a hitmaker business; the winners pay for the enormous number of losers.
That's not how that works. Jerry Seinfeld's impressive car collection isn't paying writers' salaries. Which isn't to say he isn't reinvesting some of his windfall, but his dollars don't travel as much as if they otherwise could. It's like the difference between the marginal value of $1 to a pauper vs $1 to a prince; that $1 has much more worth to the pauper (i.e. the struggling artist who could benefit from public domain assets) than it does to the prince, even if the prince spends it on the poor.
As other people keep pointing out, investment decisions don't much care about what might happen 50 years in the future. Windfalls that happen in the future increasingly inure haphazardly; they don't actually figure into the finances of how the industry works, not even as magic helicopter money.
Economists have run the numbers. They have models for this. That's why extension advocates principally hide behind theory, not empirical evidence, because the empirical support is poor at this point.
Jerry Seinfeld's impressive car collection isn't paying writers' salaries; it was rather the other way around. Seinfeld (and Larry David) were the lead writers for the series.
My point is that his car collection isn't paying writers' salaries today. He's not investing all of his windfall back into the entertainment industry. I'm sure he's doing alot of good work, but you don't build an economy around philanthropy; you build it around economic incentives. And Seinfeld and David didn't need the incentive of the multi-billion dollar windfalls, above and beyond what they might have made with shorter terms, to take the risks they took; ditto for NBC's decisions to invest.
EDIT: Let me put it a different way. If all that matters is any marginal effect (and especially if we ignore opportunity costs in the public domain, which is admittedly difficult to quantify), why not make the copyright term 1000 years? Or in perpetuity? If every time someone says, "let's extend it by 10 more years, and here's a hypothetical by which it might incentivize someone in theory", by what principle are you prepared to put your foot down? My principle would be evidence-based, and what evidence exists favors stopping terms extensions, and probably rolling them back somewhat. And fortunately that evidence is also consonant with economic theory, no less so than the hypothetical arguments for continued extension.
Why would Seinfeld's compensation for work he produced in the 1990s be compensating writers today?
I was responding to your retort,
> the winners pay for the enormous number of losers.
The original point from someone else way upthread was that the vast majority of revenue streams from published works, especially film and TV, are front-loaded. Yes, most works don't return much value; and, yes, the big winners cover the losers. But the context of this whole subthread is prospective marginal values of copyrights decades in the future (including windfalls in the distant future--I'm trying to strongman your argument) and the degree to which they incentive production of more content.
Your original point (AFAICT) was that people ignore the prospective value of extended terms and its effect on pricing and incentives in the present. And my point was that the FPV of such marginal returns are de minimis, even taking as a given that they're positive and include huge windfalls. Your point makes most sense as a retort to people wishing to roll back copyrights to, say, 20 years or especially 0 years--i.e. only have the right of first publication.
The more meta point is that we could argue hypotheticals all day, but what matters most of all is the quantifiable. Arguments from strong patent and copyright advocates are often analogous to, e.g., the shoe bomber hypothetical in security theater--yes, shoe bombers pose a hypothetical threat, and in fact a shoe bombing incident has even come to pass, but that alone doesn't necessarily justify the airport security regime established in response. To justify it we must look (as best we can) at the quantified costs + benefits, and then make judgements accordingly. So the fact that, hypothetically, marginal returns from copyright extending past 50+ years in the future might effect pricing regimes in the present--or even if we know they in fact do--doesn't resolve the question; it only begs the relevant question: does that value exceed the costs?
I think you're talking past each other.
The parents point I think is that if you make 100 films today you don't know which will be hits but you can expect X to be and they will pay for the losers.
I don't think that requires the trickle down effect that you seem to be referring to with Seinfeld.
Would you support a copyright term where fees increase exponentially then?
'worthless' copyrights could expire after a year. Copyrights after 50 years can be maintained for X million?
Of course you do, because even if you're gonna sell it in one year, the amount you can sell it for is going to be determined by its long term value.
Ok. What's the long term value of farm land? It's going to last forever so it's value should be approaching infinity right?
Or is it based on a 10 year ish payback, with some modifiers for interest rates, the prospect of getting planning permission?
Companies do not think that long term. They are not basing their investment decision on the residuals after 10 years, much less 70
Further what's the point of copyright? Is it to post hoc reward those that have already made successful things? Or is to encourage the creation of new works? If it's the latter, then the value after a year is entirely irrelevant.
Further most new works basically make all their money in the first 12 months. 95% of copyrighted works are basically worthless after 12 months. So again you're just optimising this for a handful of big companies.
yes, and its unfortunate that they have to fabricate scarcity to take care of themselves
There is a torrent of emotions coming to my mind. Call me a mule but I'm still think those are some of the best entertaining cartoons ever.
* I still think...
You can edit typos if you don't wait too long. You'll see a little edit link over your comment.
Content vanishing is the reason I archive e.g. favorite podcasts and some YouTube videos. For example, the whole cracked.com podcast's back catalogue seems to have effectively vanished from (useful) streaming now, for monetary reasons.
Though even here, backup copies gets increasingly harder to create. Another podcast I listen to has now stopped having an RSS/xml feed and while it seemingly is available still, it's available only in a proprietary player on ne web site.
Warehouse fires are one thing. But increasingly, change of distribution model is ruining the availability of stuff that was free to access when created, for purely profit reasons.
The cracked.com podcast, specifically the episodes with Jason Pargin were God-tier.
I can't see a world in which I would re-listen to the archive, but they were foundational to so much of my thinking. And to this day I follow Pargin on whatever podcast episode he goes on, and on any subject, knowing it'll be incredible.
If you somehow haven't heard, the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating Podcast has him as a regular guest: https://sifpod.podbean.com/
As does 1-900-HOTDOG - https://soundcloud.com/1900hotdog
Each of these are by former Cracked employees, so when Jason Pargin is on, the conversation gravitates to a lot of the same big subjects - society, art, culture, science, and all the ways in which we take it for granted, or don't understand nearly the way we should.
Exactly!
Jason Pargin, aka David Wong, is the main reason I listen to (and yes, re-listen) the Cracked podcast. I have recommended some of his articles to many folks over the years for it's insightful content, and occasionally revisit them myself. It's literally a case of "come for the jokes, stay for the insightfulness".
Sadly I never really got into his comedy horror books (even though I own one or two). But Pargin has said so many insightful things that are meaningful to me and my psyche, I have once asked him to compile these things into a genuine self-help book. But the man's to humble, I recall he essentially said that there are likely people better suited to do this.
I knew of his new ventures, glad he's still going strong, and yes, of course I do listen to 1-900 with him (as guest) and the incredibly funny Seanbaby. But thanks so much for mentioning it!
Yes, I never got into his comedy horror books either. But I buy every single one because he's contributed ENDLESS hours of engaging entertainment for me, and the books are the only way I can give him money.
One more link to show to friends, who ask me, why I'm not using streaming platforms for music and buy all my music in downloadable or material format (or, yes, pirate it if buying in such formats is impossible). And own huge NAS. And pay hefty price (more than typical streaming subscription) for (encrypted) cloud backup.
Preservation is piracy, piracy is preservation. Always has been. Anything less risks not fulfilling the “preservation” end of it (such as hoarding rare media because it’s illegal to redistribute).
I find it weird that the article takes turn into portraying this as some kind of "woke"-driven decision by Warner Bros Discovery, when (as noted in a linked article) it's actually just part of the nonsense service-worsening clear-cutting that the company is doing to try and make its short-term financials look better.
Every time this happens I get angry. Whatever accounting rules are causing this to happen need to be changed pronto.
They will probably resurface somewhere. While HBOmax was shelving some content for good for tax write offs—this is probably about selling rights to the highest bidder.
I've read a couple of commentators speculating that the cartoons will go to one of those "free ad-supported streaming television" (FAST) platforms like Tubi or Pluto. The ad model is supposedly more profitable for stuff where people will put it on and let it run for hours.
Schoolhouse Rock is probably next to vanish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgVKvqTItto
"Elbow Room" and its casual glossing over of extractive colonialism and genocide would really be a better example here.
The only reason I subscribed was the “Paw Patrol” series. They removed them, so I unsubscribed. Streaming is weird.
>"I don’t relish explaining to my son why he can occasionally catch me absent-mindedly whistling Stephen Foster’s “Shortnin" Bread” but will never, ever hear me sing the lyrics."
This really seems like an odd comment. "Shortnin Bread" is not a Stephen Foster song. It seems that someone who would take the time to point something like this out would actually know this. Further, the original plantation lyrics were no longer in use in the popular recorded versions of this song at the time Looney Tunes was producing cartoons. Perhaps the author was thinking of Camp Town Races? But again by this time the minstrel show lyric stylings had long been removed in recorded versions and the words in the lyrics themselves are just as silly as they are obscure but not racist in themselves. Both of these songs are basically part of the traditional American folk canon. I mean the Beach Boys recorded a well-known version of "Shortnin Bread."
It's time for the Copyright Term Reduction Act. 50 years from first publication. That's it.
Incidentally, all the Private Snafu cartoons have been uploaded to YouTube in high quality by the Library of Congress. Most of them are also on the Internet Archive.
Whatever happened to the supposed future where information wanted to be free, and we would have these video libraries of the future that would contain virtually infinite selection? It did seem for a few years at least that we were headed in that direction.
It would be interesting if there was a Popcorn Time style app that only streamed content older than 20-30 years and required you to do oAuth login for paid services that support independent artists. It might not be any less illegal, but it might seem reasonable to a lot of people that wouldn't support a less targeted form of piracy.
The pirates will always be free, and control freaks who can't control their own feelings will always impose their will on the rest of the world in the name of decorum, or civility or whatever word they want to attach to their elitism so they can see themselves as "better" even when it is less sophisticated and nuanced (ham-fisted).
Say what you will about Looney Tunes, Elmer Fudd is a very progressive character. He is open not only to transgender but also transspecies love.
There are over 500 episodes that Warner released on disc at some point… and over 500 they have not that probably haven’t been seen in… forever.
I find the article content infuriating and thus only skimmed. I don’t know if copyright is a factor somewhere here, but to me personally it is irrelevant. I shall look for a complete collection online with the best possible restoration / transfer. Surely someone has compiled such a set. I appreciate the archive link shared here in another comment.
Here’s a link to an active torrent magnet that has the complete Looney Tunes collection. Click “open” for the magnet link:
https://downloadtorrentfile.com/hash/0d0a5a005906babfbfa6a30... Tunes and Merrie Melodies HQ Project v2022
Brilliant- thank you!
In a similar vein, is there someplace where my kids can watch He-Man, The Gummi Bears and GI Joe today?
Insightful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srTqxL_6Ysg
Arrgh mateys time to sail the high seas again. I hope there is a complete torrent somewhere ...
Did anyone else find that Blippi video deeply disturbing? I was warned, but still recovering...
This is why people datahoard and why piracy is still popular.
Cultural erasure.
Most looney tunes content seems to still be available through Boomerang at least in the United States: https://watch.boomerang.com/
I found their app to be terrible and wound up cancelling. Then I found the HBO Max content. Alas.
In a recent reddit thread on this topic someone pointed out that archive.org has a bunch of old episodes for easy download: https://archive.org/details/20200303_20200303_0324
Not to worry, HBO Max has replaced all that with “Velma.”
I am getting a ton of adverts for "Velma" when watching YouTube. My YouTube habit is exclusively mountain biking, woodworking and home improvement. I am not sure how targeted YouTube's advertising is but have come up with three theories:
1) Data sharing with Netflix (I do love Big Mouth)
2) Using the content I watch as a correlation for my age, and therefore susceptibility to Scooby-Doo nostalgia.
3) Wide net, no targeting. YouTube is just blasting these ads to everyone.
Nothing in the advertisements has piqued my interest in the show either. It looks uninspired.
I had never heard of it, but with an imdb rating of 1.7 for 10k votes [1], it makes it to the top 20 worst shows/movies (with over 10k votes) in history.
The worst movie in that category seems to be a biography of Erdogan [2].
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14153790/
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5988370/
At least some of that (maybe a lot of it) is just reflexive hate-voting... but by all accounts the show is also just genuinely bad. Probably not all-time bad, but bad.
I haven’t watched it yet, but it’s been out for less than a week, so I suspect that rating may change going forward. (Or maybe it really is awful? Feels like brigading to me, though.)
It's a Scooby-Doo property...without Scooby-Doo (think the explanation for that is it's meant to be a "Velma origin story").
This is the kindof remake/re-imagining that gets made ostensibly for a different audience...but in the process alienates the traditional audience...which makes it end up with no audience.
Mindy Kaling was a big part of the success of the American Office and has other successes in a relatively short career, so it's not hard to see why it was green-lit...but frankly it's rating is probably about what it should expected to be.
It seems like the kind of show where they wrote a script first and then turned it into Scooby Doo later.
From what I've heard, it is unlikely to go up much. Absolute mess of a show that seems to go out of its way to insult any audience likely to watch it and who's only redeeming feature is that when the animators are trying they're doing a really good job.
For what I've seen it is a show is actually about the author as the main character and used only tScooby-Doo as a theme to be sold
In my experience, after 1000 votes, the rating has converged to its final value.
That has to be the result of a coordinated down-voting campaign.
the first episode is full of swearing and cartoon nudity of ~16 year old girls in the showers in their high school.
the second episode has Velma and Daphne making out.
I don't think it's a brigade, I think it's a serious reaction to a very different version of Scooby doo.
I was actually jaw-dropped at how terrible the first episode was.
HBO is normally known for high-quality content (even if I don't like it, it's not for me).
HBO Max isn’t HBO—it’s HBO plus other Warner bros stuff. Velma was made by the non-HBO side.
There has not been an HBO side for a few years now. ATT fired the HBO executives that made HBO HBO when ATT bought it.
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I have yet to encounter a single person defending the show on these grounds, and I know or follow a lot of progressive/feminist/queer/etc. type people.
Have you met anyone defending the show?
Some of the critics are, but far fewer than normal for this kind of thing, I think Mindy Kaling overplayed her hand.
I think this is a case where both takes are wrong, it’s a bad show, but not because of how they make fred a stereotype
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Velma, I believe, is a holdover from the previous regime. The current one is more likely to replace it with some sort of trashy reality TV.
Which would likely be a massive step up from Velma.
I have no take on Velma, but “Be Cool, Scooby Doo” is perhaps the best of all the more recent iterations of the show. Good writing.
What part of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is so hard to get? This isn't bloody reddit.
You seem to breaking multiple of those rules with your comment.
I have a hard time shaking the feeling that this was unironically the pitch for the show.
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magnet:?xt=urn:btih:2606A5830780074B089FAB96904009DA412C1C3D&dn=Complete%20Looney%20Tunes%20Golden%20Collection%20%5BDVDrip%5D
This one has the complete 1000 episode collection as well as movies and specials. Magnet link when you click “Open”. It’s got about a dozen seeders and I’m getting about 8 MB/sec download rate:
https://downloadtorrentfile.com/hash/0d0a5a005906babfbfa6a30... Tunes and Merrie Melodies HQ Project v2022
Notably, this project combines the best possible video and audio to obtain a single best version of each episode (things combining foreign DVD video and English LaserDisc audio for some). So, as is often the case with piracy, it likely has strictly better technical characteristics than any streaming offering.