> Disney are able to pay that amount because their IP is still generating massive income.
That's entirely irrelevant though. The point of copyright isn't to protect income. The point is to encourage the creation of new works. Disney doesn't need 100+ years of exclusive profits on something to encourage them to create new works. Nobody does.
I'd even argue that the more popular a work is the more important it is that it enter the public domain sooner rather than later. The less cultural relevancy something has when it enters the public domain the less likely it will inspire new works to be created.
With respect - copyright's protection of income is the point
That's, by design, the tool used to encourage people to invest their time into producing works.
We would not be having this conversation at all if people weren't able to make money of these works - there'd be no point to copyright at all if there wasn't money to be made (by the artists) and the reproduction of their works wasn't restricting their ability to generate that income (for themselves, or their agents).
I want to emphasise that I am not arguing in favour of the system, only how and why it works this way.
> That's, by design, the tool used to encourage people to invest their time into producing works.
The tool used was control over distribution. If income was the point copyright law could just hand tax payer money over to anyone who created something. That'd guarantee income instead of the system we have which allows artists to invest in the creation of a work and still never make a dime on it. Ultimately though, I do see your point and I agree that making it possible to earn enough money to justify the creation, publishing, and distribution of a creative work was a large part of the intention along with the establishment of the public domain.
I probably should have phrased that as "The point of copyright isn't to protect income until the work is no longer highly profitable"
Another thing that doesn't get brought up enough: Copyright is not really needed to encourage creation.
Suppose Copyright as a concept was overturned and no longer existed. Would Disney just say "Well, it was a great run, but we're going to close up shop and no longer create works." Would an independent artist who needs to paint something decide not to just because it couldn't be copyright?
"The creation of new works" doesn't need to be encouraged. It's the default. Cavemen still carved on cave walls without copyright.
You're absolutely right that artists can't stop themselves from creating, but I think that a reasonable amount of protection still does encourage more works.
Many works require a good deal of investment and time and if people had little to no chance of making money or breaking even on that investment a lot of works wouldn't get made.
Another nice aspect of copyright law is that it establishes where a work originated. Authorship gets lost in a lot of the things we treat as if they don't have copyrights. For example memes, or the way every MP3 of a parody song on P2P platforms ended up listing Weird Al as the artist regardless of his involvement. It also happens in cases where copyright really doesn't exist like with recipes and as a result we don't really know who first came up with many of the foods we love. A very limited copyright term would more firmly establish who we should thank for the things we enjoy.
IMO, copyright is something that should be shorter the bigger the media producer is.
The reason we need a copyright in the first place is to stop someone like disney just vacuuming up popular works and republishing them because they have the money to do it.
Disney, however, doesn't need almost any copyright to still encourage them to make new products. They'll do that regardless.
For an individual author, copyright should basically be for their lifetime. If they sell it, the copyright should only last 5 years after that.
A company like disney should get copyrights for like 1 year.
But also the type of media matters. IMO, news outlets and journalists should get copyrights for 1 day max. Old news is almost worthless and it's in the public interest that news be generally accessible and recordable.
Disney didn't invent (e.g.) Beauty and the Beast. They took an idea and a story in the public domain and retold it. Then they claim ownership of that and sue anyone who uses the same character(s) for the next 75+ years.
This is not "encouraging creation". This is strip-mining our shared culture.
So yeah, agree 100% that this kind of corporate theft needs to be stopped. I can't see that happening in the face of all the money though.
Encourage, probably not. Facilitate, possibly. That's why my bottle of Windex glass cleaner says "it's against federal law to use this product for anything other than its intended purpose."
In either case it's illegal for me to use it for bad purposes, but how much I can blame on Windex depends on how much they let me know that I shouldn't do bad stuff with their products.
Ask every account that has ever released information on drug use, lock picking, explosives manufacture, or "hacking" - they all say "for educational purposes only" for a damned good reason
This is one of my pain points, and one time I googled and got the real answer (which is why it's such a pain point).
That answer is "It depends on the context"
> The reason the "ours" and "theirs" notions get swapped around during rebase is that rebase works by doing a series of cherry-picks, into an anonymous branch (detached HEAD mode). The target branch is the anonymous branch, and the merge-from branch is your original (pre-rebase) branch: so "--ours" means the anonymous one rebase is building while "--theirs" means "our branch being rebased".[0]
I think that they were honest about that to a degree, they pointed out that one source of the speed up was caused by the python fixing a big they hadn't noticed in the C++
The whole point of the scientific method was that we could ignore the source of the information, and were instead expected to focus on the value of the information based on supporting evidence (data).
If we go back to "Only people that have been inducted into the community can publish science" we're effectively saying that only the high priests can accrue knowledge.
I say this knowing full well that we have a massive problem in science on sorting the wheat from the chaff, have had so for a VERY long time, and AI is flooding the zone (thank you political commentator I despise) with absolute dross.
I mean, a personal yacht can sail around the world, that's not really demonstrating whether the vessel is useful in combat operations anywhere in the world.
The biggest names in Software Products have (other peoples) ideas to sell, they're selling the buggy versions of those ideas - Microsoft, Salesforce, even early Facebook, these weren't triumphs of 'monk-like discipline' in the code. They were triumphs of market buy in and timing.
I received some 'interesting' feedback when I spoke about commenting that I was using an O(n) search instead of an O(log n) algorithm because of the normally small size of n [0]
What I should have done was point to Rob's third rule (either in my comment or in the resulting threads)
Yeah - A game is (generally) a one and done enterprise. Like a start up it's all about getting it out the door, there's little to no expectation of having to maintain it for any real length of time.
This comment assumes game companies throw away all their code and start from scratch on their next title. Which is completely untrue, games are built on decades old code, like most software. There is absolutely a need for maintainable code.
I think that there might be a distinction on indie vs big publishers (like EA) - I would expect someone like EA to enforce coding standards, but they do so whilst living off the income of previous hits.
We can probably add to that the fact that the nominated titles almost certainly started out with spaghetti code that had to be refactored, reworked, and gave maintainers nightmares in their sleep
Roblox didn't have server functions until 2014 and they weren't mandatory until 2018. Anything the client did automatically replicated to every other client.
That meant I could attach Cheat Engine to Roblox, edit memory addresses to give myself in-game cash, and inject whatever code I wanted to everyone else.
Thankfully it was sandboxed so I couldn't give people viruses.
This was probably a good decision because most of Roblox's best games from that period weren't updated to use server functions. It's too difficult.
I'm not a fan of Disney at all, just pointing out what i belive might be the flaw in the argument.
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