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Lol the censor board and Winnie the Pooh reminds me of the time Chinese censors were having a rough time trying to censor Megan Three Stallion’s (the artist who was featured in Cardi B’s W.A.P.) performance livestreamed at Coachella…
Cardi B is the artist who made W.A.P. Megan Thee Stallion was just a guest feature on the song.
my bad I will fix it
Well? Fix it!
:p
I did, it originally said artist who made W.A.P. and now it’s featured in W.A.P.
Here, I went back and made it even more clear.
Disney’s copyright goes harder than it ever should’ve in the first place.
It’s got nothing to do with Disney (other than them having changed the laws overall), it’s to do with the original books. The first book is in the public domain, but the second book which introduced tigger, is not yet.
Yeah.
357070+?! years after the creator’s death. That extension brought to you by the Disney company.Yeah it has everything to do with the copyright bullshit Disney has been lobbying pas century or so
Piglet couldn’t censor the mirror.
A bounty has been placed. The lawyers have been made aware of your presence.
See you in twelve days, Tigger!
Piglet has skills.
Still can see tiggers butt and tail in the mirror
The mirror, I hadn’t noticed 🤣
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If you reply to this comment, you can see what it originally said.
Huh, how odd. Is that universal on Lemmy? Or just this comment?
It seems to work for every deleted comment I’ve come across.
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Testing this
You’re profiting off of this?
Congratulations!
If not, how does Tigger not being public domain affect you at all?
It’s a joke comic about the copyright system.
Not OP but in theory it shouldn’t do, at least not for comics like this.
Parody is considered fair use under US copyright law.
Sure parody is a defence to copyright infringement. At the end of the day, it’s not my job to say it’s protected by parody. That’s your job as the Defendant. I only have to prove that you infringed onto my copyrights.
Even if it is clear parody, I can quietly withdraw or settle my claim against you to prevent others from even thinking about it. It’s why SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) legislation has to exist.
All true, hence I say in theory.
Copyright violations are not dependent on profit. Profit just makes it easier to calculate damages.
Copyright violations are not dependent on profit. Profit just makes it easier to calculate damages.
Ehhh…sort of.
You’re right to the extent that it’s not a straight “copyright infringement requires that the infringer profit”, but in US copyright law:
First, the copyright holder can take profits that are made by the infringer:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504
(b) Actual Damages and Profits.—
The copyright owner is entitled to recover the actual damages suffered by him or her as a result of the infringement, and any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement and are not taken into account in computing the actual damages. In establishing the infringer’s profits, the copyright owner is required to present proof only of the infringer’s gross revenue, and the infringer is required to prove his or her deductible expenses and the elements of profit attributable to factors other than the copyrighted work.
Second, some forms of fair use – which permit use of copyrighted material – do take into account whether someone was aiming to make money from it (though it’s not a “all noncommercial use is fair game” sort of thing):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
I realize this won’t be a popular view, but I don’t think you should be able to use, and profit from, a character someone else created, regardless of how long ago they were created. The original work becoming public domain, sure, but write your own characters.
I’ve got bad news for you about much of the history of human creative work.
There’s a difference between getting inspiration from something, and downright stealing it.
Have you by chance read Dante’s Divine Comedy? Or Milton’s Paradise Lost? Just to name two works that are widely considered Fucking Classic off the top of my head. Do you have much background in literature?
And are they not in the public domain?
What’s your point here, exactly?
One, those are famous works that used characters they didn’t create. Just off the top of my head. Also The Aeneid, which I haven’t read but the internet is telling me is basically Ascended Fanfiction.
Two, you don’t really seem to have an informed opinion on this topic. Which is, like, fine. Most of us don’t know most things. But maybe consider there’s good reasons many people are disagreeing with you.
You know that most of Disney’s stuff that they profit from is characters created by other people, right?
Some even closer than most think. The Sword in the Stone is based on a 1938 book, it’s not an original adaptation of Arthurian legend.
Though really, there never has been so many new takes on Arthur than today.
Many consider that the real golden age of these stories as popular tales is right now, kickstarted “only” 150 years ago by Mark Twain and his Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Why not?
No reason to fight this. Everything is a remix of something else. That’s just how creativity works.
Looking at the Venus de Milo
“I mean, it’s great and all, but it’s so derivative.”
I mean it’s a Venus, probably one of the most sculpted characters in history, he could have at least tried to be original…
This comic doesn’t work with original characters, there is a lot of prior knowledge on the part of the reader that allows the author to get right into the story without all the world building required to care about a new universe and it’s characters.
But you are using characters you didn’t invent to communicate this, without paying someone. Invent your own alphabet!
The alphabet is free and open source.
Free and open source is a subset of public domain
Free and open source that was created by someone else.
Who was it? What was their name?
Dude just binned The Bible.
You’re the second person to say something like this. Suggesting the characters in the Bible are fictional will make some people very angry.
Are people angry at Neil Gaiman? Because American Gods sure has a few Jesuses.
And Good Omens has a bunch of biblical VIPs too.
My point was, saying Jesus was a fictional character would make people angry. Using him in a work of fiction is not the same thing.
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You can’t copyright a real person, obviously. A work about them you can.
Like I give a fuck.
The original work becoming public domain, sure, but write your own characters.
I don’t understand what you’re suggesting here. How would you reconcile the original work being public domain with still wanting to restrict the use of its characters?
Meaning you can freely reproduce the original work, but you cannot create a new piece of work using the original characters.
Meaning, in the case of Winnie the Pooh, the original books and associated works are free to be used and shared, but you could not create a new book or comic without the permission of the estate of AA milne.
If you restrict reuse of the characters in new work, the original would not be in the public domain. Something is either one’s property or it isn’t, and something in the public domain is everyone’s property. You can’t have the original as part of the collective repository of freely-available information and culture while still trying to make bits of it (such as its characters) not part of that.
The public domain period is when the law has agreed that the original authors no longer have exclusive rights to the material they put into the world. Trying to still, after that period has elapsed, declare the characters are still that author’s property but only if they turn up in other people’s work is a truly bizarre suggestion and I fail to see what would be gained by society in that scenario.
I really don’t think this is a difficult concept to grasp, to be honest.
The original work becomes public domain, and can be freely reproduced.
The characters therein are, and remain, the property of the author’s estate, and cannot be used in new work without their permission.
We are already seeing this in the real world, where Disney cartoons are public domain, but the characters, having been used in consecutive works, cannot be used by anyone other than them.
This allows a published work to be used for generations to come, but doesn’t allow an author’s legacy to be tarnished by less than quality adaptations.
We are already seeing this in the real world, where Disney cartoons are public domain, but the characters, having been used in consecutive works, cannot be used by anyone other than them.
This is incorrect. When a Disney cartoon becomes public domain everything in it is also public domain, including the characters as used in that cartoon. The most famous example of this will happen on January 1 when the first Mickey Mouse cartoons go into the public domain, and so will that version of Mickey Mouse. You can read more about what that means for Mickey, and for Disney, in this post by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law.
Nobody’s legacy is “tarnished” or otherwise damaged by things other people create. The original is still there, while new things get to express their take on the characters and/or the rest of the material. Derivative works add to the sum total of culture, they don’t subtract from it, and the Public Domain denotes the part of culture we all own together and can develop new works about freely. The freedom to do so is a good thing for everyone including cultural creators (who get to enrich their own work using our shared property) and consumers (who get more stuff they might enjoy, and if they don’t the original is still there regardless) and everyone wins. Your scenario would make nothing better for anyone.
Nobody’s legacy is “tarnished” or otherwise damaged by things other people create.
There is a set of IP rights known as moral rights. These rarely come up here in the US and aren’t discussed much because they are quite limited in the US, but they play a more-meaningful role in France, whose legal tradition attaches certain rights to an artist to restrict use of his work (and who cannot give these rights up, regardless of whether he wants to do so or not, and where these rights never expire, even after death). They tend to aim at this sort of “tarnishing” concern.
That’s not to say that I particularly support this class of right, but there are places in the world where it is more-important and is a real thing in law.
I don’t know whether, in France, they would extend as far as to the use of characters.
As far as I understand you, you’re just against fan fiction. I know some people that also think that whatever is non-canon shouldn’t be approached by reasonable people, but even they don’t think that it should be forbidden
Although I don’t share your point of view, I respect and would like to know more, would you care to elaborate on the reasons that led to or justify your opinion ?
Mostly seeing the appalling job some people have done adapting a former beloved character, or the inevitable NSFW adaptations.
Imagine someone writing a story where, for example, Christopher Robin kills someone, and profiting from it? Would you be happy having your childhood memories of reading Winnie the Pooh tainted like that?
So you want to restrict others’ expressions because you don’t like how it makes you feel?
That’s the same attitude as every shade of bigot.
Interesting angle.
I understand, I don’t know exactly how I would feel if this scenario hapened.
But regardless, I can’t control what people do with the characters I love, even the rightful onwner can defame a character I love, and they sometimes do (I’m thinking of detective pikachu, which I didn’t like, because of exactly what you are talking about).
At the same time, some stories written by non-owner are amazing, and really extended my understanding or appreciation of a character, had they been prevented to write those because of copyright enforcement, I would never have had these great ideas and take on the characters.
Maybe instead of preventing other people from writing stories about preexisting character they didn’t create, we could instead enforce that derivative stories must contain a disclaimer for people that want to avoid non-canon.
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to explain, I’m really interested in how property (intellectual or physical) shape our society, and all point of view is interesting to ear and take into account.
There would always be the option for an author, or their estate, to allow such a work.
Clearly labelling whether a work was by the original author is only fair, of course.
Imagine someone writing a story where, for example, Christopher Robin kills someone, and profiting from it? Would you be happy having your childhood memories of reading Winnie the Pooh tainted like that?
Interesting that you chose this example, because it has already happened in a commercially-released horror film. The result wasn’t in any way damaging to the legacy of the original work; all the books, adaptations, and such that kids love are still available. All that ended up happening was that people who like that particular sort of thing gained a new movie to watch, people who don’t like it can ignore it, and pop culture as a whole keeps chugging along undamaged. All our childhood memories of Pooh are still the same ones we had before this movie came out.
I’m taking the lumps of the community here with you, but I do feel that civilization benefits when creators can reasonably profit from their creations and it’s derivative works.
I don’t think it needs to be as extreme as us copy write controls, but I don’t feel it should be opened up the way this community seems to think it should be.
These down votes are lame. I disagree with you completely, but your opinion is still valid. I think after the original author is long dead, I’d like to see new perspectives breathing new life into old fictional characters. Otherwise, are you saying we can’t make new stories about Hercules, Odysseus, Jesus, etc?
Robin Hood is another example of a set of works that had many people contributing different stories into what became the present-day collection.
Historically, a lot of works had many authors using the same character. I think that it’s a bit unfortunate that modern copyright law tends to discourage that.
H. P. Lovecraft was unusual in that he allowed other authors to make use of his characters (and settings, which are also covered by copyright), which is why his world – with Cthulhu and all that – has been widely used.
I imagine saying those people are fictional characters would make some people angry.
If you mean Jesus, it’s not terribly controversial that there was a historical Jesus, but there were definitely different people writing up material about Jesus, and the Bible contains self-contradictions between those stories. How closely each individual narrative hews to the historical Jesus…shrugs
For example, Christ’s birth is described differently in the different Gospels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativity_of_Jesus
Only the Gospels of Matthew and Luke offer narratives regarding the birth of Jesus.[1] Both rely heavily on the Hebrew scriptures, indicating that they both regard the story as part of Israel’s salvation history, and both present the God of Israel as controlling events.[2] Both agree that Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the reign of King Herod, that his mother was named Mary and that her husband Joseph was descended from King David (although they disagree on details of the line of descent), and both deny Joseph’s biological parenthood while treating the birth, or rather the conception, as divinely effected.[3]
Beyond this, they agree on very little.[3] Joseph dominates Matthew’s and Mary dominates Luke’s, although the suggestion that one derives from Joseph and the other from Mary is no more than a pious deduction.[4] Matthew implies that Joseph already has his home in Bethlehem, while Luke states that he lived in Nazareth.[3] In Matthew the angel speaks to Joseph, while Luke has one speaking to Mary.[4] Only Luke has the stories surrounding the birth of John the Baptist, the census of Quirinius, the adoration of the shepherds and the presentation in the Temple on the eighth day; only Matthew has the wise men, the star of Bethlehem, Herod’s plot, the massacre of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt.[4] The two itineraries are quite different. According to Matthew, the Holy Family begins in Bethlehem, moves to Egypt following the birth, and settles in Nazareth, while according to Luke they begin in Nazareth, journey to Bethlehem for the birth, and immediately return to Nazareth.[2][note 1] The two accounts cannot be harmonised into a single coherent narrative or traced to the same Q source, leading scholars to classify them as “special Matthew” (or simply the M source) and “special Luke” (the L source).[2]
