i'd never seen steamboat willie before; now that it's public domain in the usa, i have
wp says:
> In the 1950s, Disney removed a scene where Mickey tugs on the tails of the baby pigs, picks up the mother and kicks them off her teats, and plays her like an accordion, since television distributors deemed it inappropriate.[34] Since then, the full version of the film was included on the 1998 compilation VHS The Spirit of Mickey and the Walt Disney Treasures DVD set "Mickey Mouse in Black and White", as well as on Disney+.
this version has the tugging on tails, but not the picking up and accordioning of the mother, so it's a falsified version
I just love those old pre-hays-code movies. The Hay's code brought censorship from the movie industry in 1934 because they were afraid the government would step in otherwise.
The fact there's no censorship just makes them so raw.
> this version has the tugging on tails, but not the picking up and accordioning of the mother, so it's a falsified version
I wondered if that puts the Corridor version in jeopardy in any way, given that the version they have posted was produced many years later. In my few minutes of research, it seems like the answer could be quite complicated and it would depend on whether or not the censorship process exceeds the threshold of originality.
For example, I imagine if Disney had engaged in a significant colorization process of the original footage in the 50s that the resultant colorized footage would still be under copyright today.
I do think that the process of removing footage could be considered a sufficiently creative endeavour. For example, if Kubrick released a re-cut version of Odyssey 5 years after the original, I would not expect the re-cut to enter public domain until 5 years after the original (even if the only difference was removal of certain scenes). If anyone could argue that censoring a film constitutes as an editorial creative process and thereby should be granted copyright protections, it's Disney.
wow, i didn't even think of that problem! by falsifying our cultural heritage you may gain the legal right to further suppress its publication and study. a harsher indictment of copyright is hard to imagine
Even reading that document, I think the answer is "it depends".
For example, this[1] work is entirely derivative, created only using cuts from another piece of media and yet the resulting work is a complete departure and loses practically all meaning from the original. If Disney had done something like this years later using Steamboat Willie, I don't think there'd be any question that it should be considered a copyrightable piece of work and exceeds the threshold of originality.
According to the Copyright Alliance[2]:
> There is no requirement that the work be novel (as in patent law), unique, imaginative or inventive. A work need only demonstrate a very small amount of creativity in order to meet the originality requirement.
If J.K. Rowling replaces the word "wand" with "wang"[3] in the Harry Potter series and publishes a new revision, has she created a new work? According to your link, yes, she has. If you upload Harry Potter "wang" edition to the internet after the original edition enters the public domain, have you violated the copyright on the "wang" edition? Well, I think it could be argued that you have!
I posted the PDF but should have quoted, “it is not possible to extend the length of protection for a copyrighted work by creating a derivative.” But, I get your point: is it possible to practically extend a copyrighted work by defending a carefully-chosen derivative?
I was surprised how broad this can go: the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. Section 101: A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a "derivative work."
So, it appears I’m not clarifying anything. But, maybe we look at the things which are not derivative works. Let’s say a movie shows a copyrighted picture on the wall. There seems to be a six-second convention beyond which a production assistant would typically obtain permission.
The Titanic story comes to mind: James Cameron paid for a particular painting shown in Titanic. It was re-released in 3D and he was asked to pay again. So, within the industry, his derivative work enjoys protection, but insider copyright agreements do not survive the derivation.
your understanding of derivative works 'protection' is backwards, in large part because copyright lawyers use euphemistic doubletalk. 'protection' doesn't mean you can't be sued or will win if you are sued. it means you can sue someone else and win, such as a guy on a blanket outside the mall selling titanic dvds or your translation of don quixote
Colorization might be interesting in court. If original colorization was actual manually painting animation cells, and 2023 colorization is applying the right parameters to Stable Diffusion, then maybe the manual effort is protected whereas mechanical is not.
Is this related to how mainstream music publishers have been churning out pointless remasters of albums made decades ago "to improve how they sound on modern devices", while dropping the licensing of the originals on digital music platforms (to buy and stream)?
that would require music execs in 02020 to spend money today to guarantee their companies' profits in 02040, instead of spending it on buying cocaine for the next boy band, so it seems improbable
I think it entirely depends on if those cuts constitute the creation of something that could be considered a new piece of original work.
Sometimes the removal of certain scenes from a movie could completely change the way you think about that movie, or completely change the overall tone.
So this still seems like it would allow copyright to be extended for thousands of years? A 2 hour movie can easily be edited, significantly, a few dozen times.
a more serious risk is not having any way to save it or distribute it reliably; works that are too similar to copyright-restricted works tend to disappear into the memory hole on youtube and similar platforms, with no due process and no appeal. for now you can still get hard disks that don't automatically scan their contents against a youtube-style blacklist, and which can retain their contents for more than a few months when turned off because they aren't SSDs, but neither of those is likely to remain practical forever
If yt-dlp works, you can also use Celluloid to watch videos from Youtube — choose Open Location and enter the URL of the YouTube video or playlist page.
you can also open Youtube on a computer without an ad blocker (e.g. a stock Firefox or Chrome instance), or pay for premium if you don't want to watch ads
90% of the time they block me because I have an ad blocker that is _disabled for their website._ The other 10% they show me the video. This feels like a bug.
I'm not going to pay them because they have a bug, or if it's not a bug, pay them because they think they can tell me what addons I can run when viewing other websites. That would be like Stockholm syndrome.
YouTube is a highly optional part of my life, so if they are going to fuck around and be shitty, fuck em I'm out. Happy to instead do my small part in breaking the monopoly and just reduce my YouTube consumption, plus encourage other people to reduce it as well.
The lengths people go to to escape an easy and affordable option is curious.
When subscription prices get too high and the service lackluster, I can understand. Every production company tried to build their own subpar streaming service, and value delivery just doesn't scale like that.
When every one of a million different news websites has its own individual subscription, I can also understand. Nobody has time for that, and the service offered is never worth the value.
But YouTube premium is dirt cheap. And you're paying for legions of engineers to make the service rock solid. And it has everything. I think it's the last service I'd ever cancel, and I don't even watch YouTube that often.
I pay for it myself, but I Don't think I'd call it dirt cheap? 14 a month isn't much cheaper than streaming services used to be. Netflix used to be under ten dollars a month so maybe that anchored the price a bit in my head.
14 dollars a month is more than i spend on internet access and transportation put together, because i live in a third-world country in an economic crisis
right now i'm visiting my in-laws for the new year, and they have netflix; i think they pay 8 dollars a month for it
in this case what it's providing you is (instant, seekable) access to (recoded versions of a falsified version of) a public-domain video which it attempts to prevent you from storing a copy of locally
it's ridiculous that we're even considering depending on those legions of engineers given that most of us have at least ten-megabit internet service at home, but decentralized alternatives like lbry/odysee and even bittorrent are getting lobbied out of existence, in large part because they are resistant to censorship
I don't like the bait-and-switch. It's evil and scummy. I feel dirty paying for evil and scummy.
Youtube was built based on work of a creator community -- much more so than Alphabet engineers -- who viewed this as a sort of open platform. Once there was network lock-in, the paywall hits, the mandatory obnoxious ads hit, and the user-hostile JavaScript hits.
Alphabet holds the legal contract, and the army of lawyers, but there was a social contract with a community which it simply broke.
It tried (with mixed success) to do the same with the free GSuite service (once they have all your email, bill you for seeing it). Remember how Alphabet originally won by using unintrusive adwords instead of flashing banner ads? All these things might be legal, but they ain't right.
I pay for subscription services, but yes, I'll go to great lengths to never, ever pay a penny for Youtube.
this is why free software and peer-to-peer network architecture is important. centralized network services and proprietary software inherently make users vulnerable to such abuses, and the companies that engage in them will be more profitable than their competitors who don't
i'm skeptical that google will continue to operate youtube as a public charity indefinitely; perhaps we should switch to decentralized systems with higher reliability instead of locating a single point of failure on sundar pichai's desk
Other than the bullshit computerised systems behind the scenes that are the bane of creators on the platform… it’s hard to think of a more reliable website than YouTube…
I’ve heard Google employees/engineers make jokes (not entirely sure how much is a joke and how much is real) about how YouTube might be the first website back online after WW3 assuming it didn’t destroy the internet (seeing as the internet originally was designed to survive such a thing it’s not entirely far fetched to imagine global chaos and heavily degraded services but still operating in some capacity)
the reliability of centralized systems is like the reliability of the farmer's generosity toward the turkey: unfailing until the inevitable thanksgiving
the year youtube ceases to be profitable is the year it deletes 100% of its videos and you discover that your extrapolation of its reliability into the future was based on an incorrect understanding of the world
if you've been paying attention, though, you know that a substantial percentage of its videos have already been consigned to the memory hole, so its reliability as a repository of human culture is already observably poor
basically every cartoon animal is. tom? check. jerry? yeah, him too. wile e. coyote? to the extreme, if ineptly. this is the cartoon version of three stooges humor
Sure. But that’s realistic to what animals are actually like. It’s only in modern suburbia that we culturally forget that. Watch cats hunt. Or mice when there’s not enough food (they tear each other to pieces). Or really any animal in their natural habitat. “Hen pecked” isn’t just a turn of phrase.
I suspect animal on animal violence is common in old cartoons because more people spent time with animals. The idea that we should stop animals from hurting each other is a very recent notion.
>I suspect animal on animal violence is common in old cartoons because more people spent time with animals. The idea that we should stop animals from hurting each other is a very recent notion.
I don't think cartoons of the time were intended to present realistic depictions of animal behavior, so much as use them as tropes and archetypes. Rather I suspect physical and slapstick comedy was popular at the time, and that broad style of comedy was easier to portray in a visual medium.
How is Wile an “animal abusing asshole”, and “to the extreme”? It’s a primarily carnivorous animal trying to hunt another to eat. It’s not like he’s catching and torturing the Road Runner.
most people would be comfortable with the assertion that armin meiwes is a 'human-abusing asshole', even though he didn't torture brandes before killing and eating him. perhaps you are among the exceptions
Most people would be comfortable with the assertion that it is absurd to compare a fictional episodic cartoon animal comedy to real life human cannibalism in modern society. It seems you are among the exceptions.
the context of this discussion is that someone described a character in a fictional cartoon animal comedy as an 'animal abusing asshole', so judging interactions between fictional cartoon animal comedy characters using the standards applied to real-life interactions between humans is the entire premise of the discussion. i agree that it leads to absurd conclusions; that's what my comments are designed to demonstrate
it's nice that you internalized my thesis so thoroughly, but it's unfortunate that you seem to believe i was arguing against it
(unless you think the key difference is that steamboat willie wasn't episodic)
I did. I apologise for the misunderstanding but it was the “perhaps you are among the exceptions” that did it. And I bet that’s what made someone downvote you too (your comment was already grey by the time I saw it). If that part had been left out, the lingering ambiguity would have given more room for the correct interpretation.
It is probably a really bad way though, since the first 5 or whatever cigarettes are the hardest to smoke until you have overruled your natural repulsion of inhaling hot smoke.
In my n=3 experience, that didn't work on any of my friends who got caught and were forced to smoke the entire pack. It also didn't work on my siblings and I when our mother got tired of us pestering her for saltwater taffy so she made us eat an entire bag. If it made us sick, I don't remember that part and either way, it did nothing to dissuade us from further pestering for more until we aged out of having such extreme sweetooths.
Also see us changing copyright law extending it years to keep Disney works like steamboat willie private in the past.
"Under this Act, works made in 1923 or afterwards that were still protected by copyright in 1998 would not enter the public domain until January 1, 2019, or later. Mickey Mouse specifically, having first appeared in 1928 in Steamboat Willie, entered the public domain in 2024[5] or afterward (depending on the date of the product). Unlike copyright extension legislation in the European Union, the Sonny Bono Act did not revive copyrights that had already expired, and therefore is not retroactive in that sense"
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
"Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act – also known as the Copyright Term Extension Act"
It was obvious for at least the last year that this would enter the public domain, probably more like 2 or 3 years. And yet I reliably saw cynicism suggesting that Disney would be able to get another copyright extension passed. Disney wasn't even pursuing that.
Disney knows it doesn't have Congress in its back pocket right now so there was no point in wasting resources on trying to get copyright extended again even if they really wish they could.
That approach is problematic with text. If you take a blurry version of the word "apple", you can't be sure if the text should be "apple" or "appie" as the "i" and "l" look too similar when blurred. Some scanners do this to get clean crisp letters and end up fixing typos or making other substitutions. "Filling in pixels" is inherently guesswork and it's certainly not "issue free".
It's a testament to how large media interests have totally dominated our copyright system that people are so excited about this completely worthless, 100 year old, antiquated garbage being released into the public domain is considered a big deal. The entire Disney canon would be in the public domain if the duration of copyright hadn't been extended again and again and again and again.
It is 95 (up to 120) years after creation or the death of the author plus 70 years. This is absolutely absurd and serves no public interest. It only serves to benefit huge media companies that have purchased our entire shared heritage's back-catalog and survive largely by leasing it back to us over and over and over.
My wild guess is that if someone filed a copyright claim based on time zone, whatever court the claim was filed with would tell them to stop making frivolous claims.
Imagine if the date at the end was when the copyright owner had agreed for it to enter public domain, thus meaning it couldn’t be retroactively extended.
That is a start at least. International copyright of course is a complete mess and it is not obvious exactly what expiring copyrights in one country means elsewhere. J.R.R Tolkien's copyrights are listed as expired now in New Zeeland and a few other countries, but will remain in copyright in most countries for another 20+ years. Guess in NZ and the few other countries with life+50 copyright they can enjoy making their own new LoTR games or whatever, but they have to carefully limit distribution to not violate copyrights elsewhere? I think there were some issues like that a few years ago when Ian Fleming's copyrights expired in Canada and someone made a Bond movie or something that was illegal to import to the US?
I think a big part is that disney seems hypocritical. A big part of their success is monentizing public domain properties from other creators but then preventing others from doing the same with their creations.
E.g. pinnochio was released in 1940 based on a book from 1883. At the time the original book was published i believe copyright only lasted at most 42 years. It seems unfair that disney got to benefit from short copyright terms in the beggining and long copyright terms at the end. Nobody likes to see soneone eat their cake and have it to.
It was such a gigantic and obvious screwjob twenty years ago, when we were young and sorta optimistic. God bless the tree that Sonny Bono ran into.
The cartoon had very limited distribution on film, I saw it at a university showing. Disney would distribute Donald Duck and etc but back then all the Mickey material was kept on the shelf for some reason. But then the "Mickey Mouse" law made this notorious.
For me it's... neither, I guess? I hate that Disney abused the political process to milk their cash cow for longer, but I don't hate Disney otherwise. I just am glad that we didn't get another Mickey Mouse protection act passed.
Disney profited from the works of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Shakespeare, Osamu Tezuka, European and Chinese folklore, and many more sources.
Great artists build upon the work of those who came before them. This is how it’s been for millennia. Why should Disney be the end of the line?
This is actually the natural state of affairs. Intellectual "property" protections are a relatively recent invention (15th century) - created in theory to encourage production of more intellectual property and abused in modern times to provide eternal rents to owners.
Disney created the character and was able to profit from it for years, but Disney has equally profited over characters it didn't create but instead created their own adaptations. Why should other companies be denied the same thing Disney had access to?
Well they currently are still making Mickey Mouse cartoons. Are you saying that the characters should only have a limited copyright and corporations/authors should lose control over the characters after a shorter period?
By the time I was born Mickey Mouse was so embedded in popular culture that it would be unreasonable to expect me to avoid the character. I certainly won't be telling my daughter to choose which characters to like depending on the state of so-called intellectual property laws, that would be absurd.
All this adds up to the fact that established characters are already effectively part of the public domain. A perpetual monopoly on children's culture is both unnatural and unjust.
Disney still benefits from trademark law on their characters along with a generous monopoly on new creations. I would argue that extending this further would reduce the incentive to innovate.
I don't know what the parent poster had in mind, but in my view losing most control by now is absolutely right and proper.
Probably a lot of both. Disney is almost single-handedly the reason copyright is as screwed up as it is here in the U.S. as they have been the primary corporate actor behind the copyright extensions over the past several decades.
Is this video up to modern YouTube community standards? One of the tunes featured in it ("Turkey in the Straw") also circulated in well-known versions "Zip C..n" and "[N-WORD] Love a Wat.rm.lon, Ha! Ha! Ha!" Yup, surprisingly enough, these used to be considered "funny, entertaining" lyrics back then. A very disappointing chapter of American social history.
Those lyrics aren’t in the piece nor are they the original lyrics of to the tune. I can say with confidence most popular tunes of the 20th C have been sung with bigoted lyrics in various context. You only have to think to football matches.
The more interesting angle is minstrel vibes that I get watching it.
The piece does have history. When "zip coon" was written, "coon" was used to describe Whigs (american politicians, ergo white men). It wasn't a slur for another decade or two.
But then that overt racist version? It came out in 1916, and Columbia continued promoting the song until 1925 -- three years before Steamboat Willy came out. Those "minstrel vibes" aren't just vibes. Minstrel shows were big money at that time in history, and the use of Turkey in the Straw is part and parcel. What lyrics were the audience at the time most familiar with? That seems much more relevant than the original lyrics.
Whether or not something is considered racist is not dependent on where it came from. It's solely dependent on if those in power feel like it is racist. Remember the Pepe the frog meme? Pepe was a meme that got used by the alt right and now it's a "symbol of hate".
For the record I disagree with the sentiment but those are the rules.
There's an element of truth here. Part of the reason racial humor was so popular the first half of the twentieth century was because American leadership encouraged that zeitgeist. Granted, the "Censored 11" cartoons weren't direct propaganda (although some similar cartoons certainly were) -- but they and their audience participated in the cultural effect that is the desired extension of all propaganda campaigns. For example, the minstrel show wasn't by any means art or intellectual, yet its depictions were an extension of the claims about Africans by intellectuals at Southern universities, who in turn were currying to a leadership that was fully committed to keeping in subjection the "dangerous" African-American population.
wp says:
> In the 1950s, Disney removed a scene where Mickey tugs on the tails of the baby pigs, picks up the mother and kicks them off her teats, and plays her like an accordion, since television distributors deemed it inappropriate.[34] Since then, the full version of the film was included on the 1998 compilation VHS The Spirit of Mickey and the Walt Disney Treasures DVD set "Mickey Mouse in Black and White", as well as on Disney+.
this version has the tugging on tails, but not the picking up and accordioning of the mother, so it's a falsified version
the version xdennis linked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jap-UBbmPsw in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38830369 does have that full segment and is also clearer