Disney Is Placing Classic Fox Movies into Its Vault
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HOWEVER, the major downside in comparison to a cinema is that there's nothing stopping me from pulling out my phone, or keeping my notifications on, or pausing it to go do something else. The level of immersion in a difficult to watch film can be totally destroyed (e.g. good luck trying to sit through the Turin Horse in your living room, the mood of the film will be totally destroyed by a few pauses).
The walls won’t reflect too much light if you take adequate measures so that they are not pure white and uncovered. For me, the challenge of setting up the home cinema was not the reflecting light of the walls, inasmuch as they could be covered with bookshelves. Rather, it was the acoustics when I have large windows in the room – I could cover them with Ikea’s fully opaque curtains so that light isn’t a problem, but the glass of the windowpanes still has a detrimental effect on the sound.
In my case, I've a timed lock I put my phone away with ("just stop doing it" doesn't really work with me, 100% addicted) when I watch a film I actually want to pay attention to at home. No way my attention span could handle something like Bela Tarr at home (I'm a fidgety unfocused person and always have been), but for the most part it done the job.
RE: the space, it's hard to get a good setup with rented accommodation, or small accommodation (currently in a studio apartment). I'm sure I'll eventually have a place where I can set up an amazing system.
My current apartment has woodchip wallpaper and nowhere to hang a screen from, so I'm hacking together ~80inch screen project (have an old bed frame I chopped up and repurposed as a room divider that I'm gonna add a roller blind and curtains onto that I'm pretty sure will kind of work...)
That doesn’t seem to stop the people I’ve seen at the cinema, tapping away on their phones for the entire movie. I would love to go to a movie theatre that is:
1) tastefully decorated like an old-timey cinema and spotlessly clean
2) reasonably priced, both in food and ticket prices, so that families can afford to go
3) strict in its policies of restricting technology (no phone use in the theatre whatsoever) and mandating parental accompaniment for children
4) offers both healthy snacks and classic ones like popcorn, and does not use any fake butter or garbage like that
Fortunately there is a theater near me in the East Village that sometimes shows older stuff, and I saw 2001 in 70mm there and it was awesome.
The projector-wall distance was no more than 5m. A short throw projector can work with even less distance.
So absolutely doable in a small space.
I'm never going back to a regular TV.
Hmm
The cost of projectors and surround-sound speakers has dropped so significantly in the last decade (and you can use a Raspberry Pi as your media center) that I suspect it is within a lot of people’s means here and that this audience has splurged on other high-end electronics from time to time. I mean, I live in Eastern Europe on a local middle-class salary, and my setup was still achievable after a few months’ saving up.
Definitely, the real limitation to this setup is whether one can rent or own a standalone home. As the other person mentions, this is not an easy option for that portion of the HN readership who has moved to NY or SF. But for cinephiles elsewhere, they ought to think about such a setup and see whether they could make it happen.
Yes, I have a decent home theatre, and my partner and I enjoy watching shows and movies on it most nights we're home.
But going to a beautiful old cinema to watch a classic movie on a huge screen, is a whole different experience, and one that most movie enthusiasts relish from time to time, regardless of what setup they have at home.
No matter how affordable/practical it is to build a home theatre for many of us here, it still won't be for many people, and we can still find it sad that the ability to experience old movies in the kinds of theatres where they were originally shown is being wound back by changing corporate interests.
As to space, you can put your collapsible screen in front of bookshelves, windows, doors etc So they take up less useful space than a large TV.
I'd be surprised if a good short throw 4K projector is $1k (but if you've got recs within that range I'm very interested)
A normal projector is 11+ feet from the screen. The diagonal being approximately the same as the distance from the projector to the screen.
I have seen short throw 4K projectors from around 1,500$ but IMO they are a poor fit for home theater as the screen ends up as a bright object in people’s view.
Also, when going with girlfriend or children, the cinema is twice or triple as expensive.
I think you're missing the point. I have a fairly decent home cinema setup and rarely go to the cinema but there are some films that deserve viewing on the big screen. For me these are films such as Casablanca, Apocalypse Now, Alien, 2001:A Space Odyssey, Star Wars (original), Close Encounters. These were movies made where the "cinematography" had the cinema in mind, not a home cinema system (because they basically didn't exist unless you were extremely well off). Seeing these films in the cinema is, for me anyway, a genuinely different experience.
Audio at the theater was better, but I haven't invested much beyond a 2.0 setup.
At $11/ticket (pretty normal around here), the break-even point is ~200 movies. You have to B-Y-O-BluRay but at least you can rewatch those for free.
EDIT: oh and I don't have to smell buttery nacho cheese from the person sitting next to me, and fight over the cupholder
Do you really want the government to get involved in all of those situations?
Both disintermediation and aggregation have been essential forces in the information culture built upon the Internet from the early days. Both serve an useful purpose, and both have their dark sides as well.
Netflix is of course free to make and sell their own content how they wish, as is Disney. But the value proposition of Netflix started with syndicated content, and that proposition is diminished the less you find such content on it. At some point, you have to ask whether it's still worth the monthly subscription, or if you should take your money over to the other streaming services instead – each with its own slightly different and uniquely-broken interface, I should add.
Take the example of Rupert Murdoch himself, he tried to purchase the remaining stake in BSKYB on several occasions and was blocked by the reglator who felt that plurality in the media is important. Often you make unterakings to the regulator that you will not shut out third-parties like Disney alledgedly have, in order that you can get the merger sanctioned.
Thankfully, efforts to extend the period yet again have failed[1], so the original incarnation of Mickey will enter the public domain in 2023.
But the damage has been done. After a certain period, older works just naturally loose their cultural relevance. Disney's main characters being the obvious exception but there's been (and will be) tons of collateral damage.
IMHO, it's disgusting what they've done.
[0] https://alj.artrepreneur.com/mickey-mouse-keeps-changing-cop... [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/a-whole-years-wo...
Copyright simply means you can't copy your DVDs of Disney films onto other DVDs and sell them for a profit without getting permission (aka a license) from Disney first.
2) even before copyright expires, first sale doctrine applies to any re-sold copy (the disc bought), but not copies of that copy.
3) this doesn't solve the problem of have having access to the high quality masters.
Disney owns way too much. They can bully theater chains to show their films on as many screens as they want for as long as they desire, and then they take a lion's share of the revenue.
Disney can print money from all of the licensing, which isn't a problem save for the fact other entrants have a huge hurdle to overcome to get shelf space.
They water down their content for mass appeal, so it isn't artistically interesting. They also appease foreign governments like China. Again, it wouldn't be a problem if they weren't strong arming others out of the limited theater space.
Disney+ kicked off the streaming wars. Which is going to be fantastic as a consumer... :(
Disney is ridiculous. I say this despite the fact that I have a good bit of stock in the company.
It actually is going to be fantastic as a consumer. Since people are cutting cable and going to Netflix, the money for content has to come from somewhere - it’s not sustainable to get unlimited quality content for everyone for $12/mo. If new streaming services didn’t appear, the only new content we would eventually have would be Netflix Originals - and if that’s all you want, you can continue just subscribing to Netflix! With Disney+ and others, it gives companies incentives to create great new content. There’s no chance we would have gotten say, the Mandalorian, on Netflix
And the ability to cancel anytime is not a perk. For people with ADHD it's a nightmare.
There needs to be a Spotify for entertainment.
What I dislike is playing whackamole with what service I can get certain content from. Is this show on Hulu? Or is it Netflix? Oh, right, Disney pulled it from Netflix and now it's on Disney+. Continue ad nauseam. Getting notifications that new content from a series is available is likewise disparate across platforms.
There needs to be a central management point. Similar to how Amazon aggregates physical goods from many vendors, offering me a central and familiar interface to provide search, discovery and payments. They then handle distributing payment and providing the actual content.
Amazon's Fire TV provides me with some of this (i.e. I can say "play such and such show" and it will provide me with an interface that lets me open a provider that has the content), but the fact that it's not available on my computer and that it doesn't manage the subscriptions is somewhat painful.
Films released under the Disney brand were mainstream, fairly tame films intended for mass family consumption.
Films released under the Touchstone label (Buena Vista before that) were a bit more adult, and featured various states of undress, coarse language, and significant amounts of (non-bloody) violence.
Films released under Miramax were for adults: any content that would be R-rated or less was acceptable. Until recently, Miramax held the record for most total Oscars earned by a studio even though it has been defunct for 9 years.
I don't want to make this personal and/or sound troll-y but where do their ridiculousness end, and you being hypocritical begin?
I'm not defending Disney. But if they're obligated to serve shareholders, and you feel they're failing then sell. But to finance them and in turn mock them, well that's why Disney, Amazon, et al continue to do what they do.
A divestment (almost universally) does not; it's just a transfer of ownership to people with a bigger priority on making money vs whatever moral objection you might have.
In the case of public stock, "cashing out" doesn't require the company to return the investment dollars to you. There is no money coming out of their pocket, only someone else purchasing your shares. (Except stock buybacks, which are voluntary, and in those instances, beneficial to the company.)
Done on a large scale, it artificially deflates the stock price of a company below it's true market value, enabling people who have less philosophical opposition to obtain stock that's essentially subsidized by the divesting parties. (There are a few very obscure exceptions, that might initially look like divestment kills a company, but it still ends up only being an ownership transfer, just to more powerful stakeholders.)
If anything, these orgs should be doing the opposite. Becoming more invested buys you more say in how a company is run. Encouraging divestment is like telling those "divestors" not to vote.
If your really hate something enough, you would buy (enough of) it in order to destroy (or at least change) it.
- To support that you'd have to show what the myths would look like today without Disney's involvement. Just as likely, they would have been forgotten.
- This isn't a zero sum thing. If you prefer a different telling of a classic story, spread it! No one's stopping you.
- I'm also not buying that the myths existed in some ideal state in the past that we've now fallen from. Stories always evolve.
Most Disney films are not based on fairy tales. Their biggest animated films are original works. Even their biggest live-action franchises are all original works created within the last 60 years.
Indeed, one of the reasons the Marvel films do so well is because Disney has given their directors a degree of artistic control that DC would not (even though DC had the far more well-known stable of heroes) and lets the directors create other types of stories within the framework of a comic book movie (i.e., espionage thriller for Captain America, coming-of-age comedy for Spiderman, heist movie for Guardians, Shakespearean drama for Thor).
Most, maybe now-a-days.
They sure milked the premise during the early days.[0]
My biggest 'Disney problem' is their abusive use of copyright, and the fact that they got away with it largely due to the use of Disney material as pro-National propaganda.[1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_animated_films_...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney%27s_World_War_II_p...
Since 1990, Disney has produced (in terms of animated works):
* 14 films clearly based on classical mythology, fairy tales, or literature.
* 7 films clearly original works
* 4 sequels
* Pocahontas, which is (loosely) based on historical events
* Moana, which I'm not sufficiently well-versed in Polynesian mythology to know if it's based on an actual mythical event or merely draws inspiration from it
* The Lion King, which is allegedly inspired or directly ripped off of Kimba the White Lion (although Disney vehemently denies it)
* Wreck-it Ralph, although technically original, relies on a lot of explicit video game references.
It's ridiculous that Steamboat Willie is always going to be the cutoff between public domain and oblivion in dusty forgotten copyright hell.
That assertion makes absolutely no sense. Fifty years isn't a huge amount of time and the bulk of Fox's catalogue (that's actually interesting, well for me anyway) is younger than that so your copyright argument doesn't stand up.
To re-iterate, this article is about restricting access to cinemas to play these movies in their theatres. The distribution format for cinemas and their equipment is, as far as I know, somewhat different from buying a DVD or BluRay off of Amazon. Even a ten year copyright period wouldn't solve the problem of the studios withholding the technical formats that are needed for their content to be played in a theatre. They simply don't have to give that up.
Personally I don't have a problem with studios owning the copyright for say 75 years, that seems like a fair amount of time...provided the studio's play fair with access to their content.
Sure what Disney are doing is a shitty thing, but it's certainly not as simple as claiming that reforming the copyright rules would solve this.
Then, there are books. I don't really know what to do with them. Since books are work of a much smaller group of people (most often, 1 person), maybe it's ok for them to retain rights till their deaths.
Individual works last 20 years or until the first author's death, whichever is greater. The rights are assignable but non-transferable.
Corporate works last 20 years. The rights are transferable.
Then patents, NDAs, and non-competes are a whole other issue to resolve.
When you want to use some work it can be a hardship to tell if the author is dead. Fixed expiration time is much better.
It’s in the interests of the public to encourage the production and publication of new ideas and art. The vast majority of authors make very little for their efforts, and the majority of the benefit to society is gained simply by its publication and broad distribution. The additional benefit from derived works IMHO is much lower.
Copyright is not for your children. It is a limited right given specifically to you, the author or inventor. How did you confuse it with property rights? You are free to invest the earnings that you make from exercise of your copyright, and to give those investments and savings to your progeny; you are not free to so invest your works, because upon your passing, they are no longer yours, but enter the public domain. You chose to share those works with the public, taking their money with the understanding that the money would support you in your artistic efforts; the public, in turn, has a shared cultural knowledge which incorporates your art.
Your second paragraph is a bland restatement of the basic reason why copyright exists: Copying is easy, art is hard, so copyright is necessary to ensure that artists get paid enough to live on and create more art. However, art only happens within a cultural context, so it's also necessary to have a large and robust public domain. This balance between copyright and the public domain is reflected in the legislative history of copyright [1] around the time of the drafting of the Constitution.
To paraphrase a popular lyric, when you go knockin' on heaven's door, please leave your tools; you won't need 'em anymore.
You just made the perfect argument for a robust public domain.
I love project Gutenberg, I have several of its books on my iPad right now, but a single book shop selling copyright works probably does more in a week to promote actually reading stuff than Gutenberg does in a year.
I find out entirely reasonable for Disney to retain control of Mickey Mouse or DC to retain control of Batman as they’ve been continuously using and improving those ideas for almost 100 years. Otherwise unused aspects of culture need to be allowed to emerge (if after 30 years no one has put Mara Jade on film someone should be allowed to do it.)
Of course the Berne convention makes all this way more difficult than even normal law making, but c’est la vie
Nice idea in principle, but how are you going to prevent the Mara Jade et al. Trademark mmMintenance Holiday Special – directed by our janitor, starring a bum off the street?
> Of course the Berne convention makes all this way more difficult than even normal law making, but c’est la vie
Dress up as Mr. Duck and tell Mr. Trump that you're the better Donald. He'll get angry at Disney and resign from the Berne convention.
Alternatively elect someone that actually wants to renegotiate it. The USA doesn't have to take international treaties as decided by the powers that be, it's part of them.
That would be less fun though.
As for the US abandoning the Berne convention- it was ratified by the senate, so the President, even this reality tv drama of an administration, can’t just drop out (unless their is some detail of the ratification instrument I’m unaware of.) I thankfully still believe there is enough left of the constitutional apparatus that there remain some bounds on Presidential power, even when the president might be doing what I want.
If someone actually wants to watch this, they can rent a DRM'd Betamax tape (inventing this is certainly the most expensive step) for $999999/day.
You could of course make sure the "movie" is actually available by regulating distribution and prices. But you can't regulate how movies are supposed to be made without seriously restricting freedom of art.
What constitutes abandonment of a "derivative work mark" ultimately would probably be a delineation the courts would make. I'd hope that in a sane implementation of this scheme your strawman wouldn't hold up. It would be pretty easy to demonstrate that next to no money was spent on the creation or marketing of the product, and no one bought it, so that could still be considered abandonment. That being said, it wouldn't take much to produce new IP the keeps the mark alive so long it as it was 1) actually the same concept as the original mark (Mara Jade can't star in a rom com set in New York City without lightsabers. (Also Disney should call me about putting Mara Jade in a Rom Com set in NYC WITH lightsabers, because that would be amazing.)) and 2) gets some limited degree of public recognition.
So, as soon as they lock it away like this, they lose any rights to it. Whereas if they keep making it available, they can keep those rights forever!
It just now occurred to me that maybe trademark might be a better form of (long term IP) protection for stuff like Mickey Mouse.
I'm okay with Disney owning Mickey Mouse (and so forth) forever. I'm not okay with the toxic side effects of them hacking legal protections to serve their own narrow use cases.
That way, all streaming services would have full access to all back catalogs, and could compete on price, features, catalog size, etc. Not the current situation where they need in-house originals and exclusive arrangements, and many many shows are simply unavailable for any price.
The first one is more famous, but the second one is directly applicable as it dealt with the inverse of Disney's current modus operandi - the restriction of first-time screenings to theaters owned by the studio,
The gist of the complaint was that, by reason of an unlawful conspiracy of the respondents, petitioners were prevented from securing pictures -for exhibition in their theatre until after the preferred exhibitors had been able to show them in earlier and more desirable runs, and that petitioners were thus discriminated against in the distribution of feature films in favor of competing theatres owned or controlled by some of the respondents.
The matter before the court was the lower courts judgement and the damages awared to the petitioner. The lower court had found that an unlawful conspiracy existed and used a rough approximation to derive the damages,
...evidence was introduced in the course of the trial tending to show that respondents conspired to maintain the release system as part of a conspiracy to maintain minimum admission prices to be charged by exhibitors generally. This proof indicated that the object of this conspiracy was to make it possible to maintain high admission prices in the Loop theatres by restricting the price competition of the subsequent-run theatres.
The distributors' contracts with the Loop theatres provided for film rentals based on a percentage of the admission fees collected. It appeared that the rental contracts entered into between respondent distributors and the Chicago exhibitors, including respondent exhibitors and petitioners, uniformly contained schedules of minimum admission prices fixed on the basis of the playing position assigned. There was thus evidence tending to show that the release system and the price-fixing system were each an integral part of an unlawful conspiracy to give to the Loop theatres the advantages of a first-run protected from low-price competition.
The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this as being too vague, but the Supreme Court reversed this decision because,
...it is impossible to establish any measure of damage, because the unlawful system which respondents have created has precluded petitioners from showing that other conditions affecting profits would have continued without change unfavorable to them during the critical period if that system had not been established, and petitioners had conducted their business in a free competitive market.
- http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/usrep/usrep327/usrep327251/usrep327251.pdf
I recently contacted a student artist to ask to buy a print of a work they posted on an art forum. I had no particular limit to my budget. The artist said no.
You know what I can do about it? Absolutely nothing. It doesn’t matter how badly I want that piece in my home.
However, individuals and companies can contribute to the public domain. That is something we can do regardless of what the current copyright law is.
This is a major misstep by Disney, because it the crosses over to the older generation.
Best to spread the word.
Especially a company that had such a large role in writing those laws as Disney did.
You’re saying that if I make my own movie with my own funding and time/effort, if enough people like it and the culturally relevant switch gets flipped on they get to take it from me while I’m still alive and I don’t have any say on whether my work is duplicated or screened?
What if I run a SaaS product, people have been using it for 30 years, and they’ve determined it to be culturally relevant. Do they get to copy my source code and run it for themselves?
These are 70s and 80s movies. Many of those who contributed to them are still alive. It’s entirely reasonable for those people to determine how/whether to distribute their own art.
If you believe in that level of public ownership I can respect that you hold that opinion, but I don’t agree with it. At the same time, I do believe that copyrights expiring a lifetime after the creator dies are unreasonable.
To me, the right balance of copyright law is somewhere in between the extremes of Mickey Mouse ownership in perpetuity and complete public ownership.
Joking aside- This will become less true as technology makes film-making and distribution more accessible. Studios know this, so they've switched focus to tightly controlling distribution. Hurray for cultural gate-keepers.
What do you mean? The very article we've been discussing is about Disney's attempt to control distribution.
I agree that for now there's a healthy ecosystem of distribution channels for newer, lower budget content - I said as much. What's happening is that the studios are countering that by tightly controlling valuable legacy content. The kind of stuff we see as part of the cultural zeitgeist of the last several decades (again, see the article for examples).
The GPLv3 is not being used to create artificial scarcity of popular culture for corporate profit. That might be a difference you're keen on abstracting away, but I think it's a pretty big difference.
TiVo and I am sure other commercial entities think that the GPL has unreasonable demands.
Authors of GPL software have the right to distribute their software as they please...just as Disney does.
>authors of GPL software didn’t whine about Microsoft not open sourcing Windows
We both know that's not true, but it's also not relevant.
Blumhouse and Tyler Perry Studios are evidence that you can be successful without budgets of $100 million budgets.
The simple fact of the matter is the nature of the licenses in question are very different, and the nature of the licensers in question are very different. They share little other than a relation to copyright. The social impact of their use of copyright, which is the matter of contention, is worlds apart.
What’s the difference between Disney not allowing their content on Netflix or in theaters so they can exclusively use it on Disney+ and ElasticCo not allowing third party cloud providers to allow their software to be sold as a service so that they can exclusively offer managed services?
Do you want the government to step in and tell you how you can distribute your work?
Really, you're complaining that the GPL takes away your right to take away rights.
That is more pertinent question.
They perverted the intent of copyright, which is to encourage the arts by providing a temporary monopoly: After which artists are expected and encouraged to freely borrow any bits of the work and create their own.
Now they’re outright restricting even viewing of famous works. Disney is terribly corrosive.
So stop blaming Disney for the state of copyright, and start blaming all the European auteurs who tried (and nearly succeeded) in getting indefinite copyrights that passed down from the creator to his estate in perpetuity.