It's just insane enough that I want to wait and hear "the other side" before passing judgement. Are there any other details that might have been left out for example that make it a less clear cut case of theft than what is depicted in the letter?
Splinter of the minds eye may not have been the best novel, have mercy please!
I liked it too, Alan Dean Foster did some nice worldbuilding there (that ended up very non-canon) that you don't usually see in franchise novels.
Another good example of this that comes to mind is 'Spock's World' by Diane Duane (though I think most of the worldbuilding there did become canon).
The other ADF movie novelization I recall fondly is 'The Last Starfighter'.
If there is nothing missing, then shame shame shame
Everyone thinks their circumstance is "precedent setting" and something to pay more attention to than other things, but the question here being is it?
You can buy assets without liabilities. There isn't something to find out... or is there? Yes, you and them just noticed that this could undermine all royalties by just shuffling them off to a shell company that has no ability to pay. But are you sure it hasn't always been like that?
For example, many jurisdictions require a tax when a car is sold. But you can always buy the LLC that happens to own a car and no tax event occurred. The only point of this example - not as an analogy to this case - is that the feature was always present and it avoids a transaction. Could this deprive the state of revenue? Yes, yes it could, astute observation, moving on.
This article and complaint makes it seem like it is groundshaking, but did the earthquake really come decades ago and nobody used their platform to notice?
I am reserving judgement on the legal side for that purpose. Can we shame Disney for taking that approach, sure. But attempting to get a reputable legal advocacy foundation involved for a reality that already has existed for an unknown amount of time seems like misdirection.
Otherwise what's stopping me from selling my Disney BluRays to someone but not the liabilities of adhering to the copyright agreement?
That being said, it’s still quite likely Disney is in breach of contract. But it’s not quite as simple.
The reasonable interpretation is that someone at Disney is attempting to shore up their revenue this year and is using Mr. Foster’s due proceeds as a way to attempt to make their balance sheet look better.
The only reason I can really think of them doing this is that they don’t actually believe they owe him the money.
It’s reasonably clear that he never held the copyright to the works and it’s not public what his actual contract was.
Disney could be doing this at scale to many authors, this announcement by SFWA may bring a bunch of other complainants out of the woodwork.
The other aspect is that while what you say is certainly true of Disney as a whole, the amounts may be more meaningful for some subsidiary or division, (like, you know, their publishing arm) and the exec(s) that head it.
The copyright holder (the company) is the only one that can levy usage licenses aka royalties that other people need to pay it.
Disney became the copyright holder and so Disney is owed royalties from whomever has a usage license that the previous company negotiated.
Anything else is a liability that was shed or simply stayed in the now defunct company. If the contract was irreconcilably tied to the company then Disney would opt not to buy the shares and instead by all the assets and network and trademark.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-patriot-bankruptcy/bankru...
Asking this as a foreigner and because such a system sounds so ripe for abuse that it would have already been fixed if it really was flawed and affected those pensioners' lives.