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Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

Sorta related since Disney held a share in it previously but Dick Tracy exclusive rights are still held by Warren Beatty who produced and starred in the role back in 1990. He had to fight off a challenge from Tribune Media in court decades ago but stipulation was he had to produce new Dick Tracy stuff every few years. It’s lead to a series of increasingly surreal late night specials on TCM where he appears in character and talks about random stuff and the 1990 movie, last time was in 2023: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKncYwtec4

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Similarly Wheel of Time had one... I had to dig deep and converse with an LLM to figure it out. I proposed to it "copyslop" as the term of art, it came back with "placeholder productions", "copyright keepers", and eventually there seems to be a "real" term-of-art called "ashcan" - https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/9jxvtb/til_a...

In any case: """Yes, you're likely thinking of the "Wheel of Time" pilot episode titled Winter Dragon, which aired in 2015. It was a low-budget production that was released with almost no promotion and aired in the middle of the night on FXX. The purpose of this release was widely believed to be an attempt by Red Eagle Entertainment to retain the rights to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, as their licensing agreement required them to produce something before a specific deadline."""

https://wheeloftime.fandom.com/wiki/Winter_Dragon

The 1994 Fantastic 4 movie was the same deal. Produced for $1M, never released. I guess it's hard to make a legal standard for "actually trying" with a license, but it is really weird to see that you can keep these licenses alive with these zombie products.

Another less token one I'm aware of is the Marvel themed land of Universal Orlando. Universal has an indefinite license to the IP as long as they don't 'mishandle' it. An easy way to make it very clear that you haven't done that is to just never change anything. So all the rides, signage, etc is carefully maintained but identical to how it was 20 years ago.

So is Warren being an asshole here? I mean, we haven't seen a Dick Tracy movie since the 90s. I am out of the loop so trying to understand.

Perhaps, but he's also highlighting how fundamentally broken the copyright system is. I don't think that's his goal (he's mostly being petty; there's a reason there's a pop song about his vanity), but it is an interesting side-effect of his odd project.

I think it's simpler than that. IE; not a vanity thing for his ego or pettyness for the sake of being petty,

Entity owns an IP, Entity doesn't want another entity to own it for risk to the IP. (the other entity being a globally publicly owned historic aggregator of IPs for sake of short term profits)

DIsney is doing the same in reverse with the Muppets/Henson Properties. Don't do anything with it beyond semi-annual short projects to retain the IP.

So he is being an ass.

I mean, let the IP free or try to sell it if you are not doing anything with it.

> So he is being an ass.

No, let me correct you: He's being a Dick.

spot on :D

> So is Warren being an asshole here? I mean, we haven't seen a Dick Tracy movie since the 90s. I am out of the loop so trying to understand.

Well the rights were held by Disney from 1988 until 2005, and then they were tied up in court (between Beatty and Tribune) until 2011, when Beatty won the rights. The movie you're referring to was released in 1990.

So Beatty has held the rights for only 14 of those 35 years. Although the first special he made was released in 2010, during that legal battle.

Wow, TIL. I had assumed that Warren Beatty was suffering from dementia due to his great age and his retirement from cinema. I had no idea he was still making media appearances.

You assume he has dementia because he’s old and retired?

There seems to be a popular view nowadays that most old people grow to be senile (just look at any online discussion of old politicians for example). This is not the case!

Old people do lose mental capacity just as they lose strength etc, dementia is a more extreme thing.

Sad as it is, when stars from classic Hollywood stop being visible but are still known to be alive at a highly advanced age, dementia is often the case. Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, and Jack Nicholson are notable cases, and I just assumed Beatty was similar.

Do you think perhaps there is a sample bias because old actors who retire and don't have dementia don't get written about?

By the time the actors I mentioned were written about as having dementia, many film fans had already assumed they were dealing with dementia precisely because they were no longer being written about or seen in the media much. Such speculation about Jack Nicholson, for example, was rife on film forums well before those paparazzi images appeared.

Right, but that’s probably because they read stories that go back to people who knew the actors. There’s a well-oiled gossip machine.

Lots of old actors who don’t have dementia retire, there just aren’t stories about how they don’t have dementia.

Or possibly, actors who still have their faculties tend to keep acting, even into advanced age. Not sure if that's true, but even the perception of that being true could lead to these kinds of assumptions.

There's also a legendary Star wars merch rights agreement that only expired because the rights holder forgot to send Lucas a check while the franchise was inactive.

Billions of dollars gone because of an oversight.

Arguably they didn't know Lucas was going to bring it back.

https://equinoxbusinesslaw.com/blog/how-hasbro-almost-blew-a...

There's an argument to be made that Lucas wouldn't have brought it back if they didn't miss the check. A little over half a mil of it's budget came from the initial payout of the new Hasbro deal.

Surreal is precisely the term. I had no idea about this. It's sad.

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