Copyright terms are so fucking stupid. Imagine getting into trouble for using Popeye. Make it the same as a patent duration and be done with it.
Data is Beautiful
Be respectful
You can really see how invested the copyright owners were to get such long durations.
"I'm not saying that's how it should be. I'm saying that's how it is."
- Tom Scott, 2020
YouTube's copyright system isn't broken. The world's is. (43 minutes long, but worth a watch)
Fuck Disney and congress for extending copyright protections to near infinity.
I feel like it should be the life time of the creator of the work provided that person is still getting a significant percentage of the royalties. Otherwise something like 20 years.
That way companies might be less likely to force artists to sign away all rights to their work. So like "hey this kid could live another 50 years, so lets make sure he gets his percentage so we can keep control longer."
I dunno what the patent duration is, but copyright should probably just be 50 years max IMO. If you can't make bank in that time without changing the idea up (and thus getting 50 years on the new version) you don't deserve it.
Originally I think it was closer to 20 years. Frankly I think 25 years is plenty. A quarter century is enough time to reward the creator of an IP and it respects the fact that all IP is built on top of the public domain so it's return is a natural part of the cycle.
In any case it's not like after it expires you could not trade on being the original. It's not like others could then come along and claim to have been the original creator. And if you kept making works those would each get their own period of copyright.
Dude the superman and batman stuff is gonna be nuts
Whoa! That's illegal buddy. In more ways than one...
THERE ARE NO LAWS ON THE MOON, BATMAN!
Snow White and the seven dwarves are 200 years old and already in the public domain.
Wouldn't Disney harass somebody if they were try to make it tho? It would look too much like theirs?
The Disney artwork would be copyright and probably some of the story that is unique to Disney's adaptation, but the characters themselves are fair game.
Just because something is legal and fair game doesn't mean that corpo trash would harass people over it
Your point would hit harder if Snow White hadn't been adapted a stupid amount of times after Disney's movie.
The stories are, but not the characters as drawn by Disney, it's like classic music, you can use the Music commercially (given that you Perform I), but you can't use a performance from someone else.
Same with classic stories, you can make your own snow white story, but you can't use snow white as performed by Disney (yet)
I want all of them to live together in one big house, reality TV style!!
... it appears there are mockups:
This show was really fucked up lmao my partner and I stayed at an Airbnb and while looking for something to watch and she saw this was like "honey this is kinda raunchy but we HAVE to watch it since you haven't seen it" and then 10 minutes in we had to turn it off because of how awful it was haha. Fat shaming goth cutter Betty boop, gay link, racist Pikachu, hypersexual pedo superman, generally just racist to every possible point like the pig character and stereotypes.
My partner just said, "the racist characters existing themselves I could handle, it was the racism they were perpetuating that made me tap out" lmao. [Edit: I said it already but I feel the need to re-iterate, this was all in the first 10 minutes!! end edit.]
But to your point, this sort of show done right would be hilarious with the public domain characters lol
Yeah, they (the showrunners) used incredibly bad stuff to produce humour (well).
And I've heard that 'the show didn't age well' but (iirc) the show absolutely at all times (with no doubt at all) portrayed all those characters as horrible.
At no point was shaming-vagina tentacles presented as the morally right thing. If the jokes they did with that arent funny to you, sure, that's legit, but if they were funny to you but aren't anymore "bcs the times changed" that just means that you were wrong back then & now grown up, and you prob liked the shaming, not the jokes.
Its like anti-lgbt stuff in recent history - it's not that 100 years ago being a bigot was any less horrible than now, the only difference is that now it might 'inconvenience you'.
Its like people saying that It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia characters "might be bad" ... you fucked up if you idolise them just because they are main characters, if you can't comprehend how bad they are (even tho they make it extremely obvious at all times) and how bad the lives of everyone around them make. Its like the whole point of a setup like that. None of them are anti- or edgy- heroes, they just suck.
I don't think Drawn Together was like Family Guys Quagmires rapey jokes & deeds (that was his whole character for most of the shows run) that were always presented as "cool" & macho - that didn't "age badly", it was bad & horrible all along.
And mass murderers with superpowers (Drawn Together, not The Boys) that indiscriminately and selfishly hurt absolutely everyone ... well, racism of those chars prob isn't the core issue or propaganda.
And racism, shaming, etc, they exist. That's just a fact. And you can make fun of anything.
Its what Louis-Dreyfus is saying with '"woke" culture isn't killing or limiting comedy', it doesn't (the context of that is that Seinfeld is bitching how anti-sexism is limiting (his) comedy, lul).
Let me just say, I have found that my barometer is, "does it perpetuate the issue or does it highlight it." I find that IASIP does a gold job highlighting issues, and if people choose to ignore that that says a lot more about them than the show. In regards to the Jerry and Dreyfus commentary about comedy today, IASIP is a perfect example of a show reframing how they talk about _____. I think we can look to Dennis for this example, as a creepy, high libido man who wears a whole different face and manipulates women into sex, in early seasons (after it's established), his character in 2007 says things like, "you want to see real girls going wild*" and in 2023 he has a whole monologue about learning how to sleep with leftist vs. rightwinger women. His dynamic has stayed the same, how the show uses comedy around the situation has evolved. To put it frankly, Jerry Seinfeld doesn't like his stuff to be grown up, hence his issues with the evolution of comedy.
In the case of Drawn Together, when the pig straight up said "I just don't like black people!" And wiggles his eyes and smiles, to me it comes off less as highlighting an issue and more just being crass and edgy because it can. You're right that at no point does it try to present any of these characters as good in the first episode, but I would argue that it doesn't really try and make any point with any of them either. It seems to exist just to take existing characters and put them in a reality TV style situation. The link character is a gay twink just to be funny, not to highlight anything.
Not everything needs to have a point, but it certainly helps when your content is dealing with terrible characters who are actively perpetuating a very poor way of acting. For example, if The Gang rarely has actual consequences in IASIP, but the way the characters are written makes it clear that they are aiming to highlight certain social issues and use these characters as a way to frame perspectives of each side of the issue. Them being awful is a way to deliver the commentary.
Again this is just from the first episode and so I'm not going to speak for the entirety of the show, that would just be wrong. But from the research I did after the fact and comparing it as a pilot episode from the early 2000's to others, if we simply look at "The Gang Gets Racist" (episode 1 of IASIP, 2005) and Episode 1 of Drawn Together (2004} the former makes clear statements about culture and character, that people will give up thing that make them uncomfortable for money, and that people who say they will support a cause might stop when they don't get recognition (and money). Just an example as this is just 1 of a hundred possible reads, because the show does a good job at framing the awfulness of the characters and the situation. This dynamic is one that they'll come to revisit, as you have 2 sets of characters on one side, 2 on the other, and then they meet in the middle (or blow right past each other per the Gun Fever episode)
Now, the pilot of Drawn Together on the other hand is a direct to video, which from my understanding the show was picked up by Comedy Central after the fact. The focus of the episode seems to be a lot more shock factor, which for a show that wasn't initially intended to be aired, I can't really fault it. But, watch Betty Boop and Cinderella become lesbian, watch a smoking Pikachu say Toyota and Hyundai, there's a lot of stuff happening but not a lot of stuff that I personally could easily point to and say, "now that's good social commentary!". And it's okay for the show to not be created with the intent of highlighting these issues, it just means that rewatching it is watching something that has aged very poorly. The actual content of the episode is just playing with the idea of what reality TV is like, making fun of behind the scenes style footage while playing up the drama.
I think they definitely were able to highlight some issues, such as how some characters used sex to deal with avoidance and how people do certain actions to cope, but I wouldn't say that my takeaway was that Betty Boop was being used to highlight these things. The show and the characters were treating her as the joke, in my opinion thus perpetuating this problem. For me it just didn't do a good enough job at making the distinction, so each component fell apart. The reality TV set is a great medium, the... extremeness of each character sets a very strong stage and expectation, but the end result turned out to be saying and doing edgy things to make the audience gasp. Which, after 20 years, doesn't give a lot of room for any sort of social commentary with staying power.
I'm sure that season 2 and 3 do a better job at attempting to have some social commentary, however I do have my doubts that there was ever a point that Ling Ling the racist Pikachu could really make. In regards to liking it back then, comedy changing, racism existing... I think all I need to really say is that a show succeeds by making it clear to the audience what the joke is. In IASIP, every single character is the butt of the joke because they are an idiot that thinks they are smart, so we laugh at them.
In what I saw from Drawn Together, every single character is the joke, because they are an extreme stereotype or caricature. We're supposed to be laughing at Betty Boop cutting after being fat shamed and for being emo. We're supposed to laugh at Ling Ling saying the names of asian cars as his language. We're supposed to laugh at the pig explicitly saying he is racist. At no point did the episode even attempt to give these characters consequences or make a setup for why they are the way they are. They simply exist to be a stereotype to laugh through, and I say this because the show gave no reasoning to believe otherwise. As in, what is the point of Ling Ling? To be an Asian stereotype. Because at no point does the show try to make him be anything else.
Finally, I should say that comedy is an ever-evolving medium and that rarely does comedy age well, almost inherently due to the nature of it being so strongly linked to a specific cultural era. That is nearly the sole reason that comedy doesn't age well. However, there's a huge nuance in this, because there can be more than 1 reason why comedy doesn't age well. If we look to analyze comedy in American cinema, we would have to look at blackslpoitation films which dominated the 1920's. We would almost universally say that none of these are funny today for a litany of reasons. But even when you go to actually study the writing, that sucked too! The jokes were bad and not funny. Because these were written for white people to point and laugh at the funny black people. The humor back then was racism. So not only was the writing shit, but the reasons for it as well.
So, to say that "racism exists" - yeah, obviously which is why comedy should work extra hard to utilize that and make it humorous. It's Always Sunny does this nearly perfectly in its very first aired episode, having a gay black actor in Philly dating Dee and Mac saying things like "so you people actually are related!" You can make fun of anything, that doesn't mean it will be funny. Sometimes, people aren't laughing because it's funny but because they're uncomfortable. Sometimes, people are laughing because it's how they feel.
That last bit is important, because if you're going "oh man it's so true it's so true!" And you're reacting to Spanky Ham talking about Foxxy Love.. well, let's just say it's probably the same type of person unhappy about The Boys S3 and S4, or IASIP past season 12. They don't like it because they finally realized it's making fun of them.
Tl;Dr does comedy perpetuate an issue or highlight it?
I forgot to say, when a show fails to highlight something properly, it puts it at risk of being seen as perpetuative instead. This is why shows like The Boys and IASIP get latched onto by the conservative demographic, as by failing to highlight an issue, the audience can very easily ignore them and use these characters as self inserts. This means that even a show with all intents to highlight issues can still perpetuate negative things simply because they failed to do a good job at highlighting the problem.
I agree with that point.
And I agree with the harm it can cause.
Next someone will do a series called 'The Duke Boys', w/o comics, just live action. The Southlander will be the celebrated hero that can do no wrong. And the cultural shift might start going in that direction.
Yet I don't see a better way out of that, to drive humanity/culture forward. You need people to evolve, and you can't really do that without education.
Having racists brainwashed into not begin racists isn't a permanent fix, or perhaps even a bad long-term fix.
(But it does make the lives of so many minorities better for a time, which is huge, those are actual lives being lived.)
Pretending that racism either doesn't exist or having propaganda against racism just reduces the issue into a simplistic yes/no contest.
And social issues should not be treated as sports.
Already working on a Bambi: First Blood movie.
How about a sequel to Bambi meets Godzilla?
A timeline of shit horror movies.
Ah, but they'll lobby harder. Batman will enter the public domain in 2,635.
Copyright should be 14 years.
Wait, you're telling me I can draw Batman x Superman porn in 10 years and sell it?
I wonder if this will herald an era of more original content and less of all this reusing of stuff all the time.
Apparently it will herald an era of crappy horror movies.
It won’t change anything. Old stories and characters are boring. Studios do it from time to time but like Robinhood movies aren’t great investments and since they don’t own the IP don’t lead to anything else.
Community made content is just for fun, so who cares if people make repetitive fan films, art, games.
2035 will be so fun
oh yeah
*in the US and some other countries. Not worldwide
I appreciate you posting here often but this is not a data visualization. This is just a graphic with dates on it
I see it as a way of visually presenting (character, year) data points.
Donald Duck is gonna be fire, I just know it.
Also, Disney has no rights to Snow White, they merely own the 7 very specificly named dwarves.
Stringy, Stingy, Stinky, Stampy, Strapping, Stressful, and Stephen Colbert
[email protected] Surprised there isn't more stuff with Winnie Pooh considering he's in the public domain, pretty interesting graph tho
Can't make any money off Winnie the Pooh content in China... for reasons.
Bold of this graph to assume this society will last that long
Aw, I was thinking I'm gonna become the Joker. Now I gotta wait.
Basically “NO”
There is no example of fair use in this illustration. There is no real expiration.
Alec Robbins looking at 2026 like: