alt Hacker NewsDisney Lost Roger Rabbit
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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
The phrase below is worth the read:
> giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money you can give that kid that will buy them lunch – you're just enriching the bullies
> Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audio books.
> when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.
Beautifully explained the complex situation and its kind of scary how it applies to tech as well in some areas.
The second point is also true w.r.t big tech & privacy regulations.
> The original US copyright lasted for 14 years, and could be renewed for another 14 years, but only by the creator (not by the publisher).
I wish we would go back to that.
I don’t know if Cory Doctorow has read the “fantastic 1981 novel”, but I have (decades ago) and as I recall the plot of the book and the plot of the movie are very different from each other. The author of the book didn’t write the screenplay and I doubt he had much (if anything) to do the character designs in the movie. So even if he has the rights to his novel back, it’s not at all clear to me that he could just make (or sell a license to make) a straight, recognizable sequel to Disney’s movie without getting back into bed with Disney, and clearly Disney isn’t interested or they’d have done something by now.
Direct link to the article: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/#im-just-drawn...
It's a long-winded article, even for a lawyer, but the payload seems to be a crack at the head of the RIAA, which is suing Midjouney.
"In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods."
It amazes me the number of people who are raging at how AI is hurting creators, and will make long videos and posts about this subject, without touching on the fact that the __ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY__ is the single largest abuser of creators, and it's far worse than AI is or probably will ever be.
That's how you can tell that the RIAA/MPAA propaganda campaign against AI to protect its racket is working.
> Termination is a powerful copyright policy, and unlike most copyright, it solely benefits creative workers and not our bosses.
That's an interesting framing. I know why Doctorow wants to import the boss/worker concept here, but it just doesn't apply. Disney wasn't Wolf's boss in any sense that is usually understood, and it just obscures the picture with a bunch of class-based chaff.
> The answer lies in the structure of creative labor markets, which are brutally concentrated. Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks.
> The media industry isn't just a monopoly, in other words – it's also a monopsony, which is to say, a collection of powerful buyers. The middlemen who control access to our audiences have all the power
I'm happy to see apps included here, I feel sometimes folks forget these are also a form of creative works and having the two gatekeepers constantly filter and influece what can and can't be released is absolute nightmare for both developers and consumers (who don't even know the things they could've had but were denied by big A or big G).
Hot damn I’m a sucker for a good analogy…
”Giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. You're just enriching the bullies.”
The big “5,4,3,2,1” is also a powerful piece of rhetoric. Who is this Doctorow person? He has my attention! :)
Lots of fun ranting (the good kind) about the ills of the industries built to take advantage of creators, but for those who just want to know more about the state of Roger Rabbit: https://www.imnotbad.com/2025/11/roger-rabbit-copyright-reve...
> Under Termination, a media company can force you to sign away your rights in perpetuity, but you can still claim those rights back after 35 years. Termination isn't just something to bargain away, it's a new power to bargain with.
It's sentences like these that make it hard for me to take Doctorow seriously.
No media company is "forcing" anyone to do anything. They're paying creatives for their work. Every creative is free to say no. Musicians are free to shop their music to different record labels for the best deal. Authors pitch their books to different publishers to see which one offers the best deal. And there's always self-publishing as well.
We can have a reasonable conversation about copyright without saying silly untrue things like media companies are "forcing" creators to take deals.
A great article on how awfully twisted copyright has become away from its intended goal, or at least the publicly stated intended goal.
Much reform is needed, seems to apply to everything...
I loved WFRR as a kid, and of all the movies I loved as a kid, it has definitely held up the best. I re-watched it recently and it is still great. Hilarious, thoughtful and just the right amount of dark.
One of the reasons I still love it is that it hasn't fallen prey to the usual Hollywood practice of taking something you love and shovelling it down your throat until you're sick of it. It saddens me when you see a really good movie with a bunch of bad sequels, or TV series that were once great but ran for 10 seasons too long.
There's something very weird in this editorial. Doctorow implies that he's unhappy that copyright renewability became assignable in 1909†. Assignability to publishers is, by implication, bad for creators.
How exactly could that be the case? Assignment isn't automatic. Creators have to agree to assign to publishers. It's not clear to me how this doesn't make them strictly better off. Assignment of renewability, in Doctorow's framing, is valuable. How are creators made better off for not being able to sell it?
†(he refers to the framer's original term of 14 years + renewability for 14 years, leaving out that the term was extended to base 28 + 14 year renewal in 1831 --- he also leaves out that assignability predates the modern media industry by decades).
35 years seem quite excessive.
Taking half your life to get your stuff back?
Really interesting read, but I wonder if the character design everyone associates with the story isn't still owned by Disney even after termination. As I understand the original work is a written novel (and not a graphic novel), and I assume Disney designed the characters.
Otherwise ("creative works" based on the original material also transfer to the author of the original material) would mean that the author suddenly owns the MOVIE as well...
This is so freakin awesome!
Roger Rabbit was actually played in 35mm just last Thursday in Central NJ. What a treat it would have been to known that the original author got his characters back. I was lamenting on all the time that had passed since release. This cheered me right up! Will we see a whole Roger Rabbit universe now?
Intellectual property rights should go away after 10 years.
This should work for video game developers right? Can they reclaim ownership of the games they created in the 80s/90s that have been abandoned?
Disney has the Roger Rabbit themed rides at Disneyland. How is that not considered using the IP?
> In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods. He wants there to be a new copyright that allows creators to decide whether their work can be used to train AI models, and then he wants that right transferred to media companies who will sell it to AI companies in a bid to stop paying artists <…>
There’s a timeline where big media publishers at least accidentally defend the rights of small-time IP holders (individual creators)—they’d go to court with the likes of OpenAI and Midjourney and put an end to training commercial ML solutions on unlicensed material. Specifically, if they would owe a large media company for training on their original works, presumably they just as well owe an average Jane. (Granted, assuming that Jane has not signed away her rights to a large media company she works with, but that would not apply to a massive number of small-time creators.)
> Remember, Termination is one of the only copyright policies that solely benefits creative workers.
To play devil's advocate, this provision probably lowers how much media companies are willing to pay when acquiring copyrights.
So does this mean that the developers of abandonware can get legal rights to their old work?
With Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it’s not really clear whether the author originally came up with such a great idea and script, or if Disney just brought it to life so brilliantly on screen. I’m leaning toward the second. It’s cool that he got the rights back, but without Disney this idea just isn’t going to "sing" again.
35 years seems to be a lot of time. Make it 15 maybe. Which is still a lot of time with your creation collecting dust. Or am I missing something?
Let me get this straight: the author is angry that Disney didn't release a series of shitty Roger Rabbit sequels, prequels, and shared cinematic universe pictures with Pixar and Marvel, so he's re-taking his copyright in order to sell it to another studio who will exploit and debase his creative works more rapaciously?
> copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power, which means that copyright becomes something we bargain away.
This quote sums up a lot of the issues with current copyright laws in a very elegant way.
> But at the same time, the amount of money being earned by creative workers has only fallen over this period [50 years, so since 1975], both in real terms (how much money an average creative worker brings home) and as a share of the total (what percentage of the revenues from a creator's work the creator gets to keep).
Is there evidence this is true? It doesn't sound very true.
Does this takeback include the likeness of Roger and Jessica Rabbit from Disney's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or just the content from the original 1981 novel? From what I can tell, the familiar cartoon movie designs are unique to the Disney movie and affiliated Disney shorts.
It's really nice to read about the side of things that sheepish defenders of copyright seem to always be blissfully not aware of.
> .... by waiting 35 years ...
Should be 3.5
> This is a nightmare scenario for a creator: you make a piece of work that turns out to be incredibly popular, but you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them.
This nightmare scenario involves selling the rights to your character to a company that has the ability to produce, advertise and cast a movie with talented actors.
I'm certain I never would have heard of Roger rabbit had it not been sold.
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> Copyright is a very weak tool for protecting creators' interests, because copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power,
This is drivel written by someone who doesn't understand the mechanism of supply and demand. If you don't like the price, don't sell. If you don't like the terms, propose alternative ones. The real risk to creators is artificially suppressed demand through industry consolidation, not nuances to copyright law.
> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office.
You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law.
> when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.
That’s the sign of a deeply broken system. It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.