"The Little Mermaid"

Posted Jan 2, 2003 10:03 UTC (Thu) by beejaybee (guest, #1581) [Link]

"As a fairy tale, it's warning is "Don't decide to sacrifice the
familiar for the exciting before you know for sure you can live the
life you dream. You may ruin your chances at happiness in both places
if you fail," which is good advice for a fairy tale to give. Disney's
version is more along the lines of "Whatever trouble you get into,
Daddy will make it O.K.," which is the kind of advice we have had far
too much of, In My Curmugeonly Opinion."

Sure. But what Disney did to "The Little Mermaid" is small beer compared with what Disney did to, e.g., "The Jungle Book".

"What worries me is that Disney may gain the power to prevent anyone
from telling the tale as it was meant to be told, forever destroying a
bit of the wisdom that makes us human, much as a software company,
through a patent, destroys a bit of the common good by robbing the
commons of it's commodity."

IMHO Disney _has_ created new intellectual property in its adaptation of traditional & copyright-expired tales; Disney's version is obviously tuned to their market, and (so long as we see that as consisting of small children) I don't see that there's much wrong with that. They should have picked a different title, though.

The media barons' attitude that, by altering an existing piece of IP, they automatically own the work(s) from which it was derived is obviously crazy. If they get that passed, all I have to do is to make a work loosely derived from Disney's version of "The Little Mermaid" & all the related Disney-branded products instantly become illegal. Result: lawyers become _much_ richer, I probably spend some time in the slammer & the business model of every company trading in intellectual property is completely demolished.

Posted Jan 2, 2003 19:00 UTC (Thu) by X-Nc (guest, #1661) [Link]

Side comment:

This reminds me of a rant that Harlan Ellison did on a little known, and very underappreciated, show called "Sci-Fi Buzz" on cables Sci-Fi Channel a few years ago. It was around the time that "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" came out. One of the merchendizing add-ons was a picture book of the movie. Harlan was incensed that the book was titled "Walt Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame" with no mention at all of Victor Hugo. As was his way, he ranted and flamed about the whole userping of the Intellectual Property (though it wasn't called that back then).

One thing I loved about his segments on that show... Everything he went off on was very topical and worth thinking abou/discussingt, even if you didn't agree with him (like his distain for the entire online community and how they/we should all be distroyed because we're scum and morons, blah, blah, blah).

Anyway, back to work now.

Posted Jan 8, 2003 1:16 UTC (Wed) by mly (guest, #2171) [Link]

Barry King wrote:
>> If you have read one of the more folkloric versions of "The Little Mermaid"

As far as I know, "Den Lille Havfrue" was written by H. C. Andersen in 1837. I don't know of any earlier folkloristic versions, but maybe there were. If the kind of copyright legislation Disney Corp advocates had been valid then, I guess Disney would have had to pay the H. C. Anderson Holding A/S a fair sum of money to make that silly movie. Considering Disney's size and financial state, I doubt that would have been a problem, but as it was now, they got it for free.

Of course, Barry is right when he worries that Disney may gain the power to prevent anyone from telling tales as it was meant to be told, if such laws come through. Perhaps not the tales of H. C. Andersen though...

I assume Disney can't contol the works that have long been in the public domain, such as H. C. Anderson's works, or the stories told by the Grimm brothers. I guess they can try, but surely something that is clearly a pure derivate of H. C. Andersen's works can never become Disney's property. (Just don't call her Arial, Helvetica or New Century Gothic.) Certainly for more recent works, I imagine Disney will be able to get exclusive rights. They can get that already, but at least not for unlimited time...

Have any of you seen the Russian cartoon version of Winnie the Pooh for instance? It's really great! I've only seen it dubbed to Lithuanian, but even though I'm still very poor at that language, I much prefer it to all of Disneys versions. (Not only compared to the most recent Disney version which is so bland and boring that I assume that both Alan Milne and Walt Disney are rotating in their graves...)

Ok, the Russian version was made in the USSR, where intellectual property rights were completely ignored. To show it in western Europe or USA etc, I assume you would need some kind of permission from whoever owns Milne's rights today, but if this would be his children or grand children, I doubt that would be a problem. If Disney has some kind of exclusive rights (as I fear they have) it's very different. I'm sure they don't want to show an old, communist manufactured, low budget, Russian version that competes with their own work and is much, much funnier and with a lot more spirit.

I'm not against capitalism, but I am against monopolies. Just as patents, copyright protection is a time limited monopoly invented to give people economical incentive to be creative. In these days it seems the development of technology and entertainment is racing, and whatever becomes modern will be replaced by something newer quicker than the last modern thing. Making these monopolies last longer, is completely contrary to this trend. There is no just reason for that, it's not brought up to counter the trend of a world spinning faster and faster. Rather the other way around. The only reason is that big money is buying / influencing the law makers all over the world to change legislation to the benefit of the big money, at the expense of the people.

Software patents, patents on Life, extented copyrights and reduction of fair use etc are all clear trends. The big corporations understand that "things", physical objects, will be relatively less important in future economy, and that different kinds of information will become more important. Those with plenty of money see obvious oportunities and also clear dangers. They need to make information more tangible, easier for them to control, or their accumulated wealth might get out of their hands. For years, it's been clear that the patents on life threaten to make third world farmers into serfs of the large corporations. I fear that we in the west are threatened by an intellectual serfdom. Or as Eric Blair put it:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

I'm sure the Big Brother's we are facing aren't really conspiring, and that they don't want to enslave us. They just want to increase their profits and stock prices. But if we let ourselves be ruled by people who let these economical Big Brother's influence legislation too much, we might end up there anyway.

I can well understand the original ideas for patents etc.

By giving an inventor a chance to get a temporary monopoly, we stimulate more inventions, we get more useful things, and thus prosperity. By giving the author of a literary work a time limited copyright, he can pay his bills and continue to create more literary works.

But when we let corporations patent genes that they "discover" we are not talking about inventions. The inventions here are made by mother nature, and this is more like some kind of colonialism, where the first to make a claim for a certain spot of knowledge is allowed a monopoly for that. And to make things worse, these patented life forms spread and crossbreed with other plants etc, and we know the consequences. Farmers are sued by big corporations becuase their corn have naturally crossbred with the neighbours genetically manipulated corn. Millions of tons of food from the USA is rotting in locked stores in Africa while people are starving, since letting the genetically manipulated stuff into the African eco system could squash the little, real income these countries have from their food export. Some people talk about GPL as "viral", but GPL software doesn't spontaneously crossbreed with other programs without any human interference. And software changes can be undone.

When we make the media and entertainment companies stronger, by reducing fair use, prohibiting copying and extending copyrights etc, do we really think this will lead to a better world, as people originally thought that patents would? Will it lead to prosperity? Perhaps it will actually lead to some kind of economical growth, but neither pop songs nor infotainment on TV will cure AIDS, prevent wars, end starvation, fight human rights violations or stop global warming.

I don't think anyone really believes that these changes in legislation will stimulate the creation of literary or musical works etc. Would Mozart have been a greater composer if he had been under a contract with a large record company? Or would Hemmingway or Steinbeck have written more or better books if they had known that their works would have had an even longer copyright period after their deaths? Or would a number of now unknown authors have created memorable works? I seriously doubt it.

Moving what we say, sing and write more and more into the formal economy won't cause prosperity anywhere else than on paper. In Sweden we managed to blow our GNP up to among the highest in the world a few decades ago. Largely this was made by moving traditional womens work: cooking, cleaning, taking care of children and elderly, from the informal economy into the formal economy. Instead of taking care of her own home and family, the Swedish woman started to take care of someone elses kids, or someone elses old parents, or to cook in a school kitchen. Family life was institutionalized and suddenly showed up in economical statistics. I'm not claiming that this was without benefits--the main advantage was probably that women suddenly had incomes and were thus less dependent on their husbands. But today we see that while Sweden has a large percentage of paid, working women, they still do the same things as before (cooking, cleaning, caring--but in two places), they earn much less than men, and compared with the rest of Europe there are many fewer women in leading positions in Swedish companies etc.

We Swedes were so happy that we were one of the worlds riches countries, but it was largely an illusion. If all people in a country would start charging money for household work within the family (mom gets $10 for dinner and dad gets $3 for taking out garbage, $2 for making the bed and $5 for cleaning the car etc) it would not create any more resources, nothing more to eat, no more knowledge, no new things that will help us get more productive etc. But GNP will go up, and everybody will be happy about the so-called economic growth, unless someone (to return to H.C.A.) realizes that the Emperor is naked. This is largely what Swedish "wealth" was about, and the economic growth created by pleasing companies like Disney when it comes to copyright laws will be similarly empty and meaningless. It will certainly lead to some redistribution of money and buying power, but in the end there won't be more resources for us to share.

A free and open exchange of thoughts and ideas is more important and more powerful than ever before in human history. We need to fight for that, because quite obviously, strong powers are trying to restrict that. The unhealthy changes in intellectual property rights are dangerous, and this is something we need to put on the political agenda. I agree with Barry that these issues go far beyond those of free software, but they are certainly strongly related.

Even with the so-called "free press" in the so-called "free world", freedom is limited. How many papers or magazines wrote about Microsofts French code theft and the conviction in a French court? How much is written when some small companies have forgotten to pay licences for some MS Office installations? I've brought the French Microsoft case up with a number of Swedish publications, and I was either completely ignored or surprised journalists responded "I can't believe that we're not writing about this"...