Limited Times is gonna #BOYCOTTSTARWARS7 and here's why

I'm not going to let this TPP crap pass without at least rattling some cages. RATTLE RATTLE RATTLE.

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Happy Birthday is back home

Now, it is silly that the song Happy Birthday to be under copyright. As the songs origins hail from before 1921, there is literally no way for it to still be under copyright still.

But for years, Warner has claimed that, as buyers of the company that bought the company that bought the rights from the Hill Sisters, the duo of siblings that composed the song that eventually became Happy Birthday, the most sung song in the world, they owned the rights to it. Warner's earned 2 million dollars from licensing  it, and forced businesses from all over the planet to come up with their own birthday songs. Imagine how many films depicting normal, everyday life had to go "hum...skip to the blowing of the candles." Not being able to display something that's basically normal like for millions of people.

But now a federal judge has arrived at a conclusion regarding the case to prove the song is public domain, ironically brought on by other Hollywood types who wanted to use the song for their documentary about it. Uh...you'd think "making a documentary about it" would be covered by fair use. You know maybe if Warner hadn't been so greedy and let the Happy Birthday Documentary guys off without paying the fee, we wouldn't be in this situation.

Anyway, judge found that Warner is not the owner of Happy Birthday and that, while they own the copyright to SOMETHING it is not the full rights to the song. While I wish the conclusion of the case had been based on "it is impossible for Warner to lay claim to something from before  1921, it is nice to see justice finally done.

Well, mostly done. The jury, as it where, is still out on whether Warner has to give back the money it earned from licensing fees it basically suckered people out of. One would hope there would at least be some kind of consequence for purposely lying about copyright and abusing it like that, creating unfair competition and robbing the public of things they rightfully deserve. And wasting the time and resources of the state purposely with the full intention of deceit.

I mean, we've established that Copyright is serious enough to travel all the way across the planet just to get a guy who is streaming American Movies. Well, this guys lied about owning a public cultural  resource and earned millions from that lie. I would think that's just as serious, if not more. We're fleecing teenagers for downloading mp3s, what would we do with enormous corporations doing something like this?

But it's a time for joy, now, not contention. Here is the song, Puerto Rican style.

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Zombies Ate my Public Domain!

Behold, the movie that spawned the zombie genre!


Now, usually, when you post a full movie like this on your blog, you expect a takedown notice. I certainly can't post E.T. just because we're the same age, because that'd be copyright infringement. But this movie won't get taken down by the owners, because this movie entered the public domain!

The story behind that is weird. The maker, George Romero is still alive and everything. What happened was, back in those days copyright notices where expected to be placed front and center of the work.In a movie this meant putting the notice at the beginning credits. Which makes sense. You let the people know who the exact owner of the piece is, and take out all the guesswork.

However, if the work did not have a proper copyright notice, according to specifications, it fell into public domain immediately.

This is him, laughing.

This is what happened with Night of the Living Dead. The company that financed and distributed it, the Walter Reade Organization, failed to put the (c) in the credits. That's why the term Zombie, the concept of a zombie as an undead flesh eater, and any such is strictly public domain.

If you're gonna lament the maker of the movie failing to keep the idea under his fortress, fine. He did sue the company. Then he carried on making more zombie movies. He's still cranking them out.

This is him, laughing.

If you're gonna lament that it's lead to what appears to be a tiring parade of zombie product, fine. Zombies aren't my favorites,  and frankly in terms of monsters are the one step removed from vampires in terms of creativity. But it going to public domain is the reason we can have:

World War Z

Resident Evil(Game and Movie series)

Zombies Ate my Neightborhood

Plants vs Zombies

The Walking Dead(comics, tv, videogames)

Zombieland

Warm Bodies

DayZ

The usage of Zombies in a multitude of products that aren't ABOUT zombies.

Not all works going to the public domain are Night of the Living dead. Nobody seems particularly interested in remaking Star Odyssey (well...nobody ELSE) a million times. But the possibility is certainly there. Without NoTLD going public domain, George Romero might have made a few movies, promptly forgot about it, and the Zombie Genre as we know it might not exist. A man can make a franchise, but it takes many men to make a genre.

Which other kind of monster would benefit from being public domain? Let me know below!

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Why Marvel vs Capcom 4 is never coming

Squishing shoulders!

The Marvel vs Capcom series is my favorite series of videogames. Frantic action, screen filling visuals, and recognizable characters all come together to create something truly special.


X-Men: Children of the Atom, the first in what would become the series, hit 20 December of last year. The historical context is important.

Marvel was at the height of a comics bubble that was about to crash the entire market. However, they had found great success in licencing their properties into cartoons, especially Fox's X-Men. And so, they licenced Capcom to make a fighting game.

Capcom was also riding a boom: a Sonic Boom. The success of Street Fighter 2 had created wave of imitators that became the fighting game genre. While the Street Fighter brand remained strong, Capcom did began to diversify it's fighting game output, uncluding 1994's Darkstalkers.

X-Men: Children of the Atom was a big success, and begat Marvel Super Heroes, a game taking on the general Marvel universe, which eventually led to a series of  crossovers with Capcom that became known as the Vs Series, starting with X-Men vs Street Fighter.

The latest game, released in 2011, might be called Marvel vs Capcom 3, but it's really either the 5th game in a crossover tag-team series or the seventh game in Capcom's Superhero fighting game series, depending on how you want to look at it. Whether that would also include Capcom's other crossover's with Japanimation company Tatsunoko, rival company SNK, or with Tekken, well, that'a also up to the reader, as the mechanics are sufficiently distinct as to consider them separate.

So what do we have to look forward to in the series? Well, things have changed a bit. The fighting game genre isn't quite as booming as in the early 90's, is it? Most of the franchises that set up shop there are already gone. Capcom itself is now in the position Marvel was back then, of trying to license it's product into movies. It's found great success with Resident Evil(in that, and in general)  and is currently busy promoting Street Fighter 5.

Marvel, however, has changed, too. It saw so much success from licensing it's works into movies, it started doing the movies themselves. And THAT was so successful, Disney bought it.

Disney's plans for Marvel in terms of videogames seems to ever less involve licensing out, and more to involve natively making works. While that may eventually change in the over 40 years that most of these characters will remain copyrighted, the sad reality is that it probably won't.

Curiously, within this next decade, most of the characters from Silver Age would already be lapsing, according to the laws of their day.  This includes Spider-Man, Galactus, and most of the original X-Men. While Capcom would certainly not be able to use the word "Marvel" in the title, it would sure enough be able to use Spider-Man and Cyclops in an ensemble cast of sorts. Captain America, having been made in the 40's, could have already been in a game.

So I'm not trying to say Marvel vs Capcom 4 is a casualty of long copyright, but it's certainly keeping these characters out of the public's use. Would YOU like for Captain America, Marvel Girl, and Galactus to be public domain before the 2050s? Chime in below!

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Limited Time´s suggestions for a better copyright

Alright, I´ve made a few posts about our screwed up copyright. "It is how it is, what do you want?" you may have asked yourself after reading it.

Well, well, thank you for asking exactly what I needed to segue into this write up, hypothetical person!  Besides bitchin' and moanin' about our stolen inheritance, I do have some ideas to make copyright not-as-monstrous.  Well here's some of my suggestions.

An Orphan Works Potential Exemption
 
Sometimes a work is obviously not being used, and it's actual owner is not anywhere to be found. It's become a serious problem even for people who'd be willing to pay the license to said works, because they can't actually license it, and can't actually use it and copyright can't actually end within any reasonable timeframe, either. 

Now, there should be a system in place where, with reasonable evidence of non-usage of copyright and innaccessibility to the owner of the copyright, the state itself kind of licenses the work for a small fee, to be payed to the copyright holder should they ever resurface.

Require a fee every 10 years after the first 50.
 
I can't fix the U.S. relationship with the Berne Convention, which is basically an agreement that it made with other countries saying "We're all gonna follow this rules to work with each other's copyright, and whichever country doesn't, we can use their stuff."

One of the agreements of the Berne convention was that copyright should not be shorter than 50 years. So anyone wanting a copyright shorter than that should just skip the local laws and go straight to the International treaty heart of the problem.

However, 50 years is practically reasonable compared to 95 or more, and so, within that, re-registry fees should be brought back. Upon the first 50 years, and every 10 years after that point, there should be a fee required to maintain copyright.


Obviously if the work is "Keep the grandkids comfy" successful, they'll make it a point to pay the fee. If it's not...well if it's that near and dear to your heart, you'll definitively pay the fee, anyway. If it's not profitable and not near and dear enough to your heart then WHY SHOULD IT BE COPYRIGHTED NEARLY 100 YEARS?

Everything made before 1955 should become public domain

The purpose of copyright is quite specific. To promote the creation of new works. It's on the constitution and crud. There's no actual evidence that lenghtening the copyright of works from decades ago does that.

It's kind of surprising to me that the same Americans who would consider "guns" a right  because the second amendment said so, would sit idly by while the very specific "for limited times" and "to foster  the progress of the science and the useful arts" are told to go suck a lemon by a lobbied up congress. I  think while guns are useful to an extent to maintain a society, we have copyright precisely to move forward society. And holding this works back does not move us forward.

There is a saying in my island. "A payed musician does not  play well." The idea being that, if a job is payed for before it is performed, most of the incentive to do the work well is gone. While that's not all true,(as a musician, you'll probably want to be contracted again and again and by different people, which won't be accomplished if you do a half assed job all the time) think about it in terms of copyright. We´re giving this already published, already existing works decades of copyright. Instead of saying "If you find some success once, make more and better inventions. We want that." we're saying "If you find success once, you can license that shit for 100 years, and you don't really need to come up with something new."

There will be no children going home hungry from works whose copyright was extended going into the public domain. What there will be, though, is more children with access and capacity to create based on old works. Prosumers, giving their own take on the 20th century classics, in the digital age. What it will provide though, is a level ground where the companies that held this rights for decades will be forced to compete with each other and with people to decide which version is best, rather than pull legal rank and shut down any competition.

An actual, true way to help you control your own copyright.

Maybe you want your works to go into public domain after you die. Maybe you, prolific creator, feel like you've benefited enough from it. Maybe you want a different kind of creative group to beat the mainstream, such as the time BMI beat the music industry with public domain music.

But that's not actually possible. While the creative commons license is a step on the right direction, it doesn't allow you to actually rescind your copyright. You certainly can't set it on a last will and testament. There's a time limit to licenses that might very well come into play should estates or heirs come into play.

But if copyright is to benefic creators, why can't creators control how much their works are actually protected? Why aren't there any settings on this thing between 100 years and nothing at all?

So for the benefit of all peoples, shorter  copyrights on works should be available, with the lapsing dates obviously available to anyone searching the archives. Like, obviously the Disneys of the world aren't gonna apt for anything under the maximum, but why put a damper on culture's growth just because of them?

In fact, people willingly choosing shorter copyright should be encouraged by throwing it at a smaller fee, with an option to pay the additional fee for the full length should the author desire it. I mean, why not?

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Naked Batman! 5 facts we'd have to live with if Batman where public domain...

This happened.

The maximum duration of a copyright used to be 56 years.  As we've discussed, this means that everything made before 58 should have reasonably lapsed into the public domain. In Batman's case this means most of his most well known characters and concepts would be available for all to use, free of charge and free of litigation.

I have brought this matter up to fans, and many of them are concerned. They can't even picture a world where you can  go ahead and make your own Batman. As much grief as fans can give companies like DC, many think Batman is rather safe in DC/Warner's hands.

Here's 5 realities of a world where Batman is public Domain.

5) DC still owns real Batman.

Let's face it, guys. We're not talking about a riot where we go into DC's office and rob them of Batman. As the day the first Batman comic goes public domain, this is what you'll have to work with.

He just threw a man by the neck! "Regular Exercise" my ass.

It's gonna take you a couple of years to get to "Batman as we know him" today, and by then the character will already be far, far from that. You get no Batmobile. You get no Batgirl, or Batmite or  Bane. Not for a while.

Nobody still like Jason Todd.

This is Batman and his nu 52 era buddies, some of them with Wikia pages longer than the Bible. By the 2030s all Batman related Wikia pages will have more words than the Bible. You don't get that, not initially. You get the starter Batman: an orphan richboy who wants to punches criminal while dressed vaguely like a bat.

Under previous, you'd already get to adapt this.

DC needn't fear your Batman. Unless...



4)Your Batman might be better than  their Batman.

He's Nicholas Cage. He's awesomer than most things by default.

A lot of people I saw were afraid of "any old fanboys" having their  terrible ideas on Batman.  Can you imagine what that would look like?

I don't have to. Fans all over the world are currently engaged in writting stories about Batman meeting Fluttershy or something. Fanfiction is already a thing, a thing widespead enough that WB hasn't put any major efforts to stopping it. Maybe some of this stories might be good, or great. Maybe all of them stink. At least some of them involve Robocop and Batman having sex. Frankly I opt not to read them.  I can safely ignore them and so can you.

But consider Sandy Corolla. A skilled filmaker who once made a couple of fanfilms starring DC characters, and sometimes Predator and Alien. Everybody loved those fan films. Most of us would have given Corolla our money to see the full films. But WB owns Batman, and he couldn't have secured any financing for a full film except from WB, which already had plans for Batman. Under previous law, Corolla could have taken his skills towards actually making such films. He could have asked another studio to finance them. He could have taken it to kickstarter.

Where's my "realistic" body armor?

Instead he didn't. Let's face it, guys, not all the people who could make great Batman stories work for WB and DC. Some of them might work at Marvel. Some of them might work at Image. Some of them might even work at Fox. The only difference between DCs writters and, fanboys, other writters is that  they are legally allowed to work on Batman. That's all.

However, they wouldn't all be anything close to "real" Batman because...

3) We would have a lot of weird takes on Batman

Well...he's more like a bat, isn't he?

In 1998 I saw The Mask of Zorro, a movie that followed a former bandit played by Antonio Banderas adopting the mantle of Zorro from perrenial pseudo-Hispanic Anthony Hopkins. It was a fun movie. But I kept wondering where it had left the original Zorro's mute butler. You know, from the TV series. Then there was the animated, future set series. I didn't see it much. Zorro's in the public domain, currently, so anyone can work on him and many do.

Naturally, once people get to working on Batman, they're not all going to want to have the same take. After all, that is the fun of public domain. Does Batman really have to be an only child? What if he had siblings? What if  Batman is  really Alfred? What if Batman is really a bat that, through training, became a human? Maybe we get Arronofsky's Batman where he's a bum helped by a big black mechanic named Big Al? Maybe one is just naked all the time.

This is especially true before some elements are public domain. After all, if WB still own the concept of Batman living in a cave, where will yours live? Your version should already be trying to distance itself from other Batmans, maybe yours sleeps in a casket, like Dracula. Maybe he goes back to the planet Bat or something.

It only  sounds stupid because they haven't done it yet. Eventually any and all this versions could find a place in people's hearts. We'll have many Batmans, and don't be surprised when not all of them are "Bruce Wayne, playboy billionaire orphan who becomes Batman at night

2) DC would not use Batman as much.

Jesus Christ!

DC likes Batman. He makes them a lot of money, and money's where it's at. Batman's in movies. Batman's on television. Batman's on cartoons. Batman's on videogames. Batman's on lunchboxes and sweaters and sweatshirts.

However, if someone else can make Batman, that's no fun anymore. WB, overwhelmed by greed, would probably begin promoting "their" characters a lot more, if Batman was usable by anyone. They'd probably promote some silver age character to Batman's spot of importance, if they could at all.

This would not be all bad. If Batman's as overexposed in the 2030s as he is now, a little winding down might not be as bad as it sounds. The character's never not been popular, but maybe it's best to not have 50 Batman products a month in your face.

1) You'd get Batman everywhere

SAFE!

If Batman was public domain today, do you think they'd put him in Street Fighter? In Final Fantasy? In Johnny Test? WWE? GTA?

Off course they would. More than a deluge of new Batman movies every year, it would result in 1000s of "appearances" in stuff. Think of it like this: imagine every cartoon version of Dracula you've seen. Imagine all his appearances in franchises that aren't adaptations of Bram Stoker's books. That's what we're looking at.

Even when the over-saturation reaches critical levels, you'll still see Batman show up every once in a while to help or hinder the characters in question. It wouldn't be rare. And maybe that's gonna be just fine.

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Talking Points: The Starving Artist

You should have had your ears to the ground, buddy.

I get into plenty of comments sections discussing the topic of copyright.  You might be surprised, that some arguments start to form a pattern, and then I feel that, instead of replying to each and every one of those, I´d rather do a column adressing them.

For example, I´ve already seen at least two people bring this kind of talk :

"This is a bad era for artists! I spent so and so effort making an art, and then e'rebody stole it. You guys don't know what it's like to create something because you all want something for free!"

No, this wern't comments in videos and articles about "END COPYRIGHT FOREVER, FREE SHIT FOR EVERYBODY". These were comments in videos explaining in great detail how copyright was manipulated to do the entertainment industry's bidding.

I'd like to say all those guys are just People from the RIAA and MPAA sockpuppets  trying to change public opinion in their favor, but I have no evidence of that. In truth, piracy does affect a huge number of upstarts, which is most of the reason it exists. There may be people that legitimately feel those things, and I don't want to be patronizing to those people. But I have to disagree.
So this one's for you, Starving Artists. I'm gonna run you through a gamut of answers to your concerns.

A) It's not a battle of "All the copyright vs No copyright".

There are certainly those who feel copyright is an unnecessary element of law.  But people like Lawrence Lessig aren't those people. People like me aren't those people. We don't want copyright to  go away, we want it to do it's friggin' job. no more no less. It's job is giving artists a fighting chance in a world where duplication could ruin them.

Oh, look, a nice urinal

When we're discussing HOW copyright should be, it is wasteful to say "B-b-b-b-but copyright should exist." We know, baby, we know. Besides we already have some strong copyright and...

B)What happened to you  did not happen because not enough copyright.

 It's understandable to want the kinds of protections copyright promises (but can't actually enforce). But let's get serious here: Copyright lasts  more than the average human lives, and covers so many things it's not even funny.  In this world. This is the world where copyright reigns. There's not much more copyright out there to give.

I'm almost as old as copyright lasts!

If in THIS WORLD, your entire enterprise was taken down solely by pirates, then it is irrelevant to our discussion. In fact, yours is exactly the kind of work that should go public domain in a short time,  so that people could freely reuse it as they see fit. If you can't really make it in 10 years, you aren't likely gonna make it in 95 years. If you find that disheartening, maybe this will cheer you up.

C) Your project might have been doomed to failiure from the start.

If at first you don't succeed...you still got until 2082.

The world of art isn't a sure thing, buddy. For every artist that makes it and becomes well known and quoted, there are 30000 that nobody will ever know.

Perhaps your work wasn't good, perhaps it was not something that people would like, perhaps you didn't market yourself properly, or maybe you're just trying to make an outdated model work. Maybe it was too niche, or maybe too broad. Either way, your project just failed, as so many do.

But what's that got to do with stretching the copyright of works already made? The point of copyright is to inspire creativity, not hug every cat.

While anecdotally you may claim it was pirates, all loving your shit and not buying it, there's other people out there making money off of works. It might just be a personal failiure.

D)Many Other Starving Artists would like to use works under copyright, at some point, eventually.

See, Warner? You're the problem, not the solution.

Sure, from your stance I assume your works are entirely original, based solely on your own creative genius and gumption. And that's respectable. But it's not the only way to create art.

And that's part of it. Art building on other art. For example, next Summers Batman v Superman draw plenty of inspiration from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which itself drew inspiration from decades of Batman comics. Is Zack Snyder NOT a lazy sack of shit for not coming up with his own thing instead just because the company he's working under owns the property? Coolio took Stevie Wonder Wonder Song and made it about Gangsters. Is he a lazy sack of shit for not coming up with his own thing? Smash Bros was going to not star known Nintendo characters. And I dare say we love it all the more BECAUSE they didn't come up with something new!

Well, there's someone out there who'd make a killer Batman/Superman comic. He doesn't have the money to pay for Warner's license(if they'd even let him), and he can't work there. Is he different from Zack Snyder?

Maybe someone out there is just starting in music, and has a great idea for a cover of Stevie Wonder's Superstitious. What's the difference between him and Coolio?

And maybe there's a breakaway game designer waiting to make a game reuniting the unsung heroes of defunct games from the 80s for a final game. Is he different from Nintendo, who knew that using popular characters instead of new ones would result in a more appealing (and profitable game)?


We've made existing works profitable enough to dominate the box offices and music charts for years, now. But that comes with an agreement that, you know, those works eventually  should become public domain. Hopefully  before 2019.




E) This companies don't care about you

I get royalties, they get the REAL Money.

Disney made Mulan. We say that, like Disney is a person, and Mulan is a chicken dinner. People made Mulan. Animators put effort into making the characters the Character Designers made move fluidly and with grace. Colorists gave it a beautiful pastel palette. A director whose name is not atop the movie's billboard guided the voice actors to express the emotions the scriptwriter wanted. And guess what? Most of those where only payed once.

Once the artists have built the centerpiece, Disney begins to build commercialism around it. Mulan toys which the character designer won't see any money from. Mulan Backpacks, which exploit the palette the colorists put into it, without liking it. And a live action remake, which the director, scriptwriters and actors who made the original likeable won't be getting paid for. And all this built around an old chinese poem from the public domain.

These laws aren't about you, guy who's trying to be an upstart. You're about as well covered as you're gonna get.  It's about THEM, enormous corporations who rule certain mediums and want to continue ruling them. They've been working together so long, they don't even understand the concept of  actually competing, and it fucking scares them.

So I hope this answered your questions. If you're gonna take away anything from this is that we need to seriosly look at our copyright, how works, what is it purpose, change the parts that aren't working. Is that so wrong?

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