"Here's my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don't recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, "stole" Willie from Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill."
It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years--just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire. This was his character. Walt always parroted feature-length mainstream films to produce the Disney empire, and we see the product of this. This is the Disney Corporation: taking works in the public domain, and not even in the public domain, and turning them into vastly greater, new creativity. They took the works of this guy, these guys, the Brothers Grimm, who you think are probably great authors on their own. They produce these horrible stories, these fairy tales, which anybody should keep their children far from because they're utterly bloody and moralistic stories, and are not the sort of thing that children should see, but they were retold for us by the Disney Corporation. Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone."
-- Lawrence Lessig, "Free Culture", OSCON 2002 (https://youtu.be/uH4RskpUFiA?si=IHVC72F4oXpLHJVV&t=253)
Take what you can, give nothing back. Apparently.
That has been Disney's motto since forever. The "golden age if Disney" is all public domain works and fairy tales.
Public domain for thee, but not for me.
Hey come on they have original ideas, talking African animals, talking cars, talking fish, talking toys. Without intellectual property protection they wouldn't of made all these super original ideas.
I understand you are ’reworking’ a reductive history of Pixar’s canon meme except for one thing you added: “talking African animals”.
Which is a reference to the Lion King, one of the mouse’s 2d classics, which is also one of their most egregious derivative works.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimba_the_White_Lion
I enjoyed this comparison https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4 more than Kimba or Lion King (longer than both of them too!)
lion king 1 1/2 was fantastic tho
Fair point. I even remember that video releasing and here I am 3 years later spreading misinformation like exactly what it is ranting about.
I think the visual/contextual similarities with the original manga/anime run do in fact point more plainly to the reality of the mouses' relationship with their public domain reworks.
That is, what they did exactly exemplifies excellent use of the public domain. They did more than just updated reproductions of the original works. They used the public domain as a starting point, an inspiration, but told their own stories; often wildly different from their source, like, where I mention elsewhere, The Little Mermaid.
The problem focused on should be that while they benefited from having access to these works in the public domain they have spent time and resources to ensure others are unable to do the same with work they have financial control over that should have long been included in the public domain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4
Here's a nearly 3 hour video from someone whose Special Interest is The Lion King where he researches the claims that it's ripping off Kimba.
If you don't want to watch it, the original kimba series was 52 episodes and only bears a superficial resemblance to The Lion King.
_MANY_ of the most egregious examples are actually from the 1997 Kimba movie released as Jungle Emperor Leo which came out after The Lion King.
The Lion King is more Hamlet than Kimba, I think. Royal family, brother of king kills king to get throne, queen not happy about this turn of events, the kid is elsewhere, ghost of king tells kid to sort it out, kid returns to royal court and after a fight ends up offing the usurper.
But in Hamlet Shakespeare kills everyone; while in The Lion King, Walt disnae.
I love watching 2 hour animated films with no dialogue personally
Any recommendations?
Fantasia is 2h 4m according to IMDB. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032455/
12 more years, I guess.
All that IP and the talent behind it became Disney's after the acquired Pixar from Steve Jobs.
Oh OK, I was wondering how they came up with so many original ideas but it makes sense now that they had to buy them.
Bahaha... oh man... I'm imagining this comment being read in the voice and cadence of standup comedy.
Arguably, the corruption here is not Disney, but the lawmakers agreeing to change the law. If lawmakers cannot handle the pressure from large lobbyists, they should forbid large lobbyists. Etc.
Disney should be allowed to protect their interests within the applicable laws.
Or maybe people and should have morals and standards beyond "whatever is legal."
Very piracy, but okay for the big guy.
You realize that the folks at Disney put in thousands of hours to create their own version of the story. Yeah, they borrowed a bit, but they put in plenty of their own work.
But go ahead and pretend that this is the same as the cheap-ass behavior of some stoned pirate who can't bring himself to pay for content and uses Lessig as a justification for his thievery.
And "Steamboat Bill" didn't?
I fail to see the difference outside of the fact that Grimm et. Al didn't have a small army OF lawyers to say otherwise.
I'm not sure your point? I admitted that they borrowed a bit. And then your point is that "Steamboat Bill" borrowed? Okay. I guess. But I'm not denying that the filmmakers and artists grab ideas and plots from the collective idea well. I'm saying that they also put in thousands if not millions of hours of work creating the new version.
It's just wrong for the pro piracy crowd to use this as an excuse to justify their theft.
Please don't troll on HN.
Theft is taking something away from someone. Copying by definition doesn't. Pretending it's equivalent to, or even similar to, "theft" is ridiculous.
That’s not true. There’s a whole history of legislation and publications, e.g. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/intellectual-proper...
and
https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/PLAW-105publ147
If the terminology is good enough for the DoJ and Congress, it’s good enough for an internet forum.
I don’t like this movement to memoryhole the debate we had in the ‘90s through wordsmithing.
There is a lot of middle ground between swallowing lobbyists language wholesale because it was adopted by legislators in their pocket and revisionism.
My main point wasn't really about modern pirates. The internet cabal will define however they want to fit their own notions.
It was more about artists treated as "thieves" by companies like Disney that themselves have done "copyright infringement" to get themselves off the ground (by the definition they defined over the past century).
Maybe you should take a second read of the original, Grimm's version.
Keep huffing that corporate propaganda.
It's only piracy when the law isn't on your side
Everybody should keep their children far from morals? What?
Lessig isn't saying we should keep children away from morals. He's criticizing how Disney adapted the Brothers Grimm's stories, which often preached heavy-handed and regressive moral lessons in a moralizing manner.
No, he's referring to the Grimm stories. They are indeed violent. They simply are a product of their time. The Disney version is easier to digest. All of this should not detract from his main point, tho.
They were actually a product of a time earlier than the Grimms. They were acting as proto-anthropologists, collecting oral tales from illiterate peasants because they feared that these were about to be lost with modernization. This is different from later people like Hans Christian Andersen, who really did create new fairy tales.
All of this should not detract from the fact that Al Bundy scored four touchdowns in a single game while playing for the Polk High School Panthers in the 1966 city championship game versus Andrew Johnson High School, including the game-winning touchdown in the final seconds against his old nemesis, "Spare Tire" Dixon.
This is an almost impressive misinterpretation.
What lessig is likely referring to is the violent and grotesque consequences of the original Grimm stories as well as their brazen antisemitism.
https://www.history.com/news/the-dark-side-of-the-grimm-fair...
Everyone was antisemitic back then, even semites –against other semites. Not unlike current events.
"once upon a time a beautiful but poor girl married a rich dude and everything was great"
Why not "once upon a time a beautiful but poor dude married a rich girl and everything was great"? Oh. Right.
Aladdin?
We naïvely bought a book of classic German fairy tales and somehow no such stories appear
Heh if by “once upon a time “ you mean all day every day since forever.
In the original stories the bad guys are punished in a cruel and horrible way. Like forced to dance with red-hot iron shoes.
The Girl Who Sold Matches is my personal favorite.
The modern version is The Guy Who Sold Loose Cigarettes, and Was Choked To Death.
Moral of the story: Don't sell matches without a permit -corporations would starve. R.I.P. Eric Garner
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_Girl
Similar grim
The moral of the story for quite a lot of these stories is... a bit effed up. Like, try getting a coherent one out of The Little Mermaid.
It is possible to do just this, and to make a terrific and nurturing film out of it. See Ponyo.
The little mermaid is Hans Christian Andersen rather than brothers grimmm.
The messaging is about curiosity and exploration.
The moral is about accepting when things fail to go as you want, and choosing to avoid harm to others for your own benefit.
There is an anime adaptation that is faithful to the original story.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Christian_Andersen%27s_...
Walt Disney was repeatedly accused of racism during his lifetime, mostly because he kept putting dreadful racist stereotypes in his films. The defence given by his supporters is that he was essentially naive and conformist, that he just reflected the values of his time, that he viewed his work as harmless fun, that he wasn't really thinking about the message he sent when he made a film like Song of the South.
That defence is quite reasonable as a defence of the man, but it's also an indictment of his work. Do you really want your kids taking heavy-handed morality lessons from someone who didn't actually have a clear sense of morality?
Morality changes and is imposed by the times, what is moral today will not be tomorrow, To your great grandchildren you'd probably be the same as a "boomer" today and will be looked at in the same vein (an ageist word used as an insult). It is the way of human culture.
Gotta take the good and leave the bad. You can find those in every single piece of media at the time, but it's not like I want to cast all of Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, Donald, etc. As such.
Moralistic has a completely different connotation, as I'm sure you are aware.
Moralizing can have the meaning of "inculcating morality", but it's more commonly used nowadays as "relating to a narrow-minded concern [for] the morals of others".
This looks false, the Buster Keaton film was released the same year, not 14 years earlier, according to wikipedia. And both were inspired by an 18 year old song, Steamboat Bill, which Mickey whistles at the start.
You have misread the post: it explicitly says that Steamboat Bill was released the same year, "no waiting 14 years"—as in, they didn't wait for the copyright to expire.
Thanks for clarification.
The Wikipedia entry implies they're both riffing on the song, not that the cartoon is riffing on the Keaton film.
I guess I'm surprised if it wasn't coincident given only 6 months between releases!
It's also a little confusing how the Lessig refers to the Keaton film as "Steamboat Bill" when it's "Steamboat Bill, Jr." - the song that appears in both is "Steamboat Bill."
You're right that I read it wrong; I'm still not sure if it's correct though.
edit: Having watched them both, they both of course are steamboat themed. Early on, Bill Jr is referred to once as "Willie", and Bill Jr appears to be a musician while Willie is almost entirely musical (using animals as instruments). Those do feel like references. The contents mostly feel unrelated though.
No one seems to mention that Walt didn't really animate, nor create Mickey Mouse.
Walts friend of the time: Ub Iwerk did. Credit for Disney early successes should really go to him.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub_Iwerks
It’s right there in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article. Credits did go to him. The film was produced by Walt Disney Studios.
Both the Steamboat Bill[1] and the Steamboat Willie[2] wikipedia pages state that this was about parodying the title. Note that there was also a 1910 song "Steamboat Bill"[3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Bill,_Jr.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Bill