We've covered how often DMCA notices seem to be sent improperly, taking down others people's work, but it's also true that we see people send DMCA notices on their own work pretty often. TorrentFreak has done a great job detailing many cases where Hollywood's biggest and most famous studios have been issuing DMCA takedowns on their own movies, as well as their own movie promotional pages. Among the takedowns are ones from Lionsgate taking down authorized versions of a film on iTunes, Amazon, Blockbuster and Xfinity.

Then there's 20th Century Fox trying to protect Family Guy... by issuing a takedown of the Wikipedia page about the show. Even worse? Another takedown for the show How I Met Your Mother, in which the "original work URL" listed is the CBS website for the show (which makes sense), but that very same URL is listed for takedown Other studios seem to takedown press stories about their movies. The BBC, for example sent takedowns on a bunch of press coverage and reviews of their film "Ill Manors." While Sony Pictures issued a takedown supposedly about their film "The Other Guys," but which really targeted a ton of articles... about Megaupload. And then there are just random ones like notoriously aggressive about IP studio Summit Entertainment issuing takedowns over the movie 50/50... but including an announcement about US Energy Secretary Steven Chu delivering a keynote speech at the "50th Anniversary" of SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator). Apparently, you can't take a chance with anything that has "50" in the title. Might be the movie.

While these may be amusing to point out, they raise a much larger issue. Copyright holders like to insist that companies like Google and others can just "obviously" tell what is and what is not infringing and they should be able to magically stop piracy because of that. And yet... here we are, where the studios themselves can't even figure it out. How the hell do they expect others to figure it out for them?

A few folks sent over the following story of how Disney is being sued for copyright infringement. Seems a bit ironic, given just how strict Disney has been over the years in enforcing its copyright and being at the forefront of efforts to expand copyright law -- even as it tend to build some of its greatest works by copying works in the public domain. In this case, a design company produced a graphic that consists of drawings of dozens of dogs, each with a little signature under their names: Disney then introduced a teen fashion line called "D-Signed." However, some noticed that one of the t-shirts had a design quite reminiscent of the original dog artwork. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see where those particular images were directly copied from the original. As fun as it would be to catch Disney in a clear copyright violation, the dogs on the t-shirt don't appear to be the same. And, we're always told that there's an "idea/expression" dichotomy in copyright law, which is supposed to mean that you only protect the specific and defined expression -- not the general idea. So I'm just not sure I see how this is infringing, even if the idea was taken from their poster. Obviously I can understand the creators' frustration, but that hardly means there's a legal claim. Update: On closer inspection, as pointed out in the comments with a handy illustration, it turns out the copying was more direct than we thought.

We discussed recently how George Lucas relinquished control of the Star Wars franchise, selling it to Disney. As Leigh noted in that piece, critics have long chastised Lucas for the control he exerted over his films, as well as the meddling he did on the classics so many hold dear. While that criticism is certainly valid, one area where Lucas seemed to be open -- in many ways bucking the Hollywood trend -- was with fan-made content, such as fan films and fan fiction. In fact, Lucasfilm to a great extent embraced fan fiction, even going so far as to hold contests for such content. The fact that Lucasfilm gained rights ownership of those fan-made films led to some criticism, but at least the company wasn't suing the jedi tunics off of its own fans.
These aren't the defendants you're looking for.
Image source: CC BY 2.0
But now some folks are wondering about the fate of all this fan-made content, and how future fan content will be received, now that the Empire Disney controls the franchise. Dennis S. writes in about a piece on this topic at Ars Technica, which reads less like a question about fan-made content and more like a propsective eulogy for it.

In 2007, Lucasfilm even released tools that would more easily enable remixing of Star Wars content. A top Lucasfilm lawyer, Jeffrey Ulin, began speaking at conferences and to the media about the value of fan mash-ups and remixes. Those works were "part of keeping the love of Star Wars and the franchise alive... We're really trying to position ourselves for the next 30 years," Ulin told the Wall Street Journal in 2007.

Certainly, Disney fans who make their own movie featuring Mickey Mouse are more likely to get a cease-and-desist letter from a Disney lawyer than an award. After all, it was Disney who famously lobbied Congress to extend copyright terms in 1998, so much so that some dubbed the new law the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Perhaps no single company more than Disney bears more responsibility for the sorry state of the US public domain, which hasn't seen any significant works added to it in decades. For the most part, culture after 1923 has been frozen in a state of private ownership—mostly owned by the large media corporations that began rising at about that time.

It's very difficult to argue with the precedent that the article lays out. Star Wars enjoys what may well be the biggest franchise fanbase ever. Part of that fanbase is so fanatical that they want to take part in the fun, sharing with one another their own creations and extensions of the Star Wars story. Many believe it's this same enthusiasm that has built up the Star Wars brand to such an amazing degree, but Disney's history suggests these contributions may no longer be welcome.

Frankly, that may pose a bigger problem than one would imagine. Obviously the Star Wars brand is big enough at this point that whatever content Disney releases is likely to be a hit...but will it grow as fast as it could if Mickey Mouse goes all emperor over the people? There's a serious risk in alienating folks over this kind of thing. Star Wars fans aren't stupid. There's a reason there's been a fair amount of hand-wringing over the sale of the franchise to Disney, seemingly much moreso than other sales like Marvel. This is a community that likes to contribute their own work to the story. I would say that such contributions are integral to the fanbase. If Disney acts to block that kind of thing, as they have in the past, the fans may well rebel against the Empire Disney and its Senate boardroom.

Disney surprised everyone today by announcing that they've struck a deal to acquire Lucasfilm—famously 100% owned by George Lucas—and all its valuable film properties. Lucas himself is stepping aside, and Lucasfilm Co-Chairman Kathleen Kennedy will become president of the company under Disney.

As if all this wasn't enough of a shock for Star Wars fans, Disney has also announced that they will revive Lucas' abandoned plans for Episode 7 and aim for release in 2015. One can't help finding some irony in the statement from Lucas:

“For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next,” said George Lucas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Lucasfilm. “It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers. I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime. I’m confident that with Lucasfilm under the leadership of Kathleen Kennedy, and having a new home within the Disney organization, Star Wars will certainly live on and flourish for many generations to come. Disney’s reach and experience give Lucasfilm the opportunity to blaze new trails in film, television, interactive media, theme parks, live entertainment, and consumer products.”

As most of us know, fans of Star Wars and other Lucasfilm properties have loudly criticized Lucas for retaining tight control on his old works and, worse still, meddling with them by releasing updated versions to replace the beloved originals. There has long been a wish that Lucas would let Star Wars "live beyond" him—but I doubt selling it to Disney is what anyone had in mind.

It's unlikely anyone has high hopes for the quality of future Star Wars movies, but if Disney built a Star Wars theme park, it'd probably be a hit. Meanwhile, what are the odds that Darth Vader will finally get paid?

We've been writing about the patent troll Eolas for about a decade at this point. It's a trolling operation connected to the University of California, and used to take some ridiculously broad patents and try to shake down companies who actually innovated and did incredibly obvious things on the internet. Eolas' various lawsuits had gone back and forth over the years, and finally, earlier this year, a jury in East Texas (surprisingly) invalidated some of the key patents.

This summer, the judge in the case agreed that the key patents were invalid. Eolas had ridiculously tried to argue that the fact that some other companies had previously licensed the patents should have been shared with the jury to prove the "validity" of the patents. Of course, that's ridiculous on its face as trolls often convince companies to license bogus patents because it's cheaper to settle and license than to fight a bad patent lawsuit (even if you win). Of course, the judge blasted Eolas over this desire... because earlier in the case, Eolas had specifically argued that the jury shouldn't be allowed to know of Eolas' previous "business success or failure." Basically, Eolas didn't want the jury to know it was a troll without any real business. However, as the judge realized, Eolas can't hide that bit of info and then want the jury to have this other bit of info from its past.

Thus, for all intents and purposes it seemed that those two key patents -- 5,838,906 and 7,599,985 -- were effectively dead.

So it was a bit of a surprise to find out that Eolas/University of California has now sued Facebook, Disney and Wal-mart over those same patents (and a couple others). Apparently, Cal and Eolas figure that if they just keep suing, maybe one of these times they'll win.

What's really amazing is that this scorched earth, anti-innovation effort hasn't created more backlash for the University of California, and Berkeley in particular, given its proximity to Silicon Valley. You'd think that alums of the University who work at the various innovative tech companies that keep getting sued would speak out against their alma mater. It's pretty sad to see the University of California trying to set up a tollbooth on innovation by using such ridiculous patents.

Walt Disney is a company that has regularly taken from the public domain, but which famously refuses to give back to the public domain. Many of its most famous movies were public domain stories that Disney co-opted and then locked up with copyright. Disney has also been one of the main proponents of expanding copyright at every opportunity. As many people have noted, it was a driving force behind the 1998 copyright term extension, which some have called the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act," because it kept Mickey Mouse from going into the public domain for another 20 years. So, it seems notable (as pointed out by the EFF) that one of the "stakeholder" presentations at the latest TPP negotiations was "The Walt-Disney Company: Creativity, Brought to you by Copyright."

Of course, that leaves out that Disney was more or less founded on both copyright infringement (the true history of Mickey Mouse involves Disney copying another movie that was still under copyright) and using the public domain, not copyright. Disney's creativity wasn't brought to the world because of copyright, but often in spite of copyright. You can find the history in lots of places, but this recent blog post highlights how many of Disney's early works exist thanks to the public domain:

The Disney company had a moderate level of success with the original characters featured in early black and white short films. Disney did not really hit stride until making full length animated features. Giving credit where due, “Fantasia” was original Disney characters and story line, if you want to call it that. “Fantasia” was literally a series of short animated stories edited together to a soundtrack made up of mostly public domain music for which Disney paid no license (with the exception of “The Rite Of Spring”).

From there on, most Disney feature animations would be based on stories that had since fallen into public domain. Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and many other princess stories, were based on age old fairy tales that Disney was not required to pay license or royalties for. Later works would include children’s literature like: “Pinocchio”, “Alice in Wonderland” , “The Jungle Book” (released just one year after Kipling’s copyright expired),– All in the public domain! Disney didn’t pay a cent for story license, yet reaped many millions. The “Little Mermaid”, “Beauty and the Beast”, “Aladdin” and all features made under the reign of Michael Eisner, would be from public domain. Of course, Disney touted “The Lion King” as an original story. Not! Besides being an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” told through a pride of lions, there are way too many similarities between The Lion King and a 1960s Japanese animated series called “Kimba the White Lion”. Though Disney claims these a coincidence, they would sue anyone else into oblivion if they came half as close to one of their properties.

It seems that perhaps someone else ought to do a presentation on "The Walt-Disney Company: Creativity, Brought to you by the Public Domain." Otherwise, we're going to see efforts like TPP seek to further kill off the public domain.

There's an almost entirely silly article over at CNN speculating -- with absolutely no knowledge -- about the identity of a woman seen frequently with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. I'm not quite sure how that makes a news story, but what caught Dark Helmet's eye was that in this bizarre little story, there was a bit from Disney, in which it felt compelled to mention that a performance seen by Kim and the woman that included Disney characters was not authorized:

The mystery woman accompanied the young leader to a Pyongyang theater on Friday night to watch a performance of North Korea's Moranbong band. The display included a cast of Disney characters, attracting the attention of The Walt Disney Company which issued a statement Tuesday saying it had not authorized their use.

As if (1) anyone cared about that or (2) anyone actually thought that Disney had licensed its characters to the North Korean government for a special performance.

This is what happens when, as a company, you seem to have infringement-on-the-brain, and think anything and everything must absolutely be framed within the context of whether or not something is infringing.

The broadest, most obvious trend in media consumption is the shift to an on-demand world, where content is available when you want it on whatever device you're using. In the day-to-day, this gets lost behind neverending squabbles about licensing, and severely limited offerings accompanied by bold statements about embracing technology—but in the long run, what's happening couldn't be any more clear. Any long-term strategy for relevance and success in the world of media has to embrace that momentum by building new business models around such distribution schemes, while gracefully dismantling the business models that rely on dying habits and the limitations of antiquated technology.

Or, you can attempt to reshape the cultural norms of future generations by going to the source: kids. At least that's what analyst Todd Juenger suggests in a recent report about children's programming on Netflix. Juenger conducted a focus group with mothers and discovered that they really like Netflix as a source of entertainment for their kids, especially since they can put it on whenever they want—and that kids are growing accustomed this. To hear Juenger talk about it, you'd think this was both surprising and bad (it's neither). His advice to the providers of children's programming? Stop this trend immediately:

His advice for entertainment companies is to be cautious about how much kids programming they make available to the online video streaming provider and in which windows. "We remain firm in our belief Viacom and Walt Disney should limit their content availability on Netflix," Juenger wrote.

...

"Moms are increasingly directing their kids to alternative viewing modes for content control, commercial avoidance and time management," Juenger summarized the findings. "The moms we talked to originally subscribed to Netflix for themselves, but have recognized the dwindling supply of content for adults and are now using the service primarily for their kids…The content selection is perceived to be significantly better for kids than for adults, and the lack of commercials and ability to control the viewing choices are seen as positives.”

According to the analyst, the focus groups described children as device agnostic, "happily watching on TV sets, tablets, computers, even phones, with indifference." The result: “Our concern regarding Viacom and Disney’s kids’ networks has been reinforced,” Juenger said. “Viacom and Disney should do everything in their power to steer viewership toward modes with the best long-term economics, namely traditional TV and emerging forms of TV Everywhere VOD.”

Yes, he's confirmed that the "lack of commercials and ability to control the viewing choices are seen as positives", in case anyone in Hollywood was still clinging to the hope that consumers would grow to hate those things. And yes, kids are "happily watching" on a variety of devices, and we can't have that, can we? Some might respond to the observation of a clear consumer preference in young children by trying to embrace that change early (if anything Hollywood does with technology can be called "early" at this point) but Juenger thinks they're better off trying to hold back the tide, or at least redirect it into their proprietary canals.

The funniest part is that suggesting Disney and Viacom should try to "steer viewership" is appealing to the very power such companies are losing. Big media empires don't get to "steer viewership" the way they used to, and that's exactly why these new distribution methods represent a threat to them. Juenger is suggesting they keep the sinking ship afloat by tying it to... itself. That's not going to work.

Kids are notoriously picky eaters when it comes to anything that isn't a dessert. Parents aren't helped when their kids are bombarded by ads on TV for all kinds of junk food. But here are a few food efforts that might divert kids' attentions back to healthier foods.

• Disney is adopting new standards for food advertising on its shows targeting kids and families -- to promote fruit and vegetable consumption and meet healthy nutritional guidelines. Awesome, now all healthy food will be approved by Mickey! [url]
• Mickey Mouse isn't the only fictional character who can influence what kids eat. Superheroes can, too. What would Batman eat? [url]
• Food trucks are trendy now, so what better way to bring free meals to kids? Sounds better than an ice cream truck... [url]
• Exercise your palate and try new foods that are bitter. Instead of sticking with salty and sweet (which are generally associated with junk food), a more bitter-flavored diet might provide a healthier range of food. [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

There has been plenty of talk over the years about why we keep extending copyright. Of course, we've discussed the infamous Mickey Mouse Curve, showing how copyright extension always seems to happen whenever Mickey Mouse is going to hit the public domain.
However, Julian Sanchez notes that this doesn't explain the whole story. After all, if it was just about protecting the very, very small number of works that still have commercial value after so many years, then you would think we would have evolved away from the "copyright absolutely everything for as long as possible" model, to one that plenty of people have suggested: one where there are regular (and perhaps escalating) recurring fees to keep renewing your copyright registration. That way, works like Mickey Mouse could stay covered by copyright, but all the other works which have been otherwise abandoned can actually contribute back to culture and be used by anyone who wants to make something with them.

As Sanchez notes, you would think that even the Disneys of the world would like this model better. Even if it had to pay such recurring fees, the overall cost will ultimately be tiny compared to the value of the copyright. Plus, it would then open up a treasure trove of public domain material that they could use in their own works -- and Disney, in particular, has a well known history of making use of public domain works.

So why do we still have a "copyright everything for as long as we live, plus 70 years" (for now)? Sanchez posits a compelling theory. That Disney and other big copyright holders like this, because it keeps them from having to compete with their own back catalog:

Insanely long copyright terms are how the culture industries avoid competing with their own back catalogs. Imagine that we still had a copyright term that maxed out at 28 years, the regime the first Americans lived under. The shorter term wouldn’t in itself have much effect on output or incentives to create. But it would mean that, today, every book, song, image, and movie produced before 1984 was freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Under those conditions, would we be anywhere near as willing to pay a premium for the latest release? In some cases, no doubt. But when the baseline is that we already have free, completely legal access to every great album, film, or novel produced before the mid-80s—more than any human being could realistically watch, read, or listen to in a lifetime—I wouldn’t be surprised if our consumption patterns became a good deal less neophilic, or at the very least, prices on new releases had to drop substantially to remain competitive.

This story certainly fits with Disney -- who famously decides to completely stop selling certain old classics and put them "in the vault" for a while, pulling them off the market entirely. For Disney, it's all about keeping out competition, which it wouldn't be able to do if copyright didn't last so long.

This actually reminds me of the missing 20th century of books that we discussed a few months back, highlighting how the amount of new works from each decade drop off rapidly the further back you go, until you hit 1923 -- the current cut-off for the public domain.

Sanchez does note that it's possible this actually drives more investment into new works, since they don't have to compete with the old. And, if you believe (which he doesn't) that new works automatically have more value than old, then you could make a twisted sort of argument that this kind of protectionism, and effective locking-up of about a century's worth of creativity, does "promote the progress" in that it moves the focus to newer works, rather than older ones. But I don't buy that at all. It ignores the fact that the giant gap doesn't just represent competitive works, but also raw material and inspiration for all kinds of amazing new works -- which are effectively killed off.

That gap represents lost culture. But, for the big legacy entertainment players, it might also represent repressed competition. That shouldn't really be surprising. After all, that is the whole purpose of government-granted monopoly privileges.