Josh Hawley Threatens Disney’s ‘Special Copyright Protections’ For Being ‘Woke’
from the hawley-shit dept
You will recall that Lauren Boebert was unsuprisingly confused about what lawmaking power she has as a lawmaker, having threatened to not “extend Micky (sic) Mouse’s trademark”, which is not a power Congress has. Josh Hawley, who has never been shy about threatening private companies over protected speech, at least has straight which law to threaten Disney with.
If you can’t read that, it says:
For years, @Disney has gotten special copyright protections from the federal government – allowing them to charge consumers more. Woke corporations shouldn’t get sweetheart deals. I’ll introduce legislation this week to end their special protections – enough is enough.
It’s not just what you do, but how and why you do it that matters. This is a perfect example. I too don’t want to see yet another extension of the current copyright term. Though, by all accounts, Disney has recognized how untenable further term extension is and hasn’t been lobbying for it at all. Ever since the public domain was allowed to return in the US, Hollywood has mostly accepted its fait regarding works from 95 years ago. But that doesn’t mean I want to live in an America where a select group of state actors can openly threaten private companies over protected speech.
Beyond that, it’s entirely unclear what legislation Hawley is proposing. Disney doesn’t have “special copyright protections”; it has the same protections as everyone else, albeit protections it specifically and heavily lobbied for. It’s unclear what Hawley is seeking to “end”.
The Walt Disney Company has lobbied multiple times to extend certain copyright protections so that their intellectual property would not fall into public domain. The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended corporate copyright protection from 75 years to 95 years, keeping Mickey Mouse under Disney’s control until at least 2024. These extensions don’t just apply to Disney, though they are the ones pushing the hardest for them.
So by all means, don’t extend copyright terms. Or, hey, even shorten them! But Hawley isn’t going to do that to one single company and he shouldn’t be allowed to do it at all on the basis of speech that he doesn’t like.
Filed Under: copyright, copyright term extension, josh hawley, retaliation
Companies: disney
Comments on “Josh Hawley Threatens Disney’s ‘Special Copyright Protections’ For Being ‘Woke’”
This statement heavily implies that non-“woke” corporations should get sweetheart deals. Someone would do well to ask him about that.
Did Josh Hawley really throw down the gauntlet in front of the copyright industry without realizing it?
Lets for a moment ignore the whole thing about the free speech implications, but how fucking stupid is the man?
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Just look at the current republican party. The smart ones are pretending to be stupid, and the stupid ones, well…. they’re still just stupid.
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but how fucking stupid is the man?
Let’s just say that he continues to exceed expectations.
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Don’t fall into that trap. Hawley is a smart, well-educated, morally bankrupt authoritarian. He knows Disney does not get “special copyright protections” and he knows that whatever legislation he introduces will have zero effect on Disney’s copyrights. But he also knows that the low-information voters that keep him in power don’t know that.
Disney also knows all this and they won’t give a shit.
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I mean, didn’t he recently feature in an article due to his fair use coming under threat? Hawley is a two-faced politician who stands behind the law so long as he derives some benefit from it. Once it’s no longer his flavor of the month, it’s disposable.
Playing games
And Keeping points.
Corporations must support my parties policies or else…. isn’t that what Nazis demand.
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Well, given that “woke” essentially means “being aware that some groups are treated poorly by society and attempting to overcome barriers to treating them equally”, then opposing it means that by default you demand that marginalised groups be treated as second class citizens. So… yes.
First Amendment violation I believe…
U.S. Government threats and extortions against free speech.
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Blatantly so, yes, which makes it not just unconstitutional but incredibly stupid at the same time since he and other politicians making statements like that are making it harder to trim back/revoke any ‘special’ treatment Disney might enjoy under the law since the motives to do so are first amendment based which is a huge no-no for politicians.
The politicians involved are dancing to Disney’s tune, the only question is if they know and are doing it intentionally or are just unwitting tools.
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The first rule of Punitive Legislation Club is: You don’t talk about the punitive nature of the legislation!
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If the first rule of Fight Club is to not talk about Fight Club, then that’s shitty advertising for your movie titled Fight Club! 😀
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The point of the rule is to make people break the rule. Tyler Durden knew that the strong-minded of Fight Club wouldn’t talk about it because they’d already be transformed by Fight Club. But the weak-minded would talk. Oh, would they talk.
So what do you get when you get a bunch of weak-minded men showing up at your doorstep to beg for enlightenment? Well, if you can get enough of them, you might just have yourself a cult—or an army. It’s a matter of perspective, really.
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That’s not what I remember of the plot. Did you and I watch the same movie?
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We did.
The first Fight Club started off small, with only a relative handful of guys duking it out with one another. Only after Tyler laid down the first two rules did Fight Club expand greatly in size, both at that location and around the country. He knew that those two rules would make some people want to break them—to be anti-authoritarian even in the context of Fight Club.
Tyler knew he’d gotten that shit right when the first person seeking enlightenment showed up at his doorstep. From there, Tyler began the work that would become Project Mayhem. Like I said, he knew the weak-willed would talk about Fight Club, and he knew they’d eventually seek him out. From there, he could make them into anything he wanted—like, say, a cult-like army willing to blow shit up.
Fight Club is about how people like Tyler, given the right tactics and the right amount of time, can shape “lost” men into violent extremists. Cults often use many of the same tactics Tyler used. His using those tactics to form what would become Project Mayhem is not a coincidence.
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That would defeat the purpose of the legislation: to rile up the voter base.
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When ‘Look at me blatantly violate the constitution’ becomes a positive for your intended audience something has gone horrible wrong in both that politician and the people they are playing to.
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Something has gone horribly wrong for all of us. So far it seems to be paying off for the politician. Until he (or his audience) get hit with a painful cluestick, all of us going to be feeling the pain.
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I would be perfectly happy to live in a country where only meat people get to enjoy constitutional protections and rights. You know, like it was before 1886’s SCOTUS disaster Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road.
Re: Re: believing the difficult to believe
Wait until anon coward discovers that even boats enjoyed rights under the law at least as far back as the early 1800s. United aStates v. Schooner Peggy, 5 U.S. 103 (1801); Murray v. Schooner Charming Betsy, 6 U.S. 64 (1804). Boats are effective stand-ins for interest of their owners.
(preweiv still borkne on new platform)
Here's the perfect defense to what I'm threatening you with
Can’t say I’m surprised that insurrectionist Hawley isn’t a fan of the law or constitution though I do find it just a little bit funny how the politicians throwing fits over Disney objecting to their bigotry are going out of their way to give the company all the legal firepower needed to shoot down their vindictive lashing out by making crystal clear that their motives are first-amendment based.
In their efforts to grandstand and play to the gullible people that support them they are merely helping the company, similar to the efforts to ‘take down Big Tech’ that will instead enshrine their positions, making such efforts boneheaded for several reasons.
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A legal victory would mean nothing to Hawley. He wants to be seen performing outrage so he can keep his voting base riled up. Disney could whoop his ass in court and he’d still take that as a win because he could say he stood up to Disney.
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True enough, it’s not like he and his supporters care about the law all that matters is ‘sticking it to the libs/woke’ and since it’s not likely that he’ll be paying for any of it it’s really a win-win for the scumbag, though even then it’s worthwhile to call him out on it I’d say.
As a reminder, “woke” is a term that means “Not a complete piece of shit.”
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One way I’ve heard it put:
They say “woke” because it sounds much more insulting than “enlightened”. Besides that, they can’t spell “enlightened”.
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They say “woke” because it’s the latest word alongside things like “anti-fascist”, “progressive”, “liberal”, “socialist” and “communist” that they’ve been trained to hate on hearing it. They can’t tell you what the word actually means, why it’s bad or what the people they label with it actually think, but they have been fully trained to use the word to spread hate instead of actually discuss positions with the people they have been told are their enemies.
You can’t have your uneducated base accidentally agreeing with the sensible positions of their perceived enemies if you redefine the very words used to have such a discussion.
Censo(R)ship
Maybe josh hawley should have spent more time reading up on facts, and less time sucking up to the Proud Boys. Or he could have hired some office staff based on competence, rather than the pointiness of their klan robes
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That’s slander. As a proud organization based on many years of tradition, we would never accept the likes of Josh Hawley into the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan.
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“Slander is spoken, in print it’s libel…”
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What if they were using speech-to-text?
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There’s one in every crowd….
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Thank you. Now I know to sue ben jones for libel if he repeats his defamatory assertion that any Klansnan would willingly associate with the likes of Josh Hawley.
The only reason they say "woke"
Is because no matter how hard they try they can’t make “enlightened” sound like an insult.
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No, they managed to do that with other positive words.
The reason is because “woke” is the word that’s easier to meme, and it doesn’t have any real dictionary definition in context outside of the “being aware of systemic injustice” definition that they’re desperate to redefine.
For years, @Disney has gotten special copyright protections from the federal government – allowing them to charge consumers more. Woke corporations shouldn’t get sweetheart deals. I’ll introduce legislation this week to end their special protections – enough is enough.
So basically, Hawley’s gonna try and take away everyone’s copyrights in the US just to punish one company with whose views he disagrees? I’ll get out the popcorn.
Yes, but keep in mind that Hawley is both an idiot and a liar.
Re: Why...
… stop there:
I’d include “a waste of oxygen”.
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I’d go further, then skip a step and say, “Waste of conception.” ;D
Back to 11 years, please.
It's the Sonny Bono Act, not the Disney Act
So he should be in favor of it, because Sonny and his widow Mary were both Republicans in Congress
Bigoted, stupid, and fascist is no way to go through life, son
But as Texas and Florida, and plenty of politicians outside the USA, are demonstrating, there is no limit to what these individuals will attempt once they accumulate enough power to do so, regardless of how much harm it causes their own supporters and cheer leaders.
Freedom of speech, bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, privacy – are all under direct and immediate threat from right-wingers (and lest you think this is just the RWNJs, check out what Mitt Romney said about the SC abortion decision leak – he’s a big fan of what Alito has done._
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Alito. Isn’t his title quite ironically ‘Justice’?
Not only do they have that power, they’ve been not-extending the trademark since 1928.
If this is meant to say Congress has no power to regulate trademarks, that’s the first I’m hearing of it. Applying it unfairly—just to Disney—would raise obvious Constitutional concerns. But Congress passed the Lanham Act in 1946, and I see no reason they couldn’t modify it—for example, to make all trademarks expire after some set time.
Re: Not the function of trademarks
Trademarks aren’t supposed to be temporary exclusive monopolies like patents and copyrights. They’re supposed to be a consumer protection mechanism so consumers won’t get confused about branding sources. Expiring trademarks would likely result in more consumer confusion.
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Of course it would be ridiculous, which might be why nobody other than Hawley has ever suggested it. That still doesn’t mean Congress lacks the power to do it.
So this joke of a bloke will provoke the Woke?
Don’t have a stroke while you smoke that toke or snort some coke and upset the Disney folk.
Will this legislation croak?
Will he be the one covered in yolk?
From his Senate bio…
“Senator Hawley is recognized as one of the nation’s leading constitutional lawyers.”
How many more of these until the media stops referring to him as a constitutional lawyer without laughing?
This is a government offical flat out threatening a citizen (so what if a corp can’t smile, they have rights) to do what he wants or he’ll use the power of his office to punish them.
Something something does an oath to the Constitution mean anything when you can shit on it daily?
Re: Improved accuracy.
*From his Senate bio…
“Senator Hawley is recognized as one of the nation’s leading anti-constitutional lawyers.”*
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‘Constitutional lawyer’ just means he’s learnt more about the Constitution than most people. It doesn’t suggest he has any particular desire to follow it. In fact it probably means he knows better how to abuse it.
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In the minds of most ordinary people, the term ‘Constitutional lawyer’ suggests someone that cares about the US Constitution, just like Google’s old motto ‘Don’t be evil’ suggested that they actually cared about the usability of Android, rather than them adhering to their own specialised interpretations of the phrase as they did.
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Just because he may know what’s in it doesn’t in any way mean he cares what it says or has any interest in upholding it.
That said it certainly would be nice if the press actually pointed that out more often as you suggest, it’s bad enough when your average citizen screws up the constitution when a politician does it that deserves heavy condemnation, all the more so if they want to trumpet how well they supposedly know the document.
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I wonder if we could get a copy of the citizenship test, dummy it up to be some sort of media question thingy and find out how stupid they all are.
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Get Vice to do the interviews. 🙂
these folks spell leadership this way: v-i-n-d-i-c-t-i-v-e
The catchphrase era continues as republicans jump on whatever social media fury gets them the most attention. They’re led by the dumbest of the dumb, Desantis, whose actions against Disney are going to cost Florida taxpayers a bundle. And now they’re falling in line behind him by deciding that the Disney company is the enemy just because company leadership had to stand up for human rights or risk losing creatives. Honestly, politicians could learn a lot from this, but instead, the “conservatives” who got voted in via ridiculous antics, now seem to think they can make arbitrary threats without any checks and balances. Didn’t these asshats see Schoolhouse Rock?
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the Disney company is the enemy just because company leadership had to stand up for human rights or risk losing creatives.
But those men in dresses and all you woke idealogues aren’t human, so you don’t deserve human rights.
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Please tell me your joking!
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*you’re
Stupid autocorrect…
For as much as they want to punish Disney, why won’t the Republicans and DeathSantis return their dirty dirty campaign contributions?
If Disney is so terrible, their money is tainted and not returning it seems like the support all that grooming they claim Disney wants to do…
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It’s funny, no matter how much some politicians scream about how companies have no business meddling in politics they sure seem to be eager to take money from those same companies in the form of campaign donation, apparently that sort of ‘meddling’ is perfectly acceptable.
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Indeed, explicitly so.
“My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics.”
“I’m not talking about political contributions,” McConnell said during a stop at a Kentucky health clinic Tuesday.
https://www.businessinsider.com/mcconnell-not-talking-contributions-told-ceos-to-stay-out-politics-2021-4
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Gotta love the naked hypocrisy and his laughable attempt to pretend otherwise. ‘Giving us money is fine, telling us we’re wrong is not.’
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and a base to stupid to question if these ceos are running evil child grooming programs doesn’t that make our leaders at least complicit in the abuse of those children they claim to protect while taking the money they get for grooming those kids?
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More a naked desire for an authoritarian one party state.