Hello frens,

As a great opponent of any form of IP, I have been following the event of Disney’s Steamboat Willie entering the public domain with great amusement. The incidents where creators have been falsely demonetized on youtube for rightfully using this film is further underpinned by Disney’s decades-long shameless practices. The linked article sums it up quite well I think.

  • NuXCOM_90PercentEnglish
    208·
    1 year ago

    That… actually makes a lot of sense? And is what we should want?

    Copyrighting The Monkey King in the 16th century (just roll with it, this is going somewhere) made sense. Over time, that copyright would expire.

    Fast forward to the 1980s where Akira Toriyama and Shonen Jump basically retold the story but with a lot more robots, werewolves, kaiju fights, and noseless bald cops. Goku is based on The Monkey King but is not The Monkey King and has gone on a much stupider trajectory to become an alien who is too dumb to live and regularly threatens all of existence with his idiocy. And has canonically fucked two babies into his wife without ever kissing her. That is a new character.

    As for “change the color of the nose”: (Disclaimer: I am an anime bitch so I am sure this color was already used for Goku as opposed to just Broly but whatever). If you make Goku’s hair Green because he went Super Saiyan Fury Happy Dance Now With The Divine Gods, that is not a new character and the rights-holders for Dragon Ball would rightfully send you a C&D. Whereas, if you make an identical clone of Goku but is evil then you have Turles (or Black Goku (or, honestly, Bardok)) and it can be argued as a new character. Whether a third party could get away with that starts to get incredibly messy and dangerous.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        92·
        1 year ago

        There are a lot of weird anime fans I’ve encountered who seem to think that everyone is as familiar with anime as they are. I don’t get it. I’m a massive Trekkie, but I wouldn’t expect strangers that aren’t on a Star Trek forum or something to understand what I’m talking about when I discuss Rick Berman’s role in preventing queer characters from being a major presence on Star Trek shows until the kiss between Jadzia and another Trill host in the late 1990s being a microcosm of the television landscape of the 1980s and 1990s as a whole including the acceptability of queer women (such as Ellen) on TV vs. queer men… Because they have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about or who Rick Berman is or what a Jadzia could possibly be even if I could expand upon that and write a nice tight little essay.