HER APP UPDATE
HER will be available for Android devices in May
(HER wird ab Anfang-Mitte Mai auch für Android Geräte verfügbar sein)
FINALLY
More you might like
If 2/2/22 falls on a Tuesday it could also be known as “2’s Day”
DUDE
October 30th 11:59pm: *crickets*
October 31st 12:00am: *smashing through your window*boYS AND GIRLS OF EVERY AGE, WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO SEE SOMETHING STRANGE
*running through your house* COME WITH US AND YOU WILL SEE THIS, OUR TOWN OF HALLOWEEN
*fleeing through your back door* THIS IS HALLOWEEN THIS IS HALLOWEEN, PUMPKINS SCREAM IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT
*hiding in the forest from the police* *whispering* this is halloween everybody make a scene trick or treat till the neighbors gonna die of fright, its our town everybody scream, in this town of halloween
Disney going around buying everything is definitely terrible, but there totally needs to be more awareness that the biggest damage Disney has done to the American media landscape happened twenty years ago, and ended up warping a whole generation’s notion of how media is fundamentally supposed to work in the process.
Basically, you can’t “renew” a copyright in order to extend it. “Copyright renewal” used to be a thing, but the purpose of doing so was to prevent the copyright from expiring early, not to extend it beyond the normal statutory limit – and in any event, all that was abolished decades ago, and everybody’s copyrights now last for the full term without the need for renewals.
When most people think of copyright “renewal”, they’re really thinking of copyright extension, which is some legislative fuckery that happened back in the 1990s, and is 100% Disney’s fault.
In a nutshell, Disney didn’t want Mickey Mouse entering the public domain, but there was no formal mechanism for preventing it, and obviously they couldn’t have a legal exception made just for Mickey Mouse; even if they’d bribed enough lawmakers to make it happen, that sort of blatant legislative favouritism would have caused a big hairy scandal.
So what they did instead was lobby for a global copyright extension, applying to all works that were still under copyright at the time – and they succeeded. The Copyright Extension Act of 1998 – sometimes known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, because they weren’t fooling anybody! – tacked an extra twenty years onto the term of all outstanding copyrights, ensuring that Mickey Mouse would be safe until at least 2024.
So here’s the trick: what happened to all the works that would have entered the public domain in 1999? Well, they’d now enter the public domain in 2019 – effectively “freezing” the public domain America for the next two decades. Thanks to Disney’s lobbying, there was a twenty-year span in which no works at all entered the public domain in the United States, apart from the tiny handful that were explicitly released to the public domain by a living author.
If you’re American and under the age of 30, last year is probably the first year in your memory that new works entered the public domain; if you’re under 20, it was the first year in your lifetime that new works entered the public domain. There’s an entire generation of Americans who grew up with a static public domain, thinking that was a normal state of affairs.
Like, I’m not saying that’s 100% responsible for American popular culture being in the condition it’s in, but it’s undeniably a pretty big contributing factor!
About the only good thing from the last four years of political clusterfuckery is that everyone was too busy either supporting or fighting facism, that the media corporations didn’t have space to extend copyright again and now we have a growing public domain.
“Yes, We Have No Bananas” is now free for anyone to use. Next year, we get The Great Gatsby. (Next year, anyone is free to write a Great Gatsby/Sherlock Holmes crossover and publish it for as much money as the public will pay.)
Now that Coronavirus is huge it feels like we haven’t heard anything about the Honk Kong Protests and that timing feels suspicious.
I think shower thoughts has seen something…
