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Friday, October 15, 2004 |
Disney Caught Pirating from Public Domain -- and Children! (Jason Schultz).
When will Disney stop stealing from the public domain? I mean really, it's just taking a CD from a record store without paying for it... except that the record store owner is dead... and well, the store is really the compendium of human knowledge.. and the CD is part of our collective cultural history. Whatever. Theft is Theft, right?
LONDON, England (CNN) -- An unlikely feud is seeing the film empire that built its name on cartoons for children -- the giant Disney corporation -- at odds with Britain's most famous hospital for sick children.
And it is all over another legendary children's favorite -- Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up.
In what the New York Post billed this week as "Sick kids vs. Disney in Peter Pan dust up," Great Ormond Street hospital for children in London is consulting lawyers over a book published by a Disney subsidiary in the United States.
"Peter and the Starcatchers" by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson and published by Disney's Hyperion Books is billed as a prequel to the children's classic, "Peter Pan."
Great Ormond Street was left the royalties to Peter Pan in 1929 by the author, J.M. Barrie -- and million of pounds earned from copyright fees have gone towards treating sick children in Britain ever since.
This weekend sees the UK premiere of a film about Barrie's life, "Finding Neverland" -- starring Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet and Dustin Hoffman. The hospital will receive royalties from book excerpts portrayed in the film.
But the hospital charity says is getting nothing from "Peter and the Starcatchers" -- which has been on the New York Times best seller lists, has had an extensive author tour and has its own Web site. They say the book has been published without its permission.
A spokesman for the hospital told CNN that Great Ormond Street held the copyright to Peter Pan in the United States until 2023 -- although it runs out in EU countries in 2007 -- and said: "We are considering our options."
Disney, meanwhile, has insisted that Peter Pan is out of copyright in the United States.
"The copyright to the J.M. Barrie stories expired in the U.S. prior to 1998, the effective date of the U.S. Copyright Extension Act, and thus were ineligible for any extension of their term," Disney said in a statement to the Daily Telegraph.
[Copyfight]
7:16:41 PM 
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Derrida: "one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century".... ...
...according to more than 1,000 professors of English, comparative literature, foreign languages, and drama, as well as undergraduate and graduate students in the same fields--plus a handful of faculty who teach in philosophy departments. They are protesting the New York Times obituary, which did convey, accurately, the fact that Derrida was widely thought to be an intellectual fraud.
Not a single philosopher of any note in the English-speaking world--or from Europe--is represented on the list of signatories to the letter, by the way. There is a reason.
May I suggest as an epitaph for Derrida the following apt remark of Nietzsche's?
"Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity" (The Gay Science, sec. 173).
(Thanks to Craig Duncan for the pointer to the letter.)
[The Leiter Reports: Editorials, News, Updates]
7:11:33 AM
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REALMS OF THE FANTASTIC.
Just about seven years ago I happened to find myself in San Francisco with a very pleasant man who was then an Office Assistant to the Secretary of Defense. We got along well, and he introduced me to several new ideas (mainly the "netwar" paradigm of warfare, which is genuinely a new paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, and which I'll return to in a later post). I came away feeling highly optimistic about, of all things, the US military. He'd assured me that "NO MORE VIETNAMS" might as well be carved above the West Point gates as Prime Directive, because "asymmetric conflict with amorphous networks of terrorists, who repurpose civilian technologies to terrible ends" was going to be where it was at from now on in -- and that Vietnam was always going to be what you got if you stuck with the old paradigm.
In the days after 9-11 I often took comfort in thinking of this man and the ideas he represented. When asked what I thought the United States would or could do in response to the attacks, I surprised friends by saying that I believed the US military's intelligentsia already understood the true nature of the conflict better than the enemy did.
And I still imagine that I was right in that. But the creative intelligence of my friend from the DoD, and so many others like him, prevailed not at all -- in the face of ideology, cupidity, stupidity, and a certain tragically crass cunning with regard to the mass pyschology of the American people.
One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has since been made to be.
[Gibson Blog]
7:09:57 AM
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Lessig:
"exaggerations". Isn't the net great? Bush on Bush.
(It's a short clip (Windows Media or Real) showing Bush, on the subject of whether Kerry exaggerated when he said Bush said he wasn't that concerned about Osama bin Laden.)
7:01:04 AM
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Big Media + Blogs.
Versus is more interesting than Plus, for the simple reason that all fights have OR logic, and all peace has AND logic. And fights make better stories, if not better markets. (Or so it seems at 3:20 on a Thursday afternoon.)
Anyway, Oct 2004 State of the blogosphere: Big Meda vs. Blogs is Dave Sifry's latest, and adds considerable meaning to what Chris Anderson of Wired talks about in The Long Tail. Understates Dave,
There is a lot of information and conversation in the tail of the media power curve that goes well beyond what is available from larger media organizations. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
6:43:55 AM
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