Holy copyright infringement BATMAN!
- Thread starter miraclefan
- Start date
But anyone pulling a 1 million dollar figure out of there ass is way douchbaggy-er.
Wait...so if all idea's come from a shared consciousness, doesnt that mean i should be receiving royalty cheques from every IP franchise in existence? ker-ching
In this instance, DC dont have a choice. If you dont protect your IP, then every Tom, Dick and Harry can start infringing it because the original omission creates a precedent. And his defense is ludicrous. As Bigdaddy said, if his defense is legitimate then we can all go make Batman films or comics as long as we put a disclaimer saying its not really Batman its just an actor wearing the costume doing Batman-ish things.
You know, I've only read a small snippet of Twilight, a bit from the lastest book I believe, but it was pretty badly written. I can only imagine what Twilight fanfic must be like...
I don't think a million is enough. It's Batman! He is one of the most famous, maybe the most famous (Do they own Spiderman?) character they have. The guy most likely won't have to pay that, but you always aim higher to prove the point to all the assholes out there. It's a million dollars for hundreds and hundreds of figures, it's not like it's $100,000 for a damn song (fuck you Sony).
Try 50 figures.
Yeah, he probably shouldn't be doing it and should be punished if he's carried despite being told not to, but claiming millions in compensation is the act of a complete dick.
No, it's not. The penalty they go after has to be high enough to dissuade anyone else from doing what this idiot's done. If you ignore repeated warnings for violating the law, you deserve to get screwed big time.
Because a multi-million dollar corporation needs to utilise scare tactics against 1 little dude.
I get that the guy needs to punished, but really, they needn't be such cockends about it.
This is what they are asking for, it won't be what they are awarded.
The law also protects the little guy from having a mega corporation swoop in and steal his intellectual property. The law cuts both ways, and the concept of fairness is no less valid simply because its a corporation with enormous profit margins and not an individual scraping by with dimes. Blindfolded justice and all that ...
Exactly. Once again, it's not about actually getting that much money, it's the fact that the amount acts as a deterrent to other would-be infringing weasels.
--Ted
Exactly. It's not a number of any actual losses -which he likely caused DC none- put it's all "don't do this!" fines. They're not doing it to get the money they're doing to a)make other people not do this for fear of paying out huge fines b)not lose their own copyright by not enforcing it.
So when does it make it okay? 2 little dues? 100? 1 thousand?
The throw the high price tag out there as a scare tactic against others (people and corporations) that might attempt do something like this. This guy just happens to be the first one do it and got a precedent set.
I've come up with ideas in my field of work for 20 years and when someone asks if they can replicate it, I send them my files, free of charge, and tell them to have at it. I have seen my ideas replicated in at least 4 states and about 10 different creative institutions. And it makes me happy every time. I pull my teeny little paycheck and do my work and live a very pleasant life. Neither I, nor the institutions I work for, try to "ream people up the ass" (as other posters have so pithily put it) so we can hoard our ideas or attendant revenue. Belive it or not, greed is not the end all, be all of values.
My issue with Warner Bros is this - IP law was developed off of the work of individuals. An individual creates a fictional character and s/he and/ or that person's estate, retains the rights to that character for 75 years following the artist's death. At which point the character enters the public domain. This has long been considered a fair way to protect the creator's rights and the public's rights to cultural material.
But then along came corporations. Corporations don't die. They therefore own these fictional creations - which they, of course, did not create - they only purchased them from their creators and then hired other people to continue to write more material with those characters, continually owning the work of individual artists (who are, by definitions being bandied around here, writing fanfic since they did not originate these characters - they only get paid to write their fanfic by the corporate owners). These creations and their attendant revenue are fiercely protected - to the point of reaming the original creators up the ass (see Shuster and Siegal and the sad story of Superman's creators - not to mention Bill Finger, the original writer of Batman) - and none of these works will ever, ever enter the public domain because these corporations don't give a shit about the public domain. You know why? Because the public domain means their little fiefdoms don't get to keep making money off something the current managers had absolutely no hand in creating. Forgive me if I fail to see why they should have the right to restrict everyone else from using these characters based on a law that was meant to protect individual creativity. 70 years of one corporation owning Batman - that's not enough. It has to go on forever. And the public's rights to important cultural icons? The creativity of what can happen when a variety of authors or artists can freely create using such legendary creations? Fuck that, we need to make a few more million bucks, even when what we're producing is more often than not, utter crap because we're not even artists!
It pisses me off. It's also morally wrong. And culturally wrong. It stunts our arts, our collective storytelling and the creativity of generations of artists who should evenutally be able to incorporate cultural icons into their work.
The public domain matters, but corporations have been so successful at slinging their propaganda that people have forgotten that it even exists.
Nah its okay, you were just drawing the actor, who just happened to be wearing the Batman costume at the time.
I fully agree with Lapis Exilis, immortal and unscrupulous institutions like multinationals having exclusive control over the creative arts is damaging and unsustainable, they have completely deformed IP laws way beyound their original parameters and intent. And Disney has sued children's day care centers for displaying Disney characters in wall art, which is both scary and ridiculous.
