The turkey is gone, so it's time for sausages!
- So someone needs to save Disney, eh? And the obvious starting point is reinvigorating Marvel — this from a studio that built its reputation on appropriating material from other cultures and copyright piracy (just what, exactly, did you think Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan, and The Lion King were?). Well, I don't really agree; they'd have to "reinvigorate" Marvel by both admitting that, like almost everything washed through NYC-based commercial publishing, 90% or more of it is crap… and then acknowledging the deep, dark secret abuses of its contracting practices that mean some of Marvel's properties have, umm, cloudy titles (cloudy as in "is that a cumulonimbus bearing down on us?"), meaning that they might actually have to compensate the actual creators (past, present, and future) instead of the aggressively passive investors.
Not. Gonna. Happen. So, instead, I think this will be much more palatable — and likely (as suggested 39 years ago):
Or they could just add more sex at the Mouse House. Yeah, that would turn out well — just consider the most plausible alternative to the MCU (and don't even think about the longstanding media conglomerate with an even higher proportion of crap and even worse historical contracting practices).
- Copyright is much more "in the news" of late than usual, primarily because techbros and hedge-fund managers seem to think that if they can see a way to make money for themselves, they're entitled to do so for no cost. And without asking permission; they didn't for privacy, so why should we expect them to for intellectual property?
- Over across the Pond, the French courts have clarified (sort of) when the statute of limitations begins running on a copyright action. Only sort of, though, because it leaves wide open both which facts are relevant — for example, how precise does the holder's knowledge of who the infringer(s) are need to be, particularly given that it's much harder to sue what common-law jurisdictions call a "Doe defendant" in France — and what, especially in the context of the vast universe of the 'net, means that the holder "should have known." My limited understanding is that the French courts have largely punted on both problems relating to intellectual property.
- That, though, is still clearer than the EU's Intellectual Property Office calling for some form of copyright unification. The most obvious aspect of the problem is that what makes a work eligible (or ineligible) for copyright protection in each nation in the EU varies, and that variance is in part due to other laws that are not nearly so amenable to unification, harmonization, or even polite disagreement. Then, too, as the preceding sausage indicates, core civil procedure matters — in fact, it's the dominant factor in a not-surprisingly-large proportion of copyright disputes.
- In a piece that barely scratches one of the surfaces — not for want of trying, or of perceptive analysis, but for want of about 40,000 words and a couple millenia of historical analysis (maybe more) and such — Jonathan Freedland rightly asserts that peace will require that we ignore extremists on both sides of the (current) Israel/Palestine-reflected-in-Hamas dispute. Let's not forget the extremists in Europe, either, who certainly helped — indeed, intended to help — make the region the festering pustule of political/cultural toxic waste that we're enjoying today.
But Mr Freedland is certainly correct in his disdain for the extremists; I think his advocacy of the two-state solution wrong (a "state" created on religious-purity lines is already at least 80% of the way toward failed statehood — and that goes for both Israel and Palestine), but it may turn out to be a least-bad temporary solution until we can get two consecutive generations in power in the region, throughout the region, who have grown up not hating each other. Which is to say at least half a century from now, by which time maybe they can actually listen to some advice from Richard Loving. Advice that will be, by that time, well over a century old.
- All of which is less depressing than contemplating techbros and hedge-fund managers and their part in dooming my children to rising sea levels. Which might not be an entirely bad thing, if it means there will be less land area in Florida and therefore fewer Florida Man stories… and fewer Florida politicians crawling up out of the Everglades onto the national stage (where they promptly urinate on debate moderators).
