Disney Lost Roger Rabbit
153 comments
·November 18, 2025neves
skybrian
Misleading phrases like this are why I dislike Doctorow.
Just before that he tries to sell us on the idea that there are no alternatives when actually there are. For example, you don’t have to publish a book through the Big Five. There are many large and small independent publishers, and some authors have had good luck with self-publishing.
I do think copyright law needs reform, but don’t trust Doctorow to explain it properly.
TitaRusell
Artists can put their big boy pants on and negotiate better deals instead of crying about them retroactively.
wrsh07
And what alternatives existed for Wolf in the 80s? What value were publishers providing?
Like many industries, book publishers integrated: editing, production, marketing, and distribution. They may have also helped with licensing.
Would _Who Censored Roger Rabbit_ have been the success it was with a different publisher? These counterfactuals are hard to prove! (Look at the discussions this year around k pop demon hunters - how much credit does Netflix get for growing an objectively good film's audience? Reasonable people debate this!)
The big publishers do provide utility, but there's also an incredible asymmetry (they have trivially made many more book deals than any of their authors)
cholantesh
Why is it misleading? The fact that alternatives exist doesn't mean that they're any good .
MichaelZuo
There are plenty of fine, even higher quality and credibility, publishers out there.
In fact even a mediocre university press likely has higher standards, in just about every conceivable quality aspect, than even the best imprints of the big 5.
badlibrarian
His book "Why None Of My Books Are Available On Audible: And why Amazon owes me $3,218.55" captures the soul, heart, nuance (and grammar) that he repeatedly brings to these issues.
He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection. Resulting in twice compressed 128k MP3s and innumerable blog posts.
shadowgovt
> some authors have had good luck with self-publishing
Indeed. What are the relative statistics on authors who have managed to bootstrap themselves vs. authors who make a comfortable living through the Big Five?
raldi
This is the problem with basic income if you don’t also increase the housing supply: landlords will just raise rents and soak it all up.
benmanns
It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs (relative to a straight 100% increase relative to the basic income). So you might send everyone $100 per month and costs go up $100 per month, until supply chains shift towards supplying lower income humans with more goods and services than they used to get, at which point costs will decrease (from the $100 increase).
With enough forewarning, suppliers could anticipate the increased demand and prepare for it.
raldi
Not if desirable places restrict zoning in a way that prevents more housing from being legal to build.
scotty79
Or you could have progressive real estate tax so you don't let the bully keep the stolen lunch money and you can give it to your kid again.
latexr
> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office.
You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law.
> when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.
That’s the sign of a deeply broken system. It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
Ntrails
> You have to wait half a lifetime?!
Yeah, I cannot quite believe the term on that thing. Somewhere between 10 and 20 feels far more reasonable since businesses do need time to work plan around and develop property.
I'm not sure how I feel about auto-reversion as a concept. I can see real problems with it conceptually (creating a deadzone around expiry etc)
jimbokun
How about 14? Which as the article explains was the original copyright term.
johannes1234321
> should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
So, if I sell you my house or car I can't sign away my rights on it? - Sure, there is a difference between material and intellectual property ...
Against swindling there needs to be protection from fraud, but that exists in most legislative systems.
jimbokun
You answer your own question.
Yes, intellectual property rights should be different than physical property rights.
NetMageSCW
Why?
scotty79
"you wouldn't steal a car" again?
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7bit
That's why it's called copyright. You can perfectly sign it away.
In Germany the right is called "Urheberrecht" which literally translates to "author's right". And while you can license your work and sign away the usage, you cannot by definition sign away the fact that you are the author of a work.
vidarh
In English this is usually translated as "moral rights"[1]. They are fairly widespread in other civil law jurisdictions than Germany too. Less so in common law jurisdictions.
But they exist to a (very) limited extent even in the US.
ghaff
Which is one of the reasons public domain is problematic in some jurisdictions because it requires you to waive rights you can't necessarily waive.
Yes, Louisiana somewhat notwithstanding, the US is basically common law like the UK (and much of the Anglosphere/Commonwealth).
As a bit of trivia, the MIT License was essentially created because of issues with "just" making X public domain. https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license
oniony
So how does ghostwriting work then? Lots of books have unaccredited ghostwriters.
pbhjpbhj
The author never had the rights, as they worked under contract, so they don't need to sign them away.
But we also the right to be named as author is not a requirement to be named as author.
Lerc
Not a Lawyer, but this seems like work-for-hire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire
I assume Germany has something like this (possibly a EU requirement). It would cover more than just ghostwritten books.
Most software is written in a similar manner. Microsoft didn't write windows, lots of ghostwriting programmers did.
Lariscus
This is handled in the employment contract. The "Urheberrecht" is not transferable only inheritable, but you can grant "Nutzungsrechte" which means "rights of use". So in your contract you just grant your employer unrestricted and exclusive rights of use.
nandomrumber
How is business supposed to be conducted under those conditions?
latexr
Fairly, respectfully, and without exploitation?
Most business conducted in the world does not require someone to reject their lawful rights. For consumers in the EU, for example, the law even offers explicit protections by stating specifically that contract terms which are unfair have no legal binding.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...
isodev
> I don't like what I signed up for freely
I believe the post makes a good case that "freely" doesn't mean by choice at all. In other words, not what people consider freely.
philipallstar
"Exploitation" isn't an objective term. It often just means "I don't like what I signed up for freely".
cnnlives8472
> You have to wait half a lifetime?!
I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us.
With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought of getting a lot of plays is a little scary.
(Note: Statistically, people don’t live forever.)
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fragmede
Estimates suggest around 117–120 billion people have ever been born, while only about 8 billion are alive today, meaning roughly 93% of all humans are dead. So statistically, if you're alive today, there's a 7% chance that you'll live forever.
IAmBroom
That's not what the statistics indicate.
Not at all.
7% have uncertain lifetimes, >= (current value).
joecool1029
Sorta related since Disney held a share in it previously but Dick Tracy exclusive rights are still held by Warren Beatty who produced and starred in the role back in 1990. He had to fight off a challenge from Tribune Media in court decades ago but stipulation was he had to produce new Dick Tracy stuff every few years. It’s lead to a series of increasingly surreal late night specials on TCM where he appears in character and talks about random stuff and the 1990 movie, last time was in 2023: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKncYwtec4
kwanbix
So is Warren being an asshole here? I mean, we haven't seen a Dick Tracy movie since the 90s. I am out of the loop so trying to understand.
shadowgovt
Perhaps, but he's also highlighting how fundamentally broken the copyright system is. I don't think that's his goal (he's mostly being petty; there's a reason there's a pop song about his vanity), but it is an interesting side-effect of his odd project.
999900000999
There's also a legendary Star wars merch rights agreement that only expired because the rights holder forgot to send Lucas a check while the franchise was inactive.
Billions of dollars gone because of an oversight.
Arguably they didn't know Lucas was going to bring it back.
https://equinoxbusinesslaw.com/blog/how-hasbro-almost-blew-a...
HeinzStuckeIt
Wow, TIL. I had assumed that Warren Beatty was suffering from dementia due to his great age and his retirement from cinema. I had no idea he was still making media appearances.
mattmaroon
You assume he has dementia because he’s old and retired?
jrmg
There seems to be a popular view nowadays that most old people grow to be senile (just look at any online discussion of old politicians for example). This is not the case!
HeinzStuckeIt
Sad as it is, when stars from classic Hollywood stop being visible but are still known to be alive at a highly advanced age, dementia is often the case. Gene Hackman, Gene Wilder, and Jack Nicholson are notable cases, and I just assumed Beatty was similar.
devsda
> Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audio books.
> when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.
Beautifully explained the complex situation and its kind of scary how it applies to tech as well in some areas.
The second point is also true w.r.t big tech & privacy regulations.
lotsofpulp
How can Congress make it any easier to access an audience? The Internet made it so there is zero friction between a media consumer and a media creator.
Having to compete with a billion other content creators (including hits from the past) is inherently hard. The most valuable service the big media sellers provide these days is curation.
Reducing copyright length would be the best thing to reduce the big companies’ power though. That way, they can’t sway buyers to their silos using content from the past, and therefore have to invest in the future.
brainwad
Shortening copyright terms would reduce the power of any given media company; but I think it might disadvantage creators of new works overall. Right now each company has a smaller back-catalogue than they would under a shorter term regime, and so the relative value to them of new content is higher.
Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content), which would then reduce the number of buyers for new content, increasing the monopsony effects.
danaris
The vast majority of money for any given copyrighted work comes within the first few years of its existence. (This is extra true for things like video games.)
Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator.
You seem to be thinking of copyright purely in terms of vast media conglomerates, but it affects literally every work created by every human in the country. That includes these HN discussion posts!
Additionally, I find it hard to see how your second paragraph holds. If the amount of exclusive content a given entity holds affects their odds of being bought by a larger conglomerate, I would think it would be in the opposite direction: having more exclusive content would make them more likely to be a target for acquisition, so that the larger company could then hold all of that exclusively.
If everything older than, say, 35 years were suddenly in the public domain, available to be distributed by any of the distribution companies, and Hypothetical Media Corp had half the back catalogue that they used to, then surely that would make big conglomerates less interested in buying up Hypothetical Media Corp?
lotsofpulp
I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content.
Currently, people give a ton of money to Comcast/Disney for stuff made decades ago, which in turn gives Comcast/Disney more power, since people are far likelier to stay within those silos.
If friends/seinfeld/whatever could be accessible via multiple sources, then other groups of content creators could emerge, offering $15 to $25 per month of new stuff, rather than compete for a smaller portion of the budget since the old content takes up so much.
The creators of new work don’t earn much from 130 year copyrights anyway, to fund any decent production, they will need outside investors such as Disney or Apple or whoever to make the gamble. In exchange, Disney and Apple are going to want the ability to sell it for 130 years, but few if any new content creators is able to negotiate gross royalties, those days are long gone.
>Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content)
This is the opposite of what would happen. If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.
randallsquared
> Termination is a powerful copyright policy, and unlike most copyright, it solely benefits creative workers and not our bosses.
That's an interesting framing. I know why Doctorow wants to import the boss/worker concept here, but it just doesn't apply. Disney wasn't Wolf's boss in any sense that is usually understood, and it just obscures the picture with a bunch of class-based chaff.
peepee1982
I read it more like "workers" being the ones who actually produce the good stuff, and "the boss" as being the entity to stick it to (as explained in the classic film "School of Rock").
shadowgovt
They can tell him he can't use the IP he created. That may not be precisely a "boss" but it's a powerful constraint on his freedom.
CuriouslyC
It amazes me the number of people who are raging at how AI is hurting creators, and will make long videos and posts about this subject, without touching on the fact that the __ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY__ is the single largest abuser of creators, and it's far worse than AI is or probably will ever be.
That's how you can tell that the RIAA/MPAA propaganda campaign against AI to protect its racket is working.
mayoff
I don’t know if Cory Doctorow has read the “fantastic 1981 novel”, but I have (decades ago) and as I recall the plot of the book and the plot of the movie are very different from each other. The author of the book didn’t write the screenplay and I doubt he had much (if anything) to do the character designs in the movie. So even if he has the rights to his novel back, it’s not at all clear to me that he could just make (or sell a license to make) a straight, recognizable sequel to Disney’s movie without getting back into bed with Disney, and clearly Disney isn’t interested or they’d have done something by now.
pavlov
Disney definitely owns the character designs, so Roger and Jessica Rabbit will have to look different if a new movie is made using the IP owned by the book's author.
havblue
I can't imagine it without the high pitched "pbbbbbleeeease!" voice and without Kathleen Turner's voice.... and Jessica's exaggerated hourglass appearance. The idea of another Toon noir would be great but this would be a very difficult project to get off the ground. Maybe Warner Brothers would produce it...
bryanrasmussen
>clearly Disney isn’t interested
often big media companies aren't interested in exploiting specific properties if there is ongoing litigation regarding them.
philistine
In this case it’s not that there is litigation. It’s that Steven Spielberg must approve any and all content featuring Roger Rabbit. The delinquent partner who sits on their hands and does nothing is Spielberg.
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jajuuka
Yeah the Roger Rabbit is a miracle where multiple major studios came together and allowed their IP to be in the same work. Disney, Warner Bros, Fleischer Studios, Harvey Comics, King Features Syndicate, Felix the Cat Productions, Turner Entertainment, and Universal Pictures/Walter Lantz Productions all agreed to share their characters. One of Steven Spielbergs great accomplishments was negotiating this. With how protective these studios are about their IP anymore I doubt we'd see anything close to the Roger Rabbit movie sadly.
Not to mention some of the actors have passed like Paul Reuben who really sold the cartoon aspect of Roger Rabbit.
isodev
> The answer lies in the structure of creative labor markets, which are brutally concentrated. Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks.
> The media industry isn't just a monopoly, in other words – it's also a monopsony, which is to say, a collection of powerful buyers. The middlemen who control access to our audiences have all the power
I'm happy to see apps included here, I feel sometimes folks forget these are also a form of creative works and having the two gatekeepers constantly filter and influece what can and can't be released is absolute nightmare for both developers and consumers (who don't even know the things they could've had but were denied by big A or big G).
Exoristos
Direct link to the article: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/#im-just-drawn...
It's a long-winded article, even for a lawyer, but the payload seems to be a crack at the head of the RIAA, which is suing Midjouney.
"In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods."
jonplackett
I don’t find it long winded. It just gives background and makes a bunch of valid points.
Mainly that creatives are being screwed because every time they get given extra rights they’re bullied into selling them for nothing.
So this right that they get the copyright back after 35y is different - because you can’t be forced to sell it for nothing.
We need more laws like this to help creative people make the money they deserve. Most creative people make a pitiful amount of money while studios / publishers / labels do better and better. It’s not sustainable.
troupo
It's a readable and enjoyable text about a complex issue. You can't really distill anything about copyright without actually talking about history, relevant examples, and how it affects other industries, or other creative works, or...
gorgoiler
Hot damn I’m a sucker for a good analogy…
”Giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. You're just enriching the bullies.”
The big “5,4,3,2,1” is also a powerful piece of rhetoric. Who is this Doctorow person? He has my attention! :)
mathgeek
Lots of fun ranting (the good kind) about the ills of the industries built to take advantage of creators, but for those who just want to know more about the state of Roger Rabbit: https://www.imnotbad.com/2025/11/roger-rabbit-copyright-reve...
TitaRusell
Creators are often dumb enough to trade away their rights. They have dollar signs in their eyes too. So many popstars selling their music because the label paid for their coke habit for a few years.
Besides as much as we all hate Disney they are a machine that can make global hits. Would we still talk about Bambi without the movie?
NoboruWataya
I loved WFRR as a kid, and of all the movies I loved as a kid, it has definitely held up the best. I re-watched it recently and it is still great. Hilarious, thoughtful and just the right amount of dark.
One of the reasons I still love it is that it hasn't fallen prey to the usual Hollywood practice of taking something you love and shovelling it down your throat until you're sick of it. It saddens me when you see a really good movie with a bunch of bad sequels, or TV series that were once great but ran for 10 seasons too long.
vintermann
Yeah. One thing is what's good for the author, one thing is what's good for the publisher. But what's good for us as viewers/end users (and every "creative" ought to remember that's what they are 99.9% of the time!) is often a third thing entirely.
lkramer
The 8 most terrifying words in the English language are "Let us turn this movie into a franchise"
The phrase below is worth the read:
> giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money you can give that kid that will buy them lunch – you're just enriching the bullies