Disney Video Used to Explain Copyright

Recently a pretty amazing video surfaced that used clips from Disney films to explain copyright law. It was created by Eric Faden of Bucknell University and must have taken an insane amount of time to assemble. Now you have to wonder how long before someone gets sued over it. Also here is a corel cache version as well as a link to the original page.

Very well thought through thinking...

[Nymz]

On the contrary, Disney is the perfect target. What other company has benefited so much by taking from the public domain, yet continuously refuses to release anything back.

Re:Description, please!

[Dr_Mic]

50 years? BLEH!
With the acceleration of culture and technology, shouldn't the modern duration of copyright (and other intellectual property rights) be shorter than the original 17 years, rather than longer? The video makes the excellent point that all new works borrow from existing materials (culture), and so should revert to the culture (public domain) after the owners and/or creators have had reasonable opportunity to profit from their works.

Re:Buzz "Copy" Lightyear

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi Tachys,

I'm Eric Faden the director of the film . . . and yes, Buzz provided the only clear enuciation of the word "copy" that we could find. The Monster's Inc. enuciation at the end of the film couldn't be isolated clearly enough. It was quite interesting to see what words Disney films avoided like the plague: "copy" "piracy" "artist" (very interesting) "creativity."

As an FYI, there will be a director's commentary on the MEF DVD release (in June) that talks about the ideas and challenges of putting the film together.

And thanks to everyone at Slashdot for the great comments . . .

best,
e

Re:Ummm... copyright is civil

[Albanach]

In the United Kingdom Copyright is both a civil and criminal offence. So if someone breaches your copyright, say alters your GPL program and redistributes without the modified source, you could complain to the police. Useful if you don't have the resources to fight a copyright battle yourself. Equally, if you breach copyright law in the UK you could go to jail.

Re:Description, please!

[BakaHoushi]

Hmmm. Well, perhaps then, the length of copyright should be inversely proportional to the income it makes? (Like a tax bracket)

Re:Bravo!

[Dan East]

Not to belittle the effort that went into this, but it would actually be extremely simple to locate the words you want. The Closed Captioned text of all those movies and TV shows is available, thus you just search those documents to find the words you want (like "seventeen"), and then you watch the actual source material at that timestamp to see if it will work.

So not as much effort went into this as the story poster intoned. It's not like someone manually scanned through these movies and TV shows to watch and listen for the needed words.

Dan East

Re:Disney irony

[sootman]

Exactly. To me, there's nothing worse than being a hypocrite. Disney built their empire largely on the backs of non-copyrighted works, especially their earliest and biggest hits. A very short list*: Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, The Jungle Book, Robin Hood, The Little Mermaid, and most of (all?) the music from the Fantasia movies.

For fun, compare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_domai n_characters [wikipedia.org]
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_animat ed_features [wikipedia.org]