The Null Device

Those copyright fascists at Disney are at it again; from McCarthyism to the SSSCA, they've never been far from the repressive authoritarianism du jour. And now, they're buying up the rights to Hong Kong films, editing them (from simple censorship to actively changing the story with dubbing and editing) and completely bastardising the filmmaker's original vision in the process, releasing their edited versions in Western markets, and then suing anybody who deigns to violate Disney's copyrights by making the originals available. Nice; next time Disney's flacks talk about the need for more draconian copyright laws to "protect artists", keep this in mind. (via the Horn)

There are 5 comments on "":

Posted by: Graham http://grudnuk.com Fri Mar 1 11:23:00 2002

Walt was a member of the American Nazi Party, wasn't he?

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Fri Mar 1 15:01:20 2002

No, but I think he was a friend of Henry Ford. (Or am I thinking of Ray Kroc?) And he may have been a fellow traveller; apparently an early Disney cartoon had a Yiddish-accented wolf preying on three little Aryan pigs or something similar. (Mind you, it'd be hard to prove, given how copyright law allows Disney to obliterate such episodes from the historical record.)

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Fri Mar 1 15:05:27 2002

Anyway, IMHO, Disney are scumbags. Worse than Vivendi Universal, much worse than AOLTW, and perhaps a nose ahead of (or behind, depending on how you look at it) News Corp. If they had their way, the world would become a totalitarian dystopia with no hope of escape from their reality, though with really shiny merchandise.

Posted by: Jimbob http://the-fix.org Sat Mar 2 01:58:36 2002

Apparently, every time it looks like the sunset clause on copyright looks like putting Mickey Mouse into the public domain, Disney manage to lobby the US Congress to increase the amount of time copyrights persist for...

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Sat Mar 2 14:16:37 2002

Yes.

The US Supreme Court is currently looking at whether or not this is constitutional. Though I wouldn't say that there's a big chance of them ruling against it (too much of an attack on the foundation of corporate capitalism); but there's always hope...