I’ve already done a couple public domain posts this year, notably the one for Public Domain Day and one on Monday about how people are, predictably, already having fun with the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse which entered the public domain in the U.S. on January 1st. But if you just want to get deeper into the legal philosophy behind public domain and also how that particularly involves Mickey Mouse, I have a couple…
I didn’t post this last week, but I actually saw some news even as I was posting about Public Domain Day last Monday: people aren’t wasting any time, Disney’s legendary legal ferocity be damned. One Steamboat Willie-themed Kickstarter launched on January 1st, there are memes aplenty (see image above), and –of course– there’s a horror movie. There’s plenty more in the works, as Sian Cain details for The Guardian (which also touches on the horror…
I still should work on a wrap-up post regarding last year’s Hollywood Strikes, but one of the outcomes the unions were able to negotiate was visibility about the success of shows on streaming services. In what definitely feels like an effort to guide that narrative, Netflix released a heretofore unprecedented amount of data publicly in December regarding how many people watched what on their service. You can get a summary, watch a half hour press…
Earlier this week, I did a post about the what we’ve gained in the public domain as of January 1st, “Public Domain Day” becoming something I post on. Thinking of annual posts, I meant to do this last month, so here goes: TCM does a great montage of folks we’ve lost in the previous year (see examples from 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019 for the most recent entries). This time around, I decided to do…
Last year I mentioned making a Public Domain Day post a tradition and so: Happy New Year to All! Plus, welcome to the public domain for so many goodies. For a great overview of said goodies on offer, check out this article from Aaron Moss over at Copyright Lately. Moss is an intellectual property attorney and is quite ready to delve deep into all things copyright. I appreciate that he goes beyond the much-covered fact…
So, the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, approved a tentative agreement with AMPTP on November 8th, but the agreement has yet to be ratified by the membership and there appear to be a lot of questions about how AI is being dealt with (actors’ concerns being similar yet different in some important regards than writers). So I’ll plan to write something post-ratification (and yes, the presumption is that the agreement will be ratified). But the ratification vote…
This isn’t the first time I’ve posted about spaceships you may want to avoid, but this seems especially seasonal… and it may just give you ideas about some films to bump to the top of your queue:
Like many, many other people, I had hoped that the end to the WGA strike would lead to a quick negotiation with SAG-AFTRA in its wake. Unfortunately, the AMPTP has evidently walked away from the negotiating table because learning nothing is… a power move? I’m not sure. Anyway, I am already speculating on what the future will bring, because even though we’ve heard a lot about how streaming isn’t the most lucrative business model ever…
Okay, I’ll be honest: I was putting off finishing this post in hopes that I could do one big post about the end of both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Although SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP are back at the negotiating table since last week, as of this writing, they haven’t made a deal. The WGA, however, has made a deal and, in a trend they established from the get-go, the WGA has provided a great summary…
I’m not gonna lie: I thought of the Monty Python skit when I saw this video as Victor Sweeney is everything you thought a mortician might be. This was apparently decently popular, so they brought him back for a part 2: And wouldn’t you know it? Mr. Sweeney has also done one of those experts-review-films videos and it’s very informative: Hope everyone’s spooky season is starting off right.