"Here's my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don't recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, "stole" Willie from Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill."
It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years--just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire. This was his character. Walt always parroted feature-length mainstream films to produce the Disney empire, and we see the product of this. This is the Disney Corporation: taking works in the public domain, and not even in the public domain, and turning them into vastly greater, new creativity. They took the works of this guy, these guys, the Brothers Grimm, who you think are probably great authors on their own. They produce these horrible stories, these fairy tales, which anybody should keep their children far from because they're utterly bloody and moralistic stories, and are not the sort of thing that children should see, but they were retold for us by the Disney Corporation. Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone."
Both the Steamboat Bill[1] and the Steamboat Willie[2] wikipedia pages state that this was about parodying the title. Note that there was also a 1910 song "Steamboat Bill"[3].
> The film inspired the title of Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928), which was released six months later and is considered the debut of Mickey Mouse.
> The title of the film may be a parody of the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), itself a reference to the song by Collins.
Arguably, the corruption here is not Disney, but the lawmakers agreeing to change the law. If lawmakers cannot handle the pressure from large lobbyists, they should forbid large lobbyists. Etc.
Disney should be allowed to protect their interests within the applicable laws.
Hey come on they have original ideas, talking African animals, talking cars, talking fish, talking toys. Without intellectual property protection they wouldn't of made all these super original ideas.
The Lion King is more Hamlet than Kimba, I think. Royal family, brother of king kills king to get throne, queen not happy about this turn of events, the kid is elsewhere, ghost of king tells kid to sort it out, kid returns to royal court and after a fight ends up offing the usurper.
But in Hamlet Shakespeare kills everyone; while in The Lion King, Walt disnae.
Fair point. I even remember that video releasing and here I am 3 years later spreading misinformation like exactly what it is ranting about.
I think the visual/contextual similarities with the original manga/anime run do in fact point more plainly to the reality of the mouses' relationship with their public domain reworks.
That is, what they did exactly exemplifies excellent use of the public domain. They did more than just updated reproductions of the original works. They used the public domain as a starting point, an inspiration, but told their own stories; often wildly different from their source, like, where I mention elsewhere, The Little Mermaid.
The problem focused on should be that while they benefited from having access to these works in the public domain they have spent time and resources to ensure others are unable to do the same with work they have financial control over that should have long been included in the public domain.
You realize that the folks at Disney put in thousands of hours to create their own version of the story. Yeah, they borrowed a bit, but they put in plenty of their own work.
But go ahead and pretend that this is the same as the cheap-ass behavior of some stoned pirate who can't bring himself to pay for content and uses Lessig as a justification for his thievery.
I'm not sure your point? I admitted that they borrowed a bit. And then your point is that "Steamboat Bill" borrowed? Okay. I guess. But I'm not denying that the filmmakers and artists grab ideas and plots from the collective idea well. I'm saying that they also put in thousands if not millions of hours of work creating the new version.
It's just wrong for the pro piracy crowd to use this as an excuse to justify their theft.
>It's just wrong for the pro piracy crowd to use this as an excuse to justify their theft.
My main point wasn't really about modern pirates. The internet cabal will define however they want to fit their own notions.
It was more about artists treated as "thieves" by companies like Disney that themselves have done "copyright infringement" to get themselves off the ground (by the definition they defined over the past century).
This looks false, the Buster Keaton film was released the same year, not 14 years earlier, according to wikipedia. And both were inspired by an 18 year old song, Steamboat Bill, which Mickey whistles at the start.
You have misread the post: it explicitly says that Steamboat Bill was released the same year, "no waiting 14 years"—as in, they didn't wait for the copyright to expire.
The Wikipedia entry implies they're both riffing on the song, not that the cartoon is riffing on the Keaton film.
I guess I'm surprised if it wasn't coincident given only 6 months between releases!
It's also a little confusing how the Lessig refers to the Keaton film as "Steamboat Bill" when it's "Steamboat Bill, Jr." - the song that appears in both is "Steamboat Bill."
You're right that I read it wrong; I'm still not sure if it's correct though.
edit: Having watched them both, they both of course are steamboat themed. Early on, Bill Jr is referred to once as "Willie", and Bill Jr appears to be a musician while Willie is almost entirely musical (using animals as instruments). Those do feel like references. The contents mostly feel unrelated though.
You’re right, the story is more than a sentence. You should remember though that Jasmine walked into the slums, met a poor thief and fell in love with him. He had to jump through some hoops and had a crisis of confidence before the end of the story though.
Moralizing can have the meaning of "inculcating morality", but it's more commonly used nowadays as "relating to a narrow-minded concern [for] the morals of others".
Walt Disney was repeatedly accused of racism during his lifetime, mostly because he kept putting dreadful racist stereotypes in his films. The defence given by his supporters is that he was essentially naive and conformist, that he just reflected the values of his time, that he viewed his work as harmless fun, that he wasn't really thinking about the message he sent when he made a film like Song of the South.
That defence is quite reasonable as a defence of the man, but it's also an indictment of his work. Do you really want your kids taking heavy-handed morality lessons from someone who didn't actually have a clear sense of morality?
>Do you really want your kids taking heavy-handed morality lessons from someone who didn't actually have a clear sense of morality?
Gotta take the good and leave the bad. You can find those in every single piece of media at the time, but it's not like I want to cast all of Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, Donald, etc. As such.
Morality changes and is imposed by the times, what is moral today will not be tomorrow, To your great grandchildren you'd probably be the same as a "boomer" today and will be looked at in the same vein (an ageist word used as an insult). It is the way of human culture.
Lessig isn't saying we should keep children away from morals. He's criticizing how Disney adapted the Brothers Grimm's stories, which often preached heavy-handed and regressive moral lessons in a moralizing manner.
No, he's referring to the Grimm stories. They are indeed violent. They simply are a product of their time. The Disney version is easier to digest. All of this should not detract from his main point, tho.
They were actually a product of a time earlier than the Grimms. They were acting as proto-anthropologists, collecting oral tales from illiterate peasants because they feared that these were about to be lost with modernization. This is different from later people like Hans Christian Andersen, who really did create new fairy tales.
All of this should not detract from the fact that Al Bundy scored four touchdowns in a single game while playing for the Polk High School Panthers in the 1966 city championship game versus Andrew Johnson High School, including the game-winning touchdown in the final seconds against his old nemesis, "Spare Tire" Dixon.
It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years--just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire. This was his character. Walt always parroted feature-length mainstream films to produce the Disney empire, and we see the product of this. This is the Disney Corporation: taking works in the public domain, and not even in the public domain, and turning them into vastly greater, new creativity. They took the works of this guy, these guys, the Brothers Grimm, who you think are probably great authors on their own. They produce these horrible stories, these fairy tales, which anybody should keep their children far from because they're utterly bloody and moralistic stories, and are not the sort of thing that children should see, but they were retold for us by the Disney Corporation. Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone."
-- Lawrence Lessig, "Free Culture", OSCON 2002 (https://youtu.be/uH4RskpUFiA?si=IHVC72F4oXpLHJVV&t=253)