Disney Lost Roger Rabbit

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

Here are the three most prevalent themes from the Hacker News discussion:

Copyright Terms Appear Excessive and Broken for Creators: A major sentiment revolves around the idea that current copyright duration (especially the 35-year reversal mechanism) is too long, and the entire system favors middlemen and large corporations, not the original creators.
- Supporting Quote: "Mainly that creatives are being screwed because every time they get given extra rights they’re bullied into selling them for nothing." attributed to "jonplackett".
- Supporting Quote: "Termination is a powerful copyright policy, and unlike most copyright, it solely benefits creative workers and not our bosses." attributed to "randallsquared".
The Power Imbalance (Monopsony) in Media Industries: Several users noted the concentrated power of large media aggregators (the "Big Five," etc.) acting as both monopolists for distribution and monopsonists (single/few buyers) of creative labor, which undermines any rights granted to creators.
- Supporting Quote: "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." attributed to "isodev".
- Supporting Quote: "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." attributed to "gorgoiler".
The "Zombie Product" Problem and Rights Retention: There is significant discussion about rights holders (like Disney or Warren Beatty maintaining Dick Tracy) keeping IP perpetually dormant purely to prevent the rights from reverting or being utilized by others, often resulting in the IP being effectively dead to the public.
- Supporting Quote: "This is a nightmare scenario for a creator: you make a piece of work that turns out to be incredibly popular, but you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them." attributed to "parineum".
- Supporting Quote: "Entity owns an IP, Entity doesn't want another entity to own it for risk to the IP. (the other entity being a globally publicly owned historic aggregator of IPs for sake of short term profits)" attributed to "shadowgovt".

🚀 Project Ideas

Abandonware Rights Revival Service (ARRS)

Summary

A service and associated tool to automate the complex process of identifying, tracking, and potentially triggering rights reversion for "abandonware" IP, primarily targeting early video games and media where original creators/rightsholders are defunct or inactive.
Core Value Proposition: Providing creators (or their estates) a legally structured path to reclaim ownership of older works when original corporate entities have failed to maintain or exploit the IP, leveraging mechanisms like abandonment or complex rights expiration/reversion clauses.

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Original video game developers, artists, writers, and their heirs from the 80s/90s whose works are commercially unavailable.
Core Feature	Automated research pipeline checking corporate filing status, copyright renewal records, licensing agreements (where public), and cross-referencing creator/estate contact information to prepare formal notices for rights reversion (similar to the Japanese abandonware mechanism mentioned).
Tech Stack	Python (for data scraping/parsing public records like USPTO/SEC filings), Legal Tech/LLM integration (for analyzing historical agreements based on user-provided context), Secure Document Generation.
Difficulty	High (Due to reliance on often unstructured historical legal/corporate data and the necessity of highly accurate legal document formatting.)
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

This directly addresses the question raised by october8140: "Can they reclaim ownership of the games they created in the 80s/90s that have been abandoned?" and provides a technical mechanism inspired by the Japanese example cited by 0110101001.
The execution would spark significant debate regarding the complexity of "work for hire" vs. licensing (monkeywork), making it a highly discussed utility.

IP Preservation & Dormancy Monitoring (IP-Dormancy Monitor)

Summary

A subscription monitoring service designed specifically to track IP usage/exploitation across major corporate catalogs (like Disney, major music labels, etc.) against pre-defined contractual triggers (e.g., failure to produce content every X years).
Core Value Proposition: Providing transparency and acting as an early warning system for creators, ensuring they are aware exactly when a licensor/owner might be unintentionally breaching a contract term that grants the creator "Termination of Transfer" rights (as discussed extensively regarding Roger Rabbit/Warren Beatty).

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Independent creators whose IP is licensed or owned by large media conglomerates (studios, labels).
Core Feature	Customized auditing tool that crawls public release schedules, press announcements, and entertainment news aggregators. If a property hits a stipulated period of commercial inactivity (e.g., no new film, game, major merchandise run), it notifies the rights holder and generates a preliminary "Notice of Opportunity to Reclaim" document draft.
Tech Stack	Web scrapers (Scrapy/BeautifulSoup), Time-series database (InfluxDB) for tracking inactivity windows, Basic frontend dashboard.
Difficulty	Medium
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

This directly services the frustration highlighted by noelwelsh and parineum about absentee landlords who "refuse to exercise their rights."
It tackles the practical application of termination rights, which latexr noted requires waiting "half a lifetime" (35 years), by automating the waiting and monitoring process.

Negotiable Copyright Term Calculator (NCTC)

Summary

A dynamic financial modeling tool simulating the Net Present Value (NPV) of various shortened copyright terms (e.g., 14 years, 35 years, 50 years) based on projected revenue curves for different media types (movies, software, books).
Core Value Proposition: Providing empirical data and clear financial counter-arguments to entrenched industry positions regarding copyright duration, helping creators advocate for shorter, more creator-friendly terms based on standard industry economics rather than abstract law.

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Intellectual property lawyers, policy advocates, and established creators/studios engaging in contract/legislative negotiation.
Core Feature	Allows users to input historical run-rate data for similar works to visualize how much revenue is generated in Years 1-5 vs. Years 35-70. It runs Monte Carlo simulations to compare payouts under current law vs. proposed shorter terms (like the 14-year model proposed by thayne).
Tech Stack	React/Vue for interactive frontend, Python (Pandas/NumPy) for financial modeling backend, leveraging existing industry data on media revenue decay.
Difficulty	Medium/High
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

This addresses the core theme that copyright terms are too long (kwanbix, noirscape) and provides data to counter the argument that media companies rely on the distant tail end of the copyright term (brainwad claims the opposite).
It would facilitate the debate crystallized by littlestymaar: "copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power," by quantifying the value curve.