The trees in the background are burning, and an increase in wildfires is definitely a part of climate change.

That’s definitely the impression I got in the third movie. In the first one, we only see the Himalayan headquarters, and it seems like there’s a white guy inexplicably in charge of an all Asian team of ninja assassins (although I think I remember one black guy being there when they burned Wayne manor).

Yeah, but they did that specifically because Disney convinced the Comanche to adopt him before the movie came out. He certainly wouldn’t be a member of that tribe if he hadn’t been cast as a member of that tribe.

I have mixed feelings about Liam Neeson in that role. His performance is great, and given that they got rid of the whole, “immortal genius from the Islamic Golden Age,” backstory, I guess the character’s race is less important. It feels very strange that an Irish guy is somehow the leader of a group of Asian ninjas, though.

The Sam Jackson/Nick Fury story is pretty hilarious. When Marvel created the Ultimate Universe in the comics, they changed a lot of characters’ backstories. One of those changes was making Nick Fury black, and one of their artists started drawing him looking a lot like Sam Jackson. Jackson talked to his agents, and Marvel was basically like, “Well, instead of suing us, would Mr. Jackson like to play the character in any future projects?”

Well, I think it’s a bit different. The Little Mermaid takes place in an unidentified kingdom on the surface (it seems vaguely Italian or Mediterranean, I guess?) and an underwater Atlantian kingdom, so race doesn’t matter. The original Dr. Strange comics have all sorts of uncomfortable racial and religious tropes; it’s about a white guy who finds magical order Tibetan monks, not only learns their magic, but becomes even better than them at it, and moves to New York with an Asian man-servant named Wong who serves him tea. Changing up the races and backstory on that one isn’t just acceptable, it’s advisable.

Gotcha. Three-eighths is roughly one-third, so I guess that? One-quarter German on one side, one-eighth on the other?

You can get some odd fractions by two parents having similar lineages. Like, if your mother is Irish, and your great-grandmother on your father’s side is Irish, you would be five-eighths Irish. I’m having trouble finding a combination that gives you thirds, though.

In fairness to Tilda Swinton, they decided to entirely rewrite the character to be a Celtic woman instead of a Tibetan man. This was probably to avoid being censored in China, but getting away from the racist 1930s, “oriental mysticism,” trope was probably a good idea. It’s certainly a lot better than letting Jonny Depp pretend to be a Native American because he’s one-eighth Cherokee.

Almost everything you’ve said is just factually incorrect. We know why Calvin and Hobbes wasn’t franchised; in Bill Waterson’s own words, he wanted to, “write every word, draw every line, color every Sunday strip, and paint every book illustration,” not, “run a corporate empire.” His publisher had no worries about copyright infringement though, and pressured him to franchise.

Also, there was no chance he would have run into trademark issues because that’s not what trademark means. Trademark is a name, copyright is the content. Trademark is why I can open a restaurant called Spider-Man, copyright is why I can’t publish my own Spider-Man comics. While we’re at it, Nintendo is suing Palworld for Patent violations, not copyright, so this has nothing to do with the similarity of the characters, it has to do with some game mechanic that Nintendo believes is proprietary technology.

Finally, the average working class person wasn’t writing, but they were consuming printed media, and that’s why publishers were making so much money off of authors. That’s why copyright mattered. Copyright only lasted 14 years, with the option to renew it for another 14, and its sole purpose was to break up the publishers’ monopoly. The idea that it was designed to create an artificial scarcity of ideas is an ahistorical conspiracy theory that you’ve dreamed up.

First of all, literacy rates were about 70% in 1710, so the average commoner could absolutely read (at least among men, but copyright law isn’t to blame for patriarchy). This is about 300 years after the printing press, literacy had gone up.

Second…I just don’t know what to say to this anymore. You’ve created a strawman artist who believes their work is entirely original, even though no artist would claim they had no influences. You’re pretending that copyright is an edict that says ideas can never be shared, as though the Public Domain, Creative Commons, and fair use didn’t exist, or Substantial Similarity didn’t have to be proved (which, by the way, is the reason that Hobbes isn’t infringing on Tigger). And worst of all, you’re acting like artists who want to be paid for their art are greedy capitalists, not artists that live under capitalism. How is an artist who wants make a living by creating art all day, every day, somehow less worthy than an artist who works 9 to 5 at a crappy job and then does art when they have free time?

You seem to think abolishing copyright will lead to some sort of artists’ uptopia, but it’s pretty much the opposite. Let’s say copyright disappeared tomorrow. First, anyone making a living on Patreon will basically be done. If their videos or podcasts are now public property, there’s nothing to stop anyone from uploading their Premium Content to YouTube within minutes of publishing, so no one’s going to subscribe. Some of them will keep producing things, but since they’ll need a new source of income, they’ll definitely produce less.

Then there’s the cooperations. They’ll gobble up everything they can. Sure, you’ll be able to make your own Spider-Man comics, but if any publisher likes them, they’ll just sell them, along with any original IP you have. Of course you’ll be able to sell them too, but since they can afford more advertising, higher quality printing, and merchandising, they’ll out-sell you easily. You’ll be lucky it anyone’s even seen or heard of your version, even though you’re the author. It’d be like trying to compete with Coca-Cola by opening a lemonade stand, and Coke is allowed to use your lemonade recipe.

I’m not saying copyright is being done well now; cooperations have an outsized ability to enforce copyright claims, they’ve manipulated the law to retain IP for an insane amount of time, and they have far more power in negotiations over licensing and rights than artists do. But your solution to that is, “What if artists had no rights? That would be better!” and I’ve just…I’ve run out of ways to react to that. It’s truly insane to me.

intellectual property, including copyright was created by and for monied interests.

It’s literally the opposite. The first copyright law was passed in 1709 in England to give authors rights to their works instead of publishing companies. The Stationers’ Company, a guild of publishers, had a monopoly over the printing industry, and they we’re deciding amongst themselves who would get to reproduce and publish books. They took the labor of authors, changed it however they saw fit, and reproduced them for profit. Authors never saw a dime, and instead had to find wealthy patrons to subsidize their work.

Yes, for the majority of human history, people used to create art with no expectation of ownership, but for the majority of human history, there weren’t methods to mass reproduce art. Owning the rights to your books didn’t matter when the only way a second could get made is if a monk decided to hand copy it and bind it himself. When the only way to reproduce your painting was to have someone create a forgery, ownership of the physical copy was all that really mattered. If the only way you could get paid for a song was to sing it at the local tavern, it didn’t really matter if you got writing credits.

We’ve already seen a world where the cooperations that control media production can use any work they want. They carved up artists’ works like mobsters dividing up a town and kept all the profits for themselves. Maybe if we lived in a post need, post currency society, you could make an argument for abolishing copyright, but in the system we have, copyright is the only protection artists have against cooperations.

Just gonna leave this 20 year old Brian Regan bit here.

I’ve run out of ways to tell you that’s not correct. The explicit purpose of the copyright law in the constitution is to allow creators to profit from their work. If you’re arguing that we should live in a pure communist society, where the products of all labor, including intellectual property, belong to community, fine, but we don’t live in a communist utopia. We live in a capitalist hellscape, and you’re looking at one of the only protections artists have, seeing how it’s been exploited by capitalism, and claiming the protection is the problem. It’s like looking at the minimum wage, seeing how cooperations have lobbied Congress to keep it so low it’s now starvation wage, and coming to the conclusion that the minimum wage needs to be abolished.

Right, but as I said to someone else in this thread, the fact thar copyright can’t protect 99% of creators is a problem with capitalism, not copyright. The fact that our courts favor the wealthy isn’t the fault of copyright law itself.

Also, you’re correct that most art is created for pleasure, not profit, but that doesn’t mean the need to protect artists’ rights to their creations isn’t necessary, even beyond capitalistic reasons. Bill Waterson, the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, refused to merchandise his art simply because he didn’t want to ruin the image of his characters for a licensing deal. Without copyright law, any company could have slapped his characters on t-shirts and coffee mugs to make a quick buck off of his labor. But because of copyright law, he was able to refuse his publisher’s attempts to franchise his characters (reportedly, he even turned down Spielberg and Lucas’ pitch for an animated series based on the strip).

I like Will Wheaton, but Weasley Crusher still sucks ass.

Well, I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree. To me, most of the updates have been set dressing, not significant changes to the formula or gameplay. But I guess that’s a matter of opinion, not fact.

First of all, no, publishers don’t necessarily own the copyright. Most authors do a licensing deal with a publisher, but they retain the copyright to their work. My understanding is that music industry contracts vary a lot more, since music is usually more collaborative, but lots of artists still own the rights to their songs. But even if that were true, artists being forced to sell their rights to cooperations isn’t an issue with copyright, it’s an issue with capitalism. It’s like blaming America’s shitty healthcare on doctors instead of a for-profit system controlled by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Literally everyone who’s ever written a book, recorded a song, painted a painting, or created any other artwork.

No, Copyright exists to protect creators. It’s just been perverted and abused by the wealthy so that they can indefinitely retain IP. Disney holding on to an IP for 70 years after an author dies is messed up, but Disney taking your art and selling it to a mass audience without giving you a dime is worse.

I agree with you almost entirely, but if we’re being honest, there really hasn’t been a lot of innovation in their games since Gen 4, and that was almost 20 years ago. Once they figured out the physical/special split, nothing really changed in the major mechanics. They have a new gimmick mechanic every game, like Z-Moves or Dynamax, but they’re always dropped by the next game. I guess camping/picnics are evolving into a new feature, but that’s about it.