BrianDavion wrote:I can't belive anyone is defending this as MORALLY justified. is it legally doable? obviously, and big companies are famously amoral (if not outright imoral) but to claim this is "ok"....? jesus...
I didn't see anyone argue this is morally justified. It's not a moral issue.
Creative royalties are an obligation between a publisher and a creator. If a publisher goes bankrupt and someone acquires their catalog, royalties do not always survive. Publishers might have a good reason for continuing to pay royalties or they might not. There's reasons for discontinuing royalties.
The first being the previous owners went out of business and ran the property into the ground. If someone wants to revive it, they may not want to pay royalties for the right to make something popular again. Especially when the publisher and the creator are one in the same.
A good example of this is Charlton Comics, who went out of business in the 80s. They did American superhero comics along with pulp fiction. Bought out by
DC who stuck some of their characters into the regular
DC universe. There was no market for the characters, their books simply lost their appeal. The original publisher lacked the vision and insight to keep it going.
Steve Ditko, the creator of most of the Charlton characters, did an interview when Alan Moore was doing the Watchmen. He sounded satisfied with how they made their way to the
DC universe and thought Moore's take on them was interesting. The conversation didn't cover the topic of royalties, but he certainly was not screaming at
DC over them. He sounded happy the characters survived and were not forgotten.
Would it have been right to make
DC pay to re-popularize Captain Atom and Blue Beetle after Charlton ran their commercial value into the ground? Probably not.
DC used the popularity of its own characters to build Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, etc back up. In the 80s, you could put anyone next to Superman and people would instantly think they were better.
DC might not have had a reason to do that if they had to pay the original creator each time those characters appear on the page.
So I don't know, there's nothing black and white about the situation. It's that attitude, in fact, that will probably kill royalties forever. In the ADF situation, we are assuming Disney did something nefarious in determining there's no reason to continue paying royalties. That's a big assumption and there could be very good reasons why this is happening.
Here's one I was thinking about the other day. Completely theoretical, probably not based in reality.
Let's say you buy a publisher and get the rights to all the works by a specific author. There's a royalty deal in place, but you never actually print any of his books. You don't buy out the author, you just keep the deal in place without publishing anything new. Instead, you train an AI model to generate texts based on his and other author's works. The AI is doing the work, coming up with the plot, the characters, the narrative structure, etc. But there's something about the tone that reminds the reader of their favorite author.
Nothing done by the AI is actually written by the author, just a reasonable facsimile mixed in with thousands of others with a similar appeal. Do you owe that pool of authors royalties for the products of the AI as a transformative work, even though the only characteristic that's being copied is the tone of his previous works?
If you're Disney and you are (theoreticlly) currently working with a bunch of AI startups in South Korea on generative text projects trained on the works of 20th century science fiction authors, you might be terminating their royalty contracts without notice. Because you know laws around intellectual property are historically out of sync with technology and tend to overcorrect in ways that stymie innovation and unjustly enrich estates that had nothing to do with the production of the original work.
It's that part, the unjust enrichment, that seems morally wrong to me. Don't get me wrong, publishers and creator estates can be just as bad. All it takes is one person with a bad attitude to stop a deal from going forward and the only solution is usually money.
