Public school plays "The Lion King" to raise funds, Disney hits it with a bill for one-third of proceeds

Oh?    

except that people then say, “enslaving a minority is what is right!”

Obligatory link to John Tehranian’s Infringement Nation paper where he estimates that if the maximum statutory damages were applied, John (a law professor) commits somewhere in the realm of $7M worth of copyright infringement every day simply by doing things that nobody in their right mind would think was unlawful or immoral.

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long before the major shift to rent seeking and the decimation of the concept of owning things, this still wouldn’t have been a thing they could have done. I remember the first time I found out that each individual copy of a movie at a video rental store was 300 to 500 bucks each because they factor in the profit you gonna make with the renting of each tape.

The fact that “in class use” is usually considered to be covered by fair use may have added to the confusion.

This was a fundraising event for parents where they charged money to see the movie. Not a classroom exercise.

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When I was a young’un, there was this thing corporations strived for called “goodwill”. It was a sort of intangible capital that meant human beings had good feelings toward the corporate entity.
That was 50 years ago. I guess intangible capital just can’t be explained anymore (that, and most sectors are so concentrated that competition for customers is considered hilarious).

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“We’ll do the stealing of copyrighted material around here, thank you very much!”

Yes. Buying a DVD does not give you a license to rent it out and make money, or lend it out in any way that requires payment, or play it in a public venue. Where you got this idea is beyond me, as the packaging and pre-roll tells you this specifically.

Re: The Disney Day Care thing.

It wasn’t so much they used the mouse on the walls. The family that owned the place had the last name of “Disney”. Which was all fine and well until they tied badly drawn artwork of the mouse etc.
I really don’t see why this is an ‘outrage’…you can’t open up a “Disney” hotel on Orange Blossom Trail "oh yeah, we’ll stop there, it’s only 35 a night) and have the Dads beat off hustlers to get their cars (trust me I’ve been to OBT…and the Parliament house is really weird, and fantastic in it’s way)

As for Copy Right. Look about how Duncan lost the copy right to YoYo. They didn’t protect it and it fell into a common usage…Disney and their lawyers aren’t gonna risk that. As far as showing a movie…Disney did that all the time with FILM at my elementary school. They’d drag out the projector and play films for 25cent admission. Mostly Disney live action films. I got to run the projector sometimes. WOoo Hoo.

It very specifically does give you the right to do just that. See First Sale doctrine:

This copyright doctrine permits the purchaser of a legal copy of a copyrighted work to treat that copy in any way he or she desires, as long as the copyright owner’s exclusive copyright rights are not infringed. This means the copy can be destroyed, sold, given away, or rented.

A common example is the rental of movie videos, where the store purchasing the disks is entitled to rent them out without paying any royalties to the owner of the copyright rights in the movie. The term “first-sale doctrine” comes from the fact that the copyright owner maintains control over a specific copy only until it is first sold.

So who’s the asshole parent who reported them?

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Nah. Way too much exertion. We just get up early and cover every surface with tasteful yet hard-wearing pool towels. Where do you think the word bedeck comes from?

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I’ve made the bulk of my income working with large churches as a technology consultant for the past decade. Churches have been sued. I’m on vacation so I don’t have the citations handy. Usually only big ones but it does happen across the board. I’m small it’ll never happen to me is wishful thinking. As you point out that small licensing fee pales in comparison to what just one hour of lawyer time will cost you. Smart organizations make great efforts to pay their licensing fees, especially the ones broadcasting on the Internet. Churches are pretty famous for thinking they should get for free what everyone else pays for though. Most non-profits fit that mold though, faith really has very little to do with it. God forbid people get paid for their work.

I thought I first heard the story in the late 1970s, but my memory may be faulty. I’m glad there’s a verified version of the story. Thanks for sharing that link.

Actually, it does. It doesn’t give you a right to public performance, but buying a physical copy of movie does give you the right to rent the movie or loan it out. That’s why libraries exist. That’s why used CD stores existed. That’s why VHS video stores existed. All because of the doctrine of first sale which lets you do what you want with the physical copy.

The movie studios sued, demanding royalties, and lost. So instead they introduced very high pricing for home movies pricing them at prices prohibitive for consumer purchase, such as $90 a copy, but low enough that video rental stores would pay the price. They later introduced pricing windows and the price would come down after initial release to lower prices suitable for consumer pricing.

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My guess is that another parent grew up as part of the Disney “family” (parents worked there – rumor is that there is a bounty in reporting these infractions).

I worked as a teacher in Garden Grove USD and we were explicitly told never to show ANY Disney or Buena Vista movies because children may relate this to parents who work at Disneyland. As a matter of fact, we were told all movies should be broken up over four or more days for two reasons: movie viewing cuts into instructional minutes and watching an entire movie in one or two days will run afoul of copyright infringement.

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Kind of hard to watch a film in 45 minute segments anyway.

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Personally, I’ve always thought it to be enormously derivative of Bambi, but I accept that I am in the minority.

That’s a trademark, not a copyright. (Every time Nintendo shuts down a fan project some people pipe up saying “They have to do this or suddenly everyone will get to legally make Mario games!” But copyright does not work that way.)

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Nintendo hacked trademark law…

While it’s not feasible to prevent an unlicensed developer from releasing a game for your system, it is legal to prevent people from reproducing your copyrighted works. So Nintendo put two and two together: they decided to force a game to contain the code for the Nintendo logo image in order for the Gameboy to boot it! Quite genius I’d say. (As a side note, SEGA did the same basic idea for the Genesis. It eventually went to court and SEGA lost.)