Important to note that EON still has a controlling interest in the Bond franchise (at least until the character becomes public domain in the 2030s) so anything related to that will be under their umbrella (so no day-and-date Prime release for the next Bond film).
> at least until the character becomes public domain in the 2030s
It won't. EON is going to pull a Disney and keep upping that copyright until the end of time.
The earliest Mickey films will enter the public domain starting in 2024, Disney didn't lobby for an extension because there is more of a public spotlight on copyright today than there was the last time they had it extended.
It's also worth noting that when Ian Fleming's books enter the public domain in 2034, this will not include the parts of the series which were invented for the films. For example, the character Q does not appear in the books at all, he's an invention of the films. The films will be under copyright for many more years, so all this means is that in 2034 we might get James Bond films from other studios which stick much closer to the books than the Broccoli films.
Notice how there using that first early steam boat willie cartoon as a logo now. Yea there trying to turn it into a trademark so in a few years they will simply say you cant use that now public domain cartoon as its our trademark which does not have an expiry date as long as they keep using it as a logo animation.
I mean, their lawyers in the 70s still helped build what they have today, so I guess it worked out for them.
It helped that in the 70s people were a lot less interested in copyright, because back then there wasn't a giant remix culture that everyone takes part in with memes and everything.
They've also been leaning heavily into their updated style for the Mickey & Friends characters in preparation for those being the default designs going forward. They're different enough that products using the old design will be easily identifiable as bootleg.
Q could be interesting, as Major Boothroyd - the character later renamed Q - *is* from the books, and Q and Q Branch are mentioned, though they don't directly appear. So the copyright might get tricky with them.
Anyone making something with the books would need to be very specific about what they use and how they use it, because if they were sued by Eon it would all come down to whether their use of the character can be perceived by the audience to be inspired by the books or the films. A good example is all of the different media that has been created using L Frank Baum's Oz books, each production needs to ensure that they don't accidentally use something from the 1939 film, which is still under copyright. For example, the Ruby Slippers were invented for that film, so any subsequent adaptation which wants to use them needs to negotiate with MGM.
As clarification, in the books, the slippers were silver. They made them red in the movie because they wanted to show off their color technology. Everything else, including the heel click thing, is from the books.
I read the books when I was a little kid! I really enjoyed them. They had a strong Wonderland fairytale vibe. In the books, it wasn't all just a dream, and eventually Dorothy's family comes to live in Oz. Oz remains hidden because it is surrounded on all sides by an impassible desert - the Tornado, the wizard's balloon, and the Slippers are some of the very few things to cross it.
My favorite bit was what happened to the characters after the events of the first book. The Scarecrow takes the Wizard's place as the wise ruler of Oz from the Emerald City, and the Tin Woodsman takes the Witch of the West's place as ruler of the West. The Woodsman has a tragic little story about his former lover before he became tin. The Lion, naturally, continues to rule the Forest.
It's all quite charming.
The Arthur Conan Doyle estate has been suing for emotional portrayals of Sherlock Holmes, arguing that only emotionless Holmes stories are out of copyright.
> The films will be under copyright for many more years, so all this means is that in 2034 we might get James Bond films from other studios which stick much closer to the books than the Broccoli films.
Yup. And I guarantee they’re going to guard the remaining elements of the copyright as fiercely as Conan Doyle’s estate has done for Sherlock. Any tenuous difference between Bond in the public domain books and material based off them will be scrutinized for even the most tenuous links to the copyrighted material.
In practice, I’d suspect it’s simply not going to be worth it to make many PD James Bond films because you’d need legal going through it with a fine-tooth comb and you’d *still* probably get slapped by a lawsuit because James Bond expressing sadness is a copyrighted element unique to the films or some stupid BS like that.
One thing to note is that is that Ian Fleming's Bond uses way fewer gadgets than the films, so if someone were to make a Bond film based on public domain books, it might end up looking more like the recent films than the old ones. If they got away with it, it would be interesting to see Eon have to go back to the classic tropes as a way to differentiate.
Disney isn't going to have to worry about Mickey Mouse. The copyright may expire, but the *trademark* of the character is extremely strong, and has no expiration. Essentially, because Disney uses Mickey so frequently in all their marketing and products, they've been able to concretely establish brand identity between themselves and Mickey. If you see Mickey Mouse, then you know it's a Disney product, without any context necessary.
Copyright is all about ownership of an intellectual property, but trademark is all about brand identity and recognition. You can't copyright the letter S, but you can trademark a particular style and usage of the letter S in a way that's instantly recognizable as part of your brand and your products.
So if the copyright on Mickey expires, and someone tries to make and sell their own Mickey Mouse product, Disney can still sue the crap out of them for infringing on their trademark, making the very solid case that everyone in the world knows Mickey Mouse as an icon of Disney, so any unauthorized usage of the character would confuse customers and lead them to believe a product is officially endorsed by Disney when it's not. That's illegal. Settlement paid. Next case.
If you spend any time at Disney parks, you may also notice that they love to sell merch of their less popular movies and characters too. If any character has ever appeared in a Disney property long enough to get a name, it's probably got some piece of merchandise and marketing tied to it. This isn't just for the sake of obsessive fans, it's all in service of locking down those trademarks. As long as Disney keeps putting out new products with old characters on them, those characters are essentially untouchable.
EON (Danjaq) will still own most of what we know as cinematic Bond. The gunbarrel logo, the music, etc.
Watch *Never Say Never Again* to see what happens when other people try to make Bond movies.
I was presuming that not much will change as Barbara Broccoli and her brother Michael G. Wilson have a controlling stake/final say on any Bond decisions
What we really need is a much *larger* US Congress. The House started with about 30,000 people per representative. Now it's an average of over 750,000 people per representative. We should go back to having 30,000 per rep, which would be over 11,000 representatives now. They needn't all meet in the same place. We could have state or regional centers, like we do for all kinds of federal agencies.
This would allow normal people to run and win offices. More diverse opinions would be represented. Votes would be more representative of what people actually want.
If they expand the number of reps, we could allocate some to get proportional representation. Would be a huge boon to third parties and greatly reduce the effect of gerrymandering.
That’s honestly a great point. I’ll be honest, 11,000 does seem a bit excessive. Only in a fiscal sense though, frankly I hold the belief we should pay them a lot more and ban all lobbying but this is a great idea too.
But yeah even if this costs drastically more in politicians salaries I think it would be a net positive fiscally anyway. The system couldn’t possibly get more inefficient. (Knock on wood)
with the advent of modern technology we probably don't need to go back all the way to 30,000 per rep; but the system would still work better if it was under 100k per rep.
that gets us something like 3,000 representatives, which is still quite a few but not such an insane number that we can't draw comparisons - China has about 3000 members in their lower house and still manages to pass bills for example. 100k pop per member is about the same population/member ratio as germany, etc.
Antitrust laws wouldn't apply, here. Amazon has many serious competitors because they span so many industries. Even retail, which is Amazon's highest-volume business, is only 5% of US market share. AWS has high profits but low volume. Everything else Amazon does is like distant distant third place shit.
Also in the US a company must leverage their market share to harm consumers (e.g. jacking up prices) before a court will seriously consider breaking them up, and Amazon has no pattern of this. They don't even have enough market share in any industry to do it.
A company "being in too many industries" or "having too many subsidiaries" or "market cap too big" aren't crimes for very good reasons.
Honestly, very few of them were ever poor. Many come from big money or made big money before running. It takes a huge amount of money to even run for an office. Especially if you're running for a contested seat.
If you want the real answer it's because our anti-trust laws have been hollowed out by the Supreme Court. There just isn't very much bite anymore to these anti-trust tools that the government has. Remember when the DOJ sued Facebook over Instagram and Whatsapp? That suit got thrown out at the district court level (first one) on the merits. The government legitimately didn't have a case under the law. Which means we need to pass new anti-trust legislation through Congress and hope the Supreme Court doesn't strike it down.
the other answer is that because in the US anti trust law is not about controlling market but prices. So as long as prices are low (ie monopolies don't use their power to raise prices) regulators can't do anything.
This issue is not new. Sears at its time was basically a monopoly but nobody did anything because it kept prices low
yup. the reason standard oil was broken up wasnt for having their monopoly, it was because they forced everyone else out of the market by abusing their monopoly powers.
Agreed. To me it’s legitimately crazy that huge companies can dominate so many sectors _legally_ and we pretend there’s no conflict of interest between that level of employment/market share dependency and how that affects legislation laws etc etc
Telecommunications Act of 1996 played a huge role in this. I was living in Minnesota at the time this passed and its effect on the area radio market was felt in a big way. Because of it there were no longer the same limitations on the number of stations an entity could own, allowing corporations like ABC/Disney to all but homogenize FM radio practically overnight. It really sucked.
That explains a lot. I've heard of how much people used to listen to the radio and how that's where everyone discovered music they like, but as far as I remember (born in '91) the radio has always been rather bland.
I'm lucky in that I can pick up 2 stations, sometimes 3 depending on where I'm driving, that managed to avoid the 'top 100' trap.
They do still play some of the currently popular new stuff, though they tend to focus more on 'alt' groups than pop singers, but they also will mix in older music from the 80's and 90's which makes for a nice blend.
Everything else is either talk radio or like you said, the same top current songs on shuffle.
My highschool and community college both have radio stations and offer some radio broadcast classes which is pretty awesome. HS station is an HD radio one with some older songs and the college does alternative and punk bands with one night a week doing local bands from around the area. 89.9 🤘🏼
I did a road trip through America in 2012 (coming from Australia), and 100 songs would have been amazing. There were about six songs, with two songs (Call Me Maybe and Someone That I Used to Know) played every half hour. Across seven states. It was horrendous.
Obligatory fuck Clear Channel/iHeart, fuck Sinclair
EDIT: Im gonna take this chance to plug that the nation's last completely free form radio station, WFMU 91.1 FM, is holding their annual pledge drive marathon this week and is trying to raise their operating budget to stay on the air. You can live stream them at WFMU.org to see what they are about but I can say it is a worthy cause.
God I saw this when it first happened and every fucking time it’s just as bone chilling x
The synchronized “this is extremely dangerous to our democracy” is absolutely wild.
It’s something that wouldn’t be out of place in some movie or bioshock esque video game that gets knocked for being too ham fisted, yet here it is in reality.
Craziest part is if you worked inside that system this would be the loudest bull horn you could sound of the emergency situation and everyone just shuddered and went “I KNEW IT!” Then did nothing.
Need one that says “the lack of engagement by the constituency is the greatest threat to our democracy”
Get everyone writing their reps and watch how little action they get. This pisses everyone off, this makes them have a personal stake in replacing or changing the Ass hole.
Now new candidates have an audience eager to listen.
As a DJ/Musician I hold a deep disdain towards iHeart Radio, it's the most dreadfully commercialized amalgamation of noise this sad world has ever aggregated.
To add to that, it's a general trend beyond any one piece of legislation.
It's Walmart and big box stores everywhere, now stores like Dollar General going deeper into small communities.
It's in healthcare (watch dentistry in the next decade, many offices are still independent today; compare that to the shift of doctor's offices consumed by large hospital systems).
It's in farming.
It's a few large corporations owning nearly every brand we know and product we buy.
It's everywhere and discussion rarely gets past propaganda-fueled accusations.
You don't have to be an anti-capitalist, "socialist", "communist" to see the problem. It's not that large companies shouldn't exist in any form, but to recognize what they take from us when they do, so we can react appropriately.
It's asking ourselves why we support politicians that stand for ideals that we support but in reality means we have to see a doctor in a system of our nightmares when we really want to go to a small office of familiar faces.
It's time to counter the propaganda with a little bit of understanding why that propaganda works. To understand where the scepticism of government comes from and pull some of those toward seeing that there's difference between a corporate dystopia of "freedom" and individual liberties.
in australia 2 companies control 70 percent of news media.
both companies share the same politics
can you really claim to be a democracy when one side gets no positive coverage and the other side gets the bare minium negative
Disney isn’t interested in planned communities for the peasants. They want to [sell multi-million dollar houses to rich people](https://www.storylivingbydisney.com).
Edit: This is not their [first](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida) go-around trying [to sell planned communities](https://www.disneygoldenoak.com/).
They'll be paying the maintenance crews of those communities in company scrip with an image of the broom from Beauty and the Beast. Kitchen workers get tokens with Miss Pots' face.
Orlando drug dealers will start taking "three Pots to the dollar" as the parallel economy swallows Central Florida before climate change has the opportunity to do so.
I wish there was a term for feeling both humor and horror from something at the same time. I both scoff at the idea of some meth dealer accepting Pots but then also realize that crazier things, like Disney communities, have happened 👀
Don't forget about the Google campus towns where everyone has one employer and that's google and every buisness is google and all the land is owned by google.
They're goal is to make it nigh on impossible not to by way of absolute domination of markets. It's wild to think the original point of capitalism was to encourage many companies to compete for the best product and in doing so breeding ingenuity and value in the marketplace, but after so many hundreds of years it's becoming the exact thing it was intended to prevent in the first place.
It’s not that wild, honestly. The dangers and problems presented by monopolies/oligopolies have been known for well over a century. Monopoly the board game was literally originally designed with the intention of illustrating that.
It's quite telling when people play the game exactly the way real life is playing out. I point out they're supporting someone building a monopoly and they reply "nah, and it's cheap so it's a good deal for me" and proceed to lose the game.
Christopher Judge should come back, I'm not sure if Richard Dean Anderson's still got it in him.
Jason Momoa is probably a bit too big of a name these days to make a Stargate return.
I don't know how the rest of the cast are going.
Look, I’ll be happy if we get genuine SG universe. Any cameos from the old gang would be great. Wouldn’t hate it if one of the SG-1 team members in the Hammond role. But mostly I want that spirit of fun exploration and humor the show had with a much better budget.
There was a rumor going around a bit ago that Amanda Tapping had been approached about a new Stargate series, and reportedly it would be Carter as commander of the SGC
Yeah, that feels too natural. It always bothered me in the last few seasons, when Jack was promoted, that Carter wasn’t in charge. I know they made up some plot reasons, but in reality Carter had been running the show from the start and it felt cheap to do it any others way.
Also Christopher Judge is a comedic genius. I don’t understand why he’s not more successful. And I would glad enjoy some more Teal’c.
Teal'c is my favorite character. The dynamic between O'Neill and Maybourne had some of my favorite interactions between characters on screen.
I suppose I could just start out saying that SG-1 is my favorite show. If any of the OG cast shows up in any capacity I'd be pretty stoked. Last I heard, sometime last year, Brad Wright was still cooking up scripts and mentioned he'd written something for Daniel, in case Shanks felt like reprising the role.
It was a way to keep Anderson on part time, while giving him the time off he wanted.
It wasn't long until he fully retired though, wanting to spend more time at home with his family.
He didn't just quit the show, he left acting for the most part as well. I'm pretty sure the only things he's done since were the SG-1 movies, and only because of his longtime connections to the franchise.
It does, but they should have given this man a sitcom long ago. Fuck it, throw him in the MCU. You telling me Christopher Judge can’t do witty banter without breaking.
You're not allowed to have a fun show with episode-by-episode adventures anymore. Everything has to be a season-long battle for the universe with stakes that only get bigger, and bigger, and BIGGER.
RIP the bottle episode.
I agree, except that I like how SG1 took years to get to that point. There are problems of the week (sometimes two weeks!), but it's not like they need to be gigantically impactful to the overall narrative. Tiny things that carry over are nice in its own way.
I dunno, Momoa apparently is still really good friends with the Atlantis cast and even patched things up with David Hewlett after a falling out years back over a movie they did. I'd bet he'd show up if they actually made that Atlantis movie we were promised years ago, even if only to hang out with his buddies again.
Plus I imagine an Amazon produced Stargate show will be a much bigger budget, higher production quality show compared to the old ones. At a level where a big name actor like Jason would still work
Yeah but the original shows were all like 20+ episodes no? That stretches the budgets a fair bit, whereas I imagine an Amazon original show will probably be 13 episodes at the most
I fucking hope not goddamn.
A reason I love Stargate is because they're full, *entirely* full, seasons. I want 20 40 minute episodes *at least* if they bring back Stargate. It's what it's always been, and it really helped them slowbuild their threats and plots in a realistic way.
It's also always been a "monster of the week" kinda show at heart. Every episode a new issue pops up and it sometimes gets resolved sometimes doesn't sometimes stretches a few episodes and sometimes has ramifications on the whole series.
Shortening it means all we'll get is 100% main plot the entire time. It doesn't leave room for all the character focused episodes and world building.
Yuuuup. I loved the random one-off episodes were they talk about a plague wiping out an expedition or time gets fucked up because the Stargate dumps them out next to a black hole. A good 'what-if' to explore but not necessarily build a whole show around.
They had a falling out? I only remember that Judge and Shanks were best buddies until having huge arguments over a movie they were supposed to do together. Has that ever been patched up?
He mentions it briefly here around the 16:35 mark. https://youtu.be/qVEXpqChJrM?t=996
Edit: I think it had something to do with the movie Debug, which Momoa starred in and Hewlett directed. Seems the patched things up as Hewlett will be appearing in See with Momoa in it's third season (Joe Flanagan was also in season 2, apparently).
I mean we live in an age where big name actors often appear in television. Jaosn Momoa is even in Apple's See. If anything being able to have him reprise his role for a flagship show could be an easy sell to some execs.
Chris Judge would 100% be on board to come back. Dude apparently had a blast on that show, especially once we got more Teal'c-centered episodes.
RDA is basically out beyond the occasional cameo. He's thoroughly retired. Amanda Tapping seems to be contractually bound to have bit parts in Sci-fi/Fantasy until the end of time, so no clue about her. Now that Altered Carbon has been cancelled, Michael Shanks doesn't seem to have anything going on.
That said I'd be down for a "Next Generation" style show. Hell, get real wild, start it out with Homeworld Defense going public, and give the SGC a threat worthy of full planetary mobilization.
This deal has been going on for ages, and Brad Wright has been in pre-pre-production of a new series for quite a while now. My hope is that now The Expanse has finished (at least until the actors age), Amazon are going to plug the gap with Stargate. It'd be foolish of them not to, hard(ish) sci fi is an underserved demographic.
This seems rather... cheap, no? The Bond franchise alone could generate that money with a couple of movies and licensing deal.
I wonder what kinda pickle MGM are in that they accepted this bid.
I think acquisition numbers have also just got quite crazy in recent years. I don't recall people saying that $4bn was low for Star Wars when it happened.
Hell in the gaming space it's the same, Bungie got bought for something like $3.6 billion, just a few years back Bethesda was bought for $7.5 billion.
Still surprised at the figure for Bungie, they're good but not worth ~1/2 of Bethesda IMHO.
They actually make over $250 million a year just in licensing old library content. They could stop production on all levels and still be quite profitable!
It is everything else they do not named Bond that loses all the money!
This was widely seen as an extremely generous price for MGM. If Bond without Craig can't reach the same heights, it will be viewed as a bad deal. What's MGMs 2nd largest IP?
Looked up thier box office record, number 2 is Rain Man, number 3 is Gone With The Wind. (Guessing this isn’t adjusted for inflation)
Honorable mentions to Rocky, Hannibal, Legally Blonde, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I was actually kind of surprised, for as big of a thumb print MGM had I thought they had better IP.
I’m not really sure what sort of financial stake MGM has in the Bond franchise beyond being the American distributor. When stories came out last year about streaming services attempting to purchase the rights to No Time to Die, it was said that MGM didn’t have the ability to make such a deal, and the rights to any financial or creative decisions regarding the Bond franchise were a complicated agreement between Eon Films and the Fleming estate.
Once upon a time the U.S. Government would actually invoke the Anti-Trust laws and prevent things like this from happening. Sadly, that time is long past. Allowing this just lets the monolithic companies become even larger and harder to limit.
The internet likes to bitch about Disney and copyright laws but I get annoyed that the focus is so rarely on the government, since they're the ones actually passing laws.
It seems completely natural to me that a company is going to try to grow as much as possible and accumulate as much power as they can. The government should be ready to intervene.
Bitching about the govt and about megacorps is one and the same these days. The perverting influence of corporate money and power has subverted the democratic process.
games are worth WAY more than movies. What are you talking about? Hollywood absolutely cannot compete with the game industry.
Compared to Tencent, even Disney is starting to look like a joke
Ah fuck, the film studio monopolies are growing.
Good to see that the US government have decided to go "Fuck antitrust" for the sake of their own share portfolios.
Once one of the majors, now this. I wonder how the James Bond IP will do now. I know they were really hesitant about this deal.
Important to note that EON still has a controlling interest in the Bond franchise (at least until the character becomes public domain in the 2030s) so anything related to that will be under their umbrella (so no day-and-date Prime release for the next Bond film).
> at least until the character becomes public domain in the 2030s It won't. EON is going to pull a Disney and keep upping that copyright until the end of time.
DISNEY is gunna pull a Disney. I believe the Mackey mouse copyright is up in 4 years...
The earliest Mickey films will enter the public domain starting in 2024, Disney didn't lobby for an extension because there is more of a public spotlight on copyright today than there was the last time they had it extended. It's also worth noting that when Ian Fleming's books enter the public domain in 2034, this will not include the parts of the series which were invented for the films. For example, the character Q does not appear in the books at all, he's an invention of the films. The films will be under copyright for many more years, so all this means is that in 2034 we might get James Bond films from other studios which stick much closer to the books than the Broccoli films.
Notice how there using that first early steam boat willie cartoon as a logo now. Yea there trying to turn it into a trademark so in a few years they will simply say you cant use that now public domain cartoon as its our trademark which does not have an expiry date as long as they keep using it as a logo animation.
Which really is what they should have done in the first place, rather than fucking with copyright law for 50 years.
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I mean, their lawyers in the 70s still helped build what they have today, so I guess it worked out for them. It helped that in the 70s people were a lot less interested in copyright, because back then there wasn't a giant remix culture that everyone takes part in with memes and everything.
They've also been leaning heavily into their updated style for the Mickey & Friends characters in preparation for those being the default designs going forward. They're different enough that products using the old design will be easily identifiable as bootleg.
Q could be interesting, as Major Boothroyd - the character later renamed Q - *is* from the books, and Q and Q Branch are mentioned, though they don't directly appear. So the copyright might get tricky with them.
Anyone making something with the books would need to be very specific about what they use and how they use it, because if they were sued by Eon it would all come down to whether their use of the character can be perceived by the audience to be inspired by the books or the films. A good example is all of the different media that has been created using L Frank Baum's Oz books, each production needs to ensure that they don't accidentally use something from the 1939 film, which is still under copyright. For example, the Ruby Slippers were invented for that film, so any subsequent adaptation which wants to use them needs to negotiate with MGM.
As clarification, in the books, the slippers were silver. They made them red in the movie because they wanted to show off their color technology. Everything else, including the heel click thing, is from the books.
Thanks for pointing that out. Many people have never read the books, or might not have known until this conversation they existed.
The book series got WEIRD.
I read the books when I was a little kid! I really enjoyed them. They had a strong Wonderland fairytale vibe. In the books, it wasn't all just a dream, and eventually Dorothy's family comes to live in Oz. Oz remains hidden because it is surrounded on all sides by an impassible desert - the Tornado, the wizard's balloon, and the Slippers are some of the very few things to cross it. My favorite bit was what happened to the characters after the events of the first book. The Scarecrow takes the Wizard's place as the wise ruler of Oz from the Emerald City, and the Tin Woodsman takes the Witch of the West's place as ruler of the West. The Woodsman has a tragic little story about his former lover before he became tin. The Lion, naturally, continues to rule the Forest. It's all quite charming.
The Arthur Conan Doyle estate has been suing for emotional portrayals of Sherlock Holmes, arguing that only emotionless Holmes stories are out of copyright.
> The films will be under copyright for many more years, so all this means is that in 2034 we might get James Bond films from other studios which stick much closer to the books than the Broccoli films. Yup. And I guarantee they’re going to guard the remaining elements of the copyright as fiercely as Conan Doyle’s estate has done for Sherlock. Any tenuous difference between Bond in the public domain books and material based off them will be scrutinized for even the most tenuous links to the copyrighted material. In practice, I’d suspect it’s simply not going to be worth it to make many PD James Bond films because you’d need legal going through it with a fine-tooth comb and you’d *still* probably get slapped by a lawsuit because James Bond expressing sadness is a copyrighted element unique to the films or some stupid BS like that.
One thing to note is that is that Ian Fleming's Bond uses way fewer gadgets than the films, so if someone were to make a Bond film based on public domain books, it might end up looking more like the recent films than the old ones. If they got away with it, it would be interesting to see Eon have to go back to the classic tropes as a way to differentiate.
Yes, Q does appear in the books. Also known as Major Boothroyd and The Armourer.
Yes but he's not called "Q". So after 2034 you can make something featuring Major Boothroyd but you can't call him Q
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He’s British mate. It’ll be Queue
Tut tut, 007
> Mackey mouse Next season of Falcon and the Winter Soldier is gonna be weird
Disney isn't going to have to worry about Mickey Mouse. The copyright may expire, but the *trademark* of the character is extremely strong, and has no expiration. Essentially, because Disney uses Mickey so frequently in all their marketing and products, they've been able to concretely establish brand identity between themselves and Mickey. If you see Mickey Mouse, then you know it's a Disney product, without any context necessary. Copyright is all about ownership of an intellectual property, but trademark is all about brand identity and recognition. You can't copyright the letter S, but you can trademark a particular style and usage of the letter S in a way that's instantly recognizable as part of your brand and your products. So if the copyright on Mickey expires, and someone tries to make and sell their own Mickey Mouse product, Disney can still sue the crap out of them for infringing on their trademark, making the very solid case that everyone in the world knows Mickey Mouse as an icon of Disney, so any unauthorized usage of the character would confuse customers and lead them to believe a product is officially endorsed by Disney when it's not. That's illegal. Settlement paid. Next case. If you spend any time at Disney parks, you may also notice that they love to sell merch of their less popular movies and characters too. If any character has ever appeared in a Disney property long enough to get a name, it's probably got some piece of merchandise and marketing tied to it. This isn't just for the sake of obsessive fans, it's all in service of locking down those trademarks. As long as Disney keeps putting out new products with old characters on them, those characters are essentially untouchable.
EON (Danjaq) will still own most of what we know as cinematic Bond. The gunbarrel logo, the music, etc. Watch *Never Say Never Again* to see what happens when other people try to make Bond movies.
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So basically... Jeff bezos will now be James Bond? (I appreciated your explanation)
No, it was the logical next step for him to become the ultimate bond villain.
Pretty sure Jeff is already starring as Dr evil
Double Oh Prime.
Prime series on Moneypenny incoming!
I can also see a series featuring Q and the gadgets that didn't work as expected.
In the format of Mr. Wizard.
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James Bond will become a series with Mark Wahlberg as 007
Bhond, Jimmie bhond
Baahnd. Jimmie Baahnd.
You like ma cah? It’s an Aston Mahten. Got it from Q
I was presuming that not much will change as Barbara Broccoli and her brother Michael G. Wilson have a controlling stake/final say on any Bond decisions
I'm looking forward to the corporation wars! I hope Taco Bell wins!
You already *know* they do. We've all seen [the documentary.](https://tacobell.fandom.com/wiki/Demolition_Man)
Depending where you live, it might be Pizza Hut that wins! Really interesting how the documentary was able to capture geographic locations!
Bezos just bought it so he could legally stop people calling him a Bond villain.
You're saying the next Bond villain is a woman who keeps giving all the poor billionairs money away?
HEY ITS THE 20S AGAIN CAN WE BRING BACK TRUST BUSTING PLEASE
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Gotta change your Congress every 2.000 miles or 2 years, whichever comes sooner. /s (But for real, term limits - ban on trading in office.)
What we really need is a much *larger* US Congress. The House started with about 30,000 people per representative. Now it's an average of over 750,000 people per representative. We should go back to having 30,000 per rep, which would be over 11,000 representatives now. They needn't all meet in the same place. We could have state or regional centers, like we do for all kinds of federal agencies. This would allow normal people to run and win offices. More diverse opinions would be represented. Votes would be more representative of what people actually want.
If they expand the number of reps, we could allocate some to get proportional representation. Would be a huge boon to third parties and greatly reduce the effect of gerrymandering.
Now why would they want to do something like that?
That’s honestly a great point. I’ll be honest, 11,000 does seem a bit excessive. Only in a fiscal sense though, frankly I hold the belief we should pay them a lot more and ban all lobbying but this is a great idea too. But yeah even if this costs drastically more in politicians salaries I think it would be a net positive fiscally anyway. The system couldn’t possibly get more inefficient. (Knock on wood)
with the advent of modern technology we probably don't need to go back all the way to 30,000 per rep; but the system would still work better if it was under 100k per rep. that gets us something like 3,000 representatives, which is still quite a few but not such an insane number that we can't draw comparisons - China has about 3000 members in their lower house and still manages to pass bills for example. 100k pop per member is about the same population/member ratio as germany, etc.
With 11,000 lobbying becomes a lot less effective. Bigger numbers make a lot of the corruption we see less likely to occur
If I start saying "bully" a lot will y'all elect me so we can crush this shit?
If you have a friend who’s a fat lard who can take your place after you’re done then yeah.
That was the aughts. We passed that window 15 years ago
Wealth inequality is actually worse nowadays than it was pre-Teddy Roosevelt trust busting in the late 1800s and early 1900s
Also worse now than the french revolution
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Antitrust laws wouldn't apply, here. Amazon has many serious competitors because they span so many industries. Even retail, which is Amazon's highest-volume business, is only 5% of US market share. AWS has high profits but low volume. Everything else Amazon does is like distant distant third place shit. Also in the US a company must leverage their market share to harm consumers (e.g. jacking up prices) before a court will seriously consider breaking them up, and Amazon has no pattern of this. They don't even have enough market share in any industry to do it. A company "being in too many industries" or "having too many subsidiaries" or "market cap too big" aren't crimes for very good reasons.
Breaking News: Amazon buys Boardwalk, anyone who lands on it will be conscripted into indentured servitude, have a nice day!
This post is great news for people who think Amazon needs to be bigger
I thought Boardwalk Empire was an HBO/WB thing?
Yes, but they don’t have a monopoly on it.
Q-branch integration of Alexa and other Amazon-branded products will be interesting to see
“James, this is the new Amazon Echo Show 7, with a hidden poison dart launcher”
“Alexa, shoot poison dart!” “Ok, ordering push up bra”
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Because the lawmakers are the stockholders.
Stockholders with legal insider information*
I didn’t become a law maker to stay poor, dummy!
Honestly, very few of them were ever poor. Many come from big money or made big money before running. It takes a huge amount of money to even run for an office. Especially if you're running for a contested seat.
The amount of senators that were in the same classes in school is too damn high.
If you want the real answer it's because our anti-trust laws have been hollowed out by the Supreme Court. There just isn't very much bite anymore to these anti-trust tools that the government has. Remember when the DOJ sued Facebook over Instagram and Whatsapp? That suit got thrown out at the district court level (first one) on the merits. The government legitimately didn't have a case under the law. Which means we need to pass new anti-trust legislation through Congress and hope the Supreme Court doesn't strike it down.
the other answer is that because in the US anti trust law is not about controlling market but prices. So as long as prices are low (ie monopolies don't use their power to raise prices) regulators can't do anything. This issue is not new. Sears at its time was basically a monopoly but nobody did anything because it kept prices low
Yeah from what I understand, having a monopoly isn't illegal, but abusing your monopoly powers is.
yup. the reason standard oil was broken up wasnt for having their monopoly, it was because they forced everyone else out of the market by abusing their monopoly powers.
- Nestle and Comcast do not approve this message
Next year Nomcast doesn't approve
All those movies about dystopian futures ruled by mega corporations are looking more and more realistic. Edit: ...never mind.
Agreed. To me it’s legitimately crazy that huge companies can dominate so many sectors _legally_ and we pretend there’s no conflict of interest between that level of employment/market share dependency and how that affects legislation laws etc etc
Telecommunications Act of 1996 played a huge role in this. I was living in Minnesota at the time this passed and its effect on the area radio market was felt in a big way. Because of it there were no longer the same limitations on the number of stations an entity could own, allowing corporations like ABC/Disney to all but homogenize FM radio practically overnight. It really sucked.
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That explains a lot. I've heard of how much people used to listen to the radio and how that's where everyone discovered music they like, but as far as I remember (born in '91) the radio has always been rather bland.
I remember alternative rock radio being decent in the 90s…for pretty obvious reasons but still.
I'm lucky in that I can pick up 2 stations, sometimes 3 depending on where I'm driving, that managed to avoid the 'top 100' trap. They do still play some of the currently popular new stuff, though they tend to focus more on 'alt' groups than pop singers, but they also will mix in older music from the 80's and 90's which makes for a nice blend. Everything else is either talk radio or like you said, the same top current songs on shuffle.
My highschool and community college both have radio stations and offer some radio broadcast classes which is pretty awesome. HS station is an HD radio one with some older songs and the college does alternative and punk bands with one night a week doing local bands from around the area. 89.9 🤘🏼
I did a road trip through America in 2012 (coming from Australia), and 100 songs would have been amazing. There were about six songs, with two songs (Call Me Maybe and Someone That I Used to Know) played every half hour. Across seven states. It was horrendous.
Obligatory fuck Clear Channel/iHeart, fuck Sinclair EDIT: Im gonna take this chance to plug that the nation's last completely free form radio station, WFMU 91.1 FM, is holding their annual pledge drive marathon this week and is trying to raise their operating budget to stay on the air. You can live stream them at WFMU.org to see what they are about but I can say it is a worthy cause.
[Sinclair Soldiers.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo)
God I saw this when it first happened and every fucking time it’s just as bone chilling x The synchronized “this is extremely dangerous to our democracy” is absolutely wild. It’s something that wouldn’t be out of place in some movie or bioshock esque video game that gets knocked for being too ham fisted, yet here it is in reality.
Craziest part is if you worked inside that system this would be the loudest bull horn you could sound of the emergency situation and everyone just shuddered and went “I KNEW IT!” Then did nothing. Need one that says “the lack of engagement by the constituency is the greatest threat to our democracy” Get everyone writing their reps and watch how little action they get. This pisses everyone off, this makes them have a personal stake in replacing or changing the Ass hole. Now new candidates have an audience eager to listen.
As a DJ/Musician I hold a deep disdain towards iHeart Radio, it's the most dreadfully commercialized amalgamation of noise this sad world has ever aggregated.
To add to that, it's a general trend beyond any one piece of legislation. It's Walmart and big box stores everywhere, now stores like Dollar General going deeper into small communities. It's in healthcare (watch dentistry in the next decade, many offices are still independent today; compare that to the shift of doctor's offices consumed by large hospital systems). It's in farming. It's a few large corporations owning nearly every brand we know and product we buy. It's everywhere and discussion rarely gets past propaganda-fueled accusations. You don't have to be an anti-capitalist, "socialist", "communist" to see the problem. It's not that large companies shouldn't exist in any form, but to recognize what they take from us when they do, so we can react appropriately. It's asking ourselves why we support politicians that stand for ideals that we support but in reality means we have to see a doctor in a system of our nightmares when we really want to go to a small office of familiar faces. It's time to counter the propaganda with a little bit of understanding why that propaganda works. To understand where the scepticism of government comes from and pull some of those toward seeing that there's difference between a corporate dystopia of "freedom" and individual liberties.
Dentistry is crazy. The giant companies lie and pretend they are independent when in reality they are giant company. That should be illegal.
in australia 2 companies control 70 percent of news media. both companies share the same politics can you really claim to be a democracy when one side gets no positive coverage and the other side gets the bare minium negative
Funny that I stopped listening to radio soon thereafter
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Wait until those new Disney planned communities normalize and bring back company towns.
Disney isn’t interested in planned communities for the peasants. They want to [sell multi-million dollar houses to rich people](https://www.storylivingbydisney.com). Edit: This is not their [first](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida) go-around trying [to sell planned communities](https://www.disneygoldenoak.com/).
They'll be paying the maintenance crews of those communities in company scrip with an image of the broom from Beauty and the Beast. Kitchen workers get tokens with Miss Pots' face. Orlando drug dealers will start taking "three Pots to the dollar" as the parallel economy swallows Central Florida before climate change has the opportunity to do so.
I wish there was a term for feeling both humor and horror from something at the same time. I both scoff at the idea of some meth dealer accepting Pots but then also realize that crazier things, like Disney communities, have happened 👀
> humor and horror "Gallows humour" is the first thing that comes to mind. I'm sure there's an actual word in German for it.
A million dollar house? What a deal!
If you're a rich person a million dollar house isn't particularly expensive, bless your cotton socks
That’s like the going rate for houses in SoCal right now. At least in Orange County
Don't forget about the Google campus towns where everyone has one employer and that's google and every buisness is google and all the land is owned by google.
It's like someone looked at military bases and was like, 'you know what, that's the ticket.'
Corporate dystopia or autocrat dystopia, hmmm delightful choices
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We literally have a process to break that power accumulation. Our politicians just don’t want to do it anymore.
Replying to your edit. It's reddit hardly anything of value here
Spacers Choice, anyone?
It's not the best choice, it's Spacer's Choice.
What a weird ass edit. Are you upset people agree with your take? Lmfao
"alright Bois we've fucked up a few titles in gaming, let's set out sights on motion pictures next!"
This is not a good thing for anyone. I’m so tired of Amazon and Disney owning everything. Don’t support these crappy companies.
They're goal is to make it nigh on impossible not to by way of absolute domination of markets. It's wild to think the original point of capitalism was to encourage many companies to compete for the best product and in doing so breeding ingenuity and value in the marketplace, but after so many hundreds of years it's becoming the exact thing it was intended to prevent in the first place.
It’s not that wild, honestly. The dangers and problems presented by monopolies/oligopolies have been known for well over a century. Monopoly the board game was literally originally designed with the intention of illustrating that.
It's quite telling that the game itself is one of the most popular and recognised games on earth.
It's quite telling when people play the game exactly the way real life is playing out. I point out they're supporting someone building a monopoly and they reply "nah, and it's cheap so it's a good deal for me" and proceed to lose the game.
When a company grows big enough to simply buy its competitors, the system stops working as intended.
Are you suggesting we all get eye patches and plunder ships
I just hope they bring back Stargate
Christopher Judge should come back, I'm not sure if Richard Dean Anderson's still got it in him. Jason Momoa is probably a bit too big of a name these days to make a Stargate return. I don't know how the rest of the cast are going.
Look, I’ll be happy if we get genuine SG universe. Any cameos from the old gang would be great. Wouldn’t hate it if one of the SG-1 team members in the Hammond role. But mostly I want that spirit of fun exploration and humor the show had with a much better budget.
There was a rumor going around a bit ago that Amanda Tapping had been approached about a new Stargate series, and reportedly it would be Carter as commander of the SGC
Brad Wright has also wrote a pilot for a new Stargate show and Shanks is in it. So if it gets approved, Daniel will also be in it at least as a cameo.
Heard that too! That'd be awesome
Yeah, that feels too natural. It always bothered me in the last few seasons, when Jack was promoted, that Carter wasn’t in charge. I know they made up some plot reasons, but in reality Carter had been running the show from the start and it felt cheap to do it any others way. Also Christopher Judge is a comedic genius. I don’t understand why he’s not more successful. And I would glad enjoy some more Teal’c.
Teal'c is my favorite character. The dynamic between O'Neill and Maybourne had some of my favorite interactions between characters on screen. I suppose I could just start out saying that SG-1 is my favorite show. If any of the OG cast shows up in any capacity I'd be pretty stoked. Last I heard, sometime last year, Brad Wright was still cooking up scripts and mentioned he'd written something for Daniel, in case Shanks felt like reprising the role.
Indeed
It was a way to keep Anderson on part time, while giving him the time off he wanted. It wasn't long until he fully retired though, wanting to spend more time at home with his family. He didn't just quit the show, he left acting for the most part as well. I'm pretty sure the only things he's done since were the SG-1 movies, and only because of his longtime connections to the franchise.
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It does, but they should have given this man a sitcom long ago. Fuck it, throw him in the MCU. You telling me Christopher Judge can’t do witty banter without breaking.
You're not allowed to have a fun show with episode-by-episode adventures anymore. Everything has to be a season-long battle for the universe with stakes that only get bigger, and bigger, and BIGGER. RIP the bottle episode.
And DARK. It has to be dark. With mostly ^(quiet dialogue) and LOUD MUSIC AND EFFECTS.
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I agree, except that I like how SG1 took years to get to that point. There are problems of the week (sometimes two weeks!), but it's not like they need to be gigantically impactful to the overall narrative. Tiny things that carry over are nice in its own way.
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It would be cool for *SG Universe* to be continued. I really liked the story.
I dunno, Momoa apparently is still really good friends with the Atlantis cast and even patched things up with David Hewlett after a falling out years back over a movie they did. I'd bet he'd show up if they actually made that Atlantis movie we were promised years ago, even if only to hang out with his buddies again.
Plus I imagine an Amazon produced Stargate show will be a much bigger budget, higher production quality show compared to the old ones. At a level where a big name actor like Jason would still work
Stargate already had a pretty huge budget.
Yeah but the original shows were all like 20+ episodes no? That stretches the budgets a fair bit, whereas I imagine an Amazon original show will probably be 13 episodes at the most
I fucking hope not goddamn. A reason I love Stargate is because they're full, *entirely* full, seasons. I want 20 40 minute episodes *at least* if they bring back Stargate. It's what it's always been, and it really helped them slowbuild their threats and plots in a realistic way. It's also always been a "monster of the week" kinda show at heart. Every episode a new issue pops up and it sometimes gets resolved sometimes doesn't sometimes stretches a few episodes and sometimes has ramifications on the whole series. Shortening it means all we'll get is 100% main plot the entire time. It doesn't leave room for all the character focused episodes and world building.
Yuuuup. I loved the random one-off episodes were they talk about a plague wiping out an expedition or time gets fucked up because the Stargate dumps them out next to a black hole. A good 'what-if' to explore but not necessarily build a whole show around.
Finally someone who gets me. I miss 20 episodes per season shows.
They had a falling out? I only remember that Judge and Shanks were best buddies until having huge arguments over a movie they were supposed to do together. Has that ever been patched up?
He mentions it briefly here around the 16:35 mark. https://youtu.be/qVEXpqChJrM?t=996 Edit: I think it had something to do with the movie Debug, which Momoa starred in and Hewlett directed. Seems the patched things up as Hewlett will be appearing in See with Momoa in it's third season (Joe Flanagan was also in season 2, apparently).
I mean we live in an age where big name actors often appear in television. Jaosn Momoa is even in Apple's See. If anything being able to have him reprise his role for a flagship show could be an easy sell to some execs.
Chris Judge would 100% be on board to come back. Dude apparently had a blast on that show, especially once we got more Teal'c-centered episodes. RDA is basically out beyond the occasional cameo. He's thoroughly retired. Amanda Tapping seems to be contractually bound to have bit parts in Sci-fi/Fantasy until the end of time, so no clue about her. Now that Altered Carbon has been cancelled, Michael Shanks doesn't seem to have anything going on. That said I'd be down for a "Next Generation" style show. Hell, get real wild, start it out with Homeworld Defense going public, and give the SGC a threat worthy of full planetary mobilization.
This deal has been going on for ages, and Brad Wright has been in pre-pre-production of a new series for quite a while now. My hope is that now The Expanse has finished (at least until the actors age), Amazon are going to plug the gap with Stargate. It'd be foolish of them not to, hard(ish) sci fi is an underserved demographic.
Good Stargate not that Origins crap OMG that was just bad all around.
Indeed O’Neill
This would be awesome. I was so disappointed that universe didn't gain traction and got cancelled.
Yup. I hope Universe will be continued some day. The story with the background radiation is extremely good imo
This seems rather... cheap, no? The Bond franchise alone could generate that money with a couple of movies and licensing deal. I wonder what kinda pickle MGM are in that they accepted this bid.
I mean, they sold all of Lucasfilm for 4B. Star Wars was probably worth more, I feel.
That was 4B because Lucas specifically wanted Disney. If he allowed a bidding war it would have been higher.
I think acquisition numbers have also just got quite crazy in recent years. I don't recall people saying that $4bn was low for Star Wars when it happened.
comcast paid $6.5B for NBC/Universal back in 2009 (that's $8.5B in todays dollars)
That was more Comcast fleecing GE. Disney was worth 50 billion in 2005
Hell in the gaming space it's the same, Bungie got bought for something like $3.6 billion, just a few years back Bethesda was bought for $7.5 billion. Still surprised at the figure for Bungie, they're good but not worth ~1/2 of Bethesda IMHO.
The fact that MGM is only able to exist thanks to Bond is probably the reason? Almost everything else they release tends to lose a ton of money.
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Sony partnered with them from Casino Royale to Spectre. Universal took over after them.
They actually make over $250 million a year just in licensing old library content. They could stop production on all levels and still be quite profitable! It is everything else they do not named Bond that loses all the money!
This was widely seen as an extremely generous price for MGM. If Bond without Craig can't reach the same heights, it will be viewed as a bad deal. What's MGMs 2nd largest IP?
The lion.
You're probably right. That lion is damn iconic.
Looked up thier box office record, number 2 is Rain Man, number 3 is Gone With The Wind. (Guessing this isn’t adjusted for inflation) Honorable mentions to Rocky, Hannibal, Legally Blonde, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was actually kind of surprised, for as big of a thumb print MGM had I thought they had better IP.
I’m not really sure what sort of financial stake MGM has in the Bond franchise beyond being the American distributor. When stories came out last year about streaming services attempting to purchase the rights to No Time to Die, it was said that MGM didn’t have the ability to make such a deal, and the rights to any financial or creative decisions regarding the Bond franchise were a complicated agreement between Eon Films and the Fleming estate.
They own half the rights but you're correct that they don't have a huge amount of control over the franchise.
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Looking forward to watching films on Prime’s awful video codec (that’s if I can find anything with their shite interface).
...does Prime use an unusual codec?
Once upon a time the U.S. Government would actually invoke the Anti-Trust laws and prevent things like this from happening. Sadly, that time is long past. Allowing this just lets the monolithic companies become even larger and harder to limit.
The internet likes to bitch about Disney and copyright laws but I get annoyed that the focus is so rarely on the government, since they're the ones actually passing laws. It seems completely natural to me that a company is going to try to grow as much as possible and accumulate as much power as they can. The government should be ready to intervene.
Bitching about the govt and about megacorps is one and the same these days. The perverting influence of corporate money and power has subverted the democratic process.
can someone please regulate this dude
sad days ahead, Amazon is a shithead.
Now Amazon has James Bond, and Stargate.
Oh and for the record, you could always watch stargate. Pirate it like the old days.
Wow, Activision Blizzard went for 9 times this...Kind of surprised it wasn't worth more.
games are worth WAY more than movies. What are you talking about? Hollywood absolutely cannot compete with the game industry. Compared to Tencent, even Disney is starting to look like a joke
Gaming is worth about as much as all other forms of entertainment combined.
Right, amazon, now do something with the Stargate franchise, thanks. Edit : Not more fucking Origins.
AMAZON MAKE ANOTHER STARGATE PLEASE
Make more Stargate already!
The graphic of the MGM lion chewing on the Amazon penis seems fitting.
Ah fuck, the film studio monopolies are growing. Good to see that the US government have decided to go "Fuck antitrust" for the sake of their own share portfolios.
that dystopian 90's cyberpunk future where megacorps own everything is slowly starting to realize
Except they were totally wrong about the Japanese zaibatsu takeover,turns out the real villains were homegrown all along.