Hoo boy, been a while. Let me briefly say, November and December sucked personally, and I found it hard to get back into blogging and making YouTube videos after I lost my momentum. But here’s my attempt at getting back into things.
As you may know, Mickey Mouse went public domain as of January 1, 2024 in the US, along with the cartoons Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy. (For a comprehensive look at what that means, and what the public now has legal access to, check out this great writeup by Jennifer Jenkins at the Duke Center for the Study of Public Domain, Mickey, Disney and the Public Domain) Back in November I had the idea that it would be cool to make an NES game of Mickey Mouse and get it ready to release shortly after his release from copywrite. My plan originally was to start the game in November, and then with luck, since it was going to be very short, have it ready to go on New Years Day or shortly thereafter. But like I said, November and December kind of sucked, and I was not able to get motivated to make it. But shortly after New Years I started feeling like it was worth it to give it a try, and so for the past few months I have been working on the game!
I’m using a program called NESMaker, which while not exactly easy to use, is far easier than learning the NES from scratch, and it helps that there’s a great community of people willing to help you if you have questions. Right now, I’m planning on it being a rather short game, maybe four stages and a boss battle, all focused around Steamboat Willie. The enemies are some of the animals that Mickey tormented in the original short, who are not taking very kindly to the mouse anymore!
In what may have been an overly ambitious move for someone with limited knowledge of the NES and its palette at the time, I thought it would be cool to try and make the game black and white, or at least as limited in color as I could. However, with the NES’ capabilities, that means that I have black, white, and two grays. That’s not a lot to work with, so I’m also using a few lighter blues, which kind of feel like they mix in with the black and white well enough.
Work is coming along nicely on the game, and I’ll be releasing it for free on my Itch.io page when it’s complete, though right now I’ve put the game on pause momentarily to participate in a game jam around NES games, the NESMaker Byte Off IV, which I will write about in a future post. But so far working on this game has been a lot of fun, I’ve learned a lot, and I’m looking forward to releasing it so people can play it.
In case of a victory for the #PublicDomain, how to celebrate?
I just realised that night I'll be in a crowded theatre, so maybe I can cry: "EN 2:1992/A1:2004 Classification of fires"? (Or just distribute a few copies.)
"…a November judgment from the UK Court of Appeal means #museums can’t go on claiming #copyright in photographs of #publicdomain art works. Museums have used this claim to create costly licensing schemes. For art history books and dissertations that need the images for discussion, the costs are often prohibitive. And, it turns out, the #GLAM sector isn’t even profiting from it."
You know that stuff can be pulled back out of the public domain into #copyright? It has happened before. The most famous example is probably "It's a Wonderful Life". There doesn't seem to be indication #Disney is going to try to do that this time, but just be aware: #PublicDomain is a neverending fight to own your own culture.
#PhysicsFactlet
The Lorenz system is a common example of chaotic dynamics and of a strange attractor.
Points with very similar initial conditions initially evolve very similarly to each other, until their trajectories diverge from each other, and start moving on a "butterfly"-shaped fractal. #Physics#Chaos
Released into the #PublicDomain and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons together with the #Mathematica script used to generate it: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lorenz_System_Lyapunov_time.webm
This is thanks to the hard work of the people at @DProofreaders. Signing up to be a proofreader or smooth reader there is easy, and, based on personal experience, a lot of fun. Learn more here: https://www.pgdp.net/d/walkthrough/en/
95 year old American musician, singer-songwriter, satirist, and mathematician Tom Lehrer transferred the music and lyrics for all songs he has ever written into the #PublicDomain.
He further states, on his website, "THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG"
New episode! What happens when you're a comics publisher in the 80s and don't understand that Mickey Mouse isn't in the public domain yet? Well, you wind up with The Uncensored Mouse, the series spawned a Disney lawsuit after it hit store shelves.
#Copyright#IP#PD#PublicDomain#GettyImages: "[T]he paper explores the tension between asserting one own’s copyright and appropriating other people’s. More specifically, it investigates how this dual pull plays out in the activities of Getty Images. After a short introduction on how the author got interested in ‘the largest commercial archive in the world’ (Getty’s own words), the paper illustrates three main processes that allowed Getty to reach market dominance:
Takeovers: in the first ten years after its establishment in 1995, Getty built up its store of intellectual property by taking over several competing still and moving images archives, becoming a meta-archive (an archive of archives).
Litigation: the company aggressively protects its IP through litigation, or threat of litigation, such as the antitrust lawsuit against Google which led to the removal of the ‘View Image’ button from Google Images in 2018.
Platformisation: Getty has the largest and most efficient platform in the image economy, serving three main markets which value speed and ease of access over cost: media, creative professionals and corporate. In turn, being the default supplier for these sectors gives Getty power over its own suppliers, i.e. any creator who wants to reach those markets.
The second part of the paper focusses on legal and ethical aspects of Getty’s practices of appropriation. Richard’s work shows that Getty ‘appropriates’ and exploits public domain materials as well as many potential orphan works, meaning works whose actual copyright owner is either unknown or can’t be traced. This seems to indicate an apparently contradictory attitude towards copyright: while Getty aggressively protects its own intellectual property (or what they claim to be their own IP), they embrace the ambiguity of copyright law to reuse and exploit other people’s work."
Starting in just a minute over at https://www.twitch.tv/chilliteracy Sam will be reading the next part of The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson's claustrophobic cosmic horror. Head on over now! @bookstodon