FEED: Intellectual Property

The Pope speaks out on the subject in a Papal encyclical. The gist seems to be that people come first, at least in health care.

On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care. At the same time, in some poor countries, cultural models and social norms of behaviour persist which hinder the process of development. More...

FEED: Intellectual property vs Creative Freedom

I love discussions of intellectual property. I've been stating here for ages that just because something is readily accessible doesn't make it freely yours. That is, you can't claim that online music is free just because it's easy for you to acquire it without paying. There's a bench in front of my house that you could easily put into your car. Does that mean it's yours for the taking?

Anyhow, serious discussions of IP go much deeper. This article in Reason, starting with the Catcher in the Rye pastiche, is a good starting point.

Now, the court must decide if 60 Years Later falls under the "fair use" exception to copyright law. Is it an unauthorized sequel (red light), or a commentary or parody (green light)? Does it merely appropriate and continue the work, or transform it in a way that illuminates the original?

Salinger's lawyers have claimed that the new book is "a rip-off pure and simple."There is nothing simple about intellectual property law. Some things are fairly straightforward: a pirated edition of a book or an illegal DVD of a movie cuts into the revenues of the author or the producers. But a new work that builds on an earlier one can boost the sales of the original, particularly if it creates controversy. Film and television studios have sometimes gone after fan-made music videos based on TV shows and movies and posted on websites such as YouTube, even though such videos have inspired quite a few people to buy DVDs of the movies or shows. More...

FEED: Patents on publicly funded research

The People's Champion found and tweeted this (and you thought that Twitter was useless!). In essence, South Africa is looking at forced patents on intellectual property. The ramifications of this are mind-boggling. I can't believe it will happen, but in any case, IP is a big issue for me, and for LD.

...a proposal in South Africa, that would potentially require patents on certain publicly funded research. While this seems totally backwards for any number of reasons (and many of us believe that publicly funded research should be available to the public since they paid for it), apparently some are concerned that "foreign multinationals" might "misappropriate" the research. So, even if a university and the researcher choose not to protect the research results with IP, if a government body determines that the results could have commercial viability, it would have the ability to control the rights. More...

A musical interlude

We need some feedback on the communications issue, so I’ll leave that for a minute and see if we actually get any more responses. I know CP has something (undoubtedly wrong) in mind, and one does need to hear from MB…

So, another subject entirely. Music storage.

Okay, first of all, I have music I’ve purchased going back to the Dark Ages. I don’t have my 45s anymore (I’m still fuming over their “promotion” by a bunch of lowlife politicos in college who thought they would serve us well as an election ploy if we donated them to the local coffee shop; that they were mine and that I was never consulted is the issue—grrrrrr!). My LPs are in the chez basement: the sleeves aren’t in very good shape (the original Siamese, Minx, considered them the perfect scratching post) and God knows what shape the vinyl is in. I’ve got a few hundred cassettes left after cherry-picking the good ones for mp3ing; I’ve just sorted these remaining tapes into categories, and will salvage what I can over the next few months. I’ve got skadoodles of CDs going back to their invention (I was a relatively early adapter), many of which I’ve ripped into mp3s. And I’ve got mp3s acquired various (legal) ways; members of the VCA know well my stance on intellectual property, and the immorality of claiming that easy access somehow warrants theft. (Keep in mind, by the way, that I do not claim that all music, or whatever, must be kept in tightly held copyrights, but merely that the owners of intellectual property get to decide what to do with it. They’re perfectly within their rights to give it away, or not. The issue of when copyright ought to expire, and why, is a different one, and quite fascinating, but that’s for another time.)

So, in other words, I’ve got music up the wazoo, including a whole bunch of unripped CDs. My friend Peter, who is a nut worthy of being a forensician, and who makes the concept of obsessive look like casual disdain, has even more music and a bigger wazoo, but only came to the mp3 universe a few months ago with the purchase of his first iPod. He originally started ripping everything he owned in the lossless format, until he realized that this would only capture a fraction of his collection, and, additionally, he couldn’t tell the difference when he listened to stuff. So he went back and did it all mp3-style. When I demonstrated the “Remote” app to him (using the Touch to play iTunes throughout the house), he discovered that, unlike him, I hadn’t ripped my entire CD collection. “Why not?” he asked. “Why?” I riposted wittily. “Because it’s there,” he explained. Which got me thinking. Certainly at any point in the conceivable future I have more music than I can reasonably fit onto even the biggest iPod, but I could quite easily get myself one Big Sucker hard drive for the house at least for regular AirPort listening. And I could simply create a playlist of oodles of it for my MegaPod as I do now for the Touch.

Meanwhile, I’ve been spending a lot of time getting all my mp3 music into one library. Having added drives over the years and been sort of sloppy on occasion means that I have music spread out all over the place. As far as I know there’s no easy way to solve this short of laboriously finding the tracks and moving them physically album by album. But this process has convinced me of the goodness of the idea of a terabyte drive devoted entirely to music storage. So, I’ve been studying the available products, most of which look roughly identical: if it doesn’t die the first week, you’re fine. Whenever I have bought the biggest drive possible it has always cost about $125, and that remains true. The drives get bigger, the dollar gets smaller, but the price remains the same—curious economics which seem to apply to almost all computer-related purchases. Anyhow, I should have a 1T drive picked out and ordered by the end of the weekend, and then I’ll have something to continue to play with over the summer.

And this, gentle reader, is what people do at night when debate season is over and they’re not involved in any summer institutes.

Philosophy bites, and the IP debate comes parlously close to home

Philosophy Bites is not a criticism, but the name of a podcast that I highly recommend. They have a blog, (http://nigelwarburton.typepad.com/philosophy_bites/) and of course they’re available on iTunes for subscription. If you doubt the value of podcasting, then ask yourself when was the last time you heard anyone discuss Wittgenstein on your local classic rock station (although, as everyone knows, “Stairway to Heaven” was heavily influenced by the old logikmeister).

A number of people have already attempted to console me over the upcoming demise of Scrabulous, which is, as the VCA can easily understand, an interesting subject for me. I have written often and rather sternly about the concept of intellectual property. I tend to believe that if I create something, and am so inclined, I ought to be able to profit from the fruit of my labors. Herr Marx might have believed that dialectic materialism meant eliminating private property, but personally I’m a firm believer in having my own stuff, and I don’t draw the line at material goods. If I own a tree that bears a lot of fruit, you are not entitled to the fruit just because you would like some fruit, even if that fruit is tantalizingly close at hand. You can easily reach over and grab an apple. That does not mean it is right for you to do so. I apply that same logic to intellectual property. My previous arguments have all been regarding music. Just because it is easy to appropriate music via the internet does not make it an ethically correct action. Assume that a musician wishes to be paid for work. I can freely choose not to buy that musician’s work if I have some objection to paying for it, but I can not freely choose to steal it. The ethical Lockean property aspects are my reasoning for this, but the obvious outcome of artists creating and people not paying is that eventually artists will starve to death and there won’t be any art, or in other words, we’re going to be awfully disappointed when there’s no more new music to put on our iPods, so there’s consequences to this stealing of art in addition to its deontological immorality. Scrabulous, which is nothing more than a Facebook version of Scrabble, absolutely fits into the pattern of intellectual property theft. The owners of the intellectual property known as Scrabble have a right to that property until such time as that right expires in the marketplace according to the given rules of law on such things. Agree or disagree with those laws, and plenty of people disagree with the (literal) Mickey Mouse extensions on IP that seem to be stretching to infinity, that doesn’t mean you are free to break them. Even you Pffffters this month are not claiming on the con that civil disobedience is justified in the fight for more free stuff for your iPods. So there’s little question that Scrabulous infringes on the rights of the owners of the IP known as Scrabble.

But here’s the problem. Everything I’ve said about the ethics of the situation notwithstanding, the solution is not the blocking of Scrabulous. Scrabble, like most corporate entities no doubt represented by lawyers who have their secretaries print out their email for them, or, like Ted Kennedy, claim that someone sent them an internet last week, simply don’t get it. No, I’m not recommending that they allow freebooters to purloin the fruits of their intellectual labors, but the canny corporation ought to be able to see a little further than the mere theft of IP. I would venture a guess that Scrabulous has made the rather musty game of Scrabble way more popular than it was three months ago. I haven’t played Scrabble in years, and Scrabulous had me digging out my game and bringing it to Regis. How many other people will dig up their old games, or better yet from Scrabble’s point of view, buy new ones, as a result of the popularity of Scrabulous? Scrabble seems to be making the same mistake that all corporations make when confronted by new technologies. They don’t understand them, so they simply try to make them go away.

Let’s face it. The Scrabulous guys don’t have a leg to stand on in this situation. So what should Scrabble do? Settle. Quietly, out of court. We need not know officially what happened. And the end result? Scrabulous will be owned by Scrabble. It will not go away. The Scrabulous guys will be paid off handsomely, and the Scrabble people will have the best thing that’s happened to them since the invention of the two-letter word starting with X. By some incredible twist of fate, and thanks to Scrabulous, musty old Scrabble has become a hip Web 2.0 application. Scrabble can either take this ball and run with it, or become musty old Scrabble again. And the lesson here applies to numerous companies. The best thing that ever happened to Comcast was the redistribution of Comedy Channel shows on YouTube, making this material way more popular than it had been and directing people to watch the shows on TV. Comcast pulled the content. They lost the best free advertisement they could have ever prayed for. Sure, there need to be some limits consistent with IP ownership, but at the point where corporations pointedly pull back from the real power of the internet, that nebulous ability to make things popular in ways you weren’t expecting, then all the corporate concentration on “maximizing their digital position” and the like are the empty idiocy that they sound like. The problem is not that the lunatics are running the asylums; the problem is that the psychiatrists running the asylums don’t know the difference between lunacy and brilliance.

And, oh yeah, if they take away Scrabulous, my life will just be an empty shell. Sigh.

The Rights of Man (and Mouse)

(Inspired by MB's list of records I've never heard of, today's bracketology pits the Beatles vs the Stones.)

I was listening to TWIT this morning, and the point was made that the present school generation may be growing up in an environment where free content is a given, as compared to the generation two klicks previous, where purchased content was the given, or one klick previous, where content was at best capturable. That is, at some point in the dark ages, you watched TV or listened to the radio, and there was content in that ineffable moment, which was paid for by advertising, or else you went out and paid to go to a movie or a concert or to buy a record. There was no sense of your inherent ownership of this material, much less your entitlement to it. Entertainment cost money (to someone); if you wanted entertainment, somebody had to pay for it. With the advent of tape decks (reel-to-reel in the 60s), you could copy a record, but realistically this was a private, repurposing action. There was no meaningful trading of tapes; you just copied your own records, perhaps as a mix, and that was that. This continued through music cassettes and, later, videocassettes. There was even a Supreme Court case that recognized an individual’s right to do whatever that individual wanted to do with secondary-level video content, provided it was for that individual’s private use. That is, the producers act of broadcasting the material incurred the consumers’ right to make a copy of it. We couldn’t sell it, or exhibit it, but we could watch it whenever we wanted. Time-shifting, and fast-forwarding through commercials, was announced as legal. It was the beginning of a great adventure. When mp3s came along, they took the processes of creating tapes of albums or mix tapes and turned them not only into no-brainers but no-timers. Movies quickly followed suit. But no longer was I merely copying for my own purposes; given the easy-to-distribute nature of digital files, I could be copying for anyone. We were going beyond the realm of original ownership and the original producers. It’s the middle of the great adventure. But as I’ve been maintaining, the ease of performing an action is not included in the calculus of its morality. The fact that it is easy to do something doesn’t make it right. If that were the case, performing easy actions would be morally preferable to performing difficult actions. You don’t have to be Kant to find that one a little dicey.

Anyhow, we’ve already talked about that at some length. But I’m really curious about the concept of intellectual property vis-à-vis copyright. I’m trying to get my mind around both sides of the argument. The basic idea is simple. If you create something, you’re entitled to it, and a legal process exists for you to protect that entitlement. But the Constitution would limit that entitlement. The following is listed as a power of the legislature: “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” In other words, there is a belief that creators (authors and inventors) will make useful social contributions provided we protect their creations for a while. Copyright protection is seen as an incentive to produce, or maybe it’s more the other way around: if your creation is not protected, and therefore subject immediately to theft or cooption, why bother? Either way, the protection is intended to create an environment conducive to creation, with an underlying and stated assumption that this will promote social progress. The limit applied by the Constitution is unstated—“for limited times”—but that limit is there. Which raises the question, why? Why should this right be limited? My ownership of my watch, for instance, is not limited. Even after I die, that watch will go to my heirs and assignees and not to society in general. I have, in perpetuity, ownership rights to certain things, in other words. Why not to my intellectual property, if I do have this right to my physical property?

Putting aside the obvious argument that, perhaps, it is the perpetual right to the physical property that ought to be questioned, we need more purposefully to uncover why this discrepancy exists. Why did the Framers accept that, after some limited time, intellectual property no longer belonged to its creator?

The answer seems to lie in that same concept of social progress (although no doubt there is also an historical explanation to be found in the state of protection of intellectual property at the time, a subject about which I know nothing). If there is value in encouraging new ideas by protecting them for a while, there is also value in allowing those new ideas to encourage yet other ideas in a purely dialectical sense. While it was a century or so later that Mill explained with such clarity how truth could be found in the open comparison of ideas, the concept that ideas generate other ideas could not have been all that hard for the Framers to grasp, given the number of creators in their own midst. Franklin, at the Convention, and Jefferson, in Europe but certainly a member of the fraternity, were notorious tinkerers and inventors, involved with other tinkerers and inventors, living in a new country that seemed ripe for tinkering and inventing. Jefferson (who as Secretary of State was, if I remember correctly, our first patent officer) gave away his plow design for the betterment of farmers, so there was altruism not only in design but in spirit. A new type of country needed new ideas. We were already trafficking in republican democracy. We might as well go for the full gorilla.

So ideas beget ideas, and begotten ideas are seen as beneficial to society. But the begetting of ideas is also beneficial to society, so we set up a system where if you beget an idea, it’s protected for a while, but then it’s allowed to go off and beget other ideas. This makes some sense. There are certainly many specific arguments regarding the copyright of a film or a book that are not covered by this, but at least in the patenting sense, as compared to the copyrighting sense, the concept seems sound enough. Patent is a much shorter protection than copyright, at least in present-day America. You invent something, you have some time to manufacture it and get rich, and then it belongs to society. This applies to drugs, widgets, the look and feel of software (talk about dubious), most things you’d expect and some you don’t. A patent, which is different from a copyright, is also different from a trademark. I don’t feel a need to go into all the distinctions here: look them up for yourself if you don’t know them.

What has happened over the years is that copyright was extended numerous times, to the point where, today, it is beginning to look eternal. We have legislated (and according to our constitution, this is a congressional power) that copyright will last for practically a century after the creator is dead. No doubt the next time the law comes up before Congress, whoever is running Disney and like corporations will push for yet further extensions. According to the laws extant in 1928, his birthday, if we hadn’t extended copyright protection, Mickey Mouse would now be in the public domain. This means two things. Anyone could market and sell Mickey Mouse cartoons created before a certain date, and the concept of Mickey Mouse would belong to anyone, for use in any way. That is, today, if I want to, I can write a book about Snow White, a character hundreds of years old, and I don’t have to pay anyone anything. I can write about Snowy and the Seven Dwarfs, or I can write about Snowy running for governor of California. It doesn’t matter. She’s in the public domain. (Note that I’m not talking about Disney’s version of the tale, but simply the characters and the tale itself.) If Mickey were in the public domain, I could do likewise with him. I could tell any Mickey Mouse tale I want and not have to pay anyone anything. I could make my own Mickey Mouse movies. In my stories I could have him run for governor of California. In other words, I would have free access to previous intellectual creative property. And this free intellectual access is perceived as a good thing. It is creative progress. It is rooted in the Constitution (albeit through logical extension).

Disney’s argument is not merely that their corporation benefits from Mickey et alia and should continue to do so, but that since their corporation actively protects and maintains and develops and creatively progresses those intellectual properties, therefore keeping them original, it ought to have the right to continue to do so. It’s not merely the fact that they own them and should continue to do so (which is, to some extent, a perfectly reasonable argument if you compare it to the watch that I can leave to my heirs—why can’t Disney leave Mickey to his heirs?), but that they are continuing to work on them, and/or that they have corporate meaning beyond their simple existence as the properties originally created. The counterargument is that, if we allow ownership of ideas in perpetuity, we ultimately do stifle creativity. Anyone who knows the history of Disney knows that the corporation’s success (and even survival) was based on the release of Snow White, which is an example of Old Walt doing exactly what his corporation wouldn’t want anyone doing today, which is taking a story and characters in the public domain and working a new angle on them.

The more you go into this subject, the harder it gets. There are no easy answers. I find it hard to understand why both my watch and my writing can’t go to my heirs, and I find it hard to figure where to draw the line at which the legacy ends, since there seems to be an inherent logic that ownership of ideas can’t possibly be forever by the very nature of ideas. And that’s what we really haven’t discussed. An idea is different from a watch. A book or a movie is about halfway between an idea and a watch. Without my explaining the differences, I’m sure you have no difficulty agreeing with me. Therein lies the problem. As bad debaters like to say, there’s no bright line. But the fact that there is no bright line does not mean that we can’t have a hazy line: we draw hazy social lines all the time (compare maturity: you drive younger than you vote, you vote younger than you drink, we’ve got all sorts of unbright lines for measuring your adulthood). In a way, the haze here is the fun part. It gives us something to argue about, and the conflict between the rights of individual ownership and the rights of society couldn’t be more straightforward.

You know, this would make a good LD topic.

Trivia; Princesses from a different perspective; Fair(y) Use; Reassurance

Trivia
Name 4 movie actors who have been turned into AAs (audioanimatronic figures) at Disney parks. And while you're at it, figure out the brackets of the worst of WDW.

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Princesses from a different perspective
Previously we analyzed Disney princesses from the post-contemporary point of view. That is, we concentrated on the antifeminist aspects of the idea, the thought of women being bred for their (presumably non-existent) Prince Charmings, the Disney wedding where your fairy tale dream comes true, the pure when-are-you-going-to-grow-up-ness of the thing. Which is all well and good, but then again, I would imagine that a lot of people get married at WDW simply because they enjoy the resort because it’s fun, and they’re going to honeymoon there anyhow (it is a very popular honeymoon spot) so why not make it a destination event for the actual wedding? Everyone in the world isn’t caught in the lockstep of some sort of pomo mindset, in other words. As I said yesterday, I simply get into the fun aspects of Disney when I’m there, otherwise why would I bother to go? And I would imagine that most other people do likewise. You can make it a pretty miserable experience, I guess, if you’re so inclined, but you can make anything a pretty miserable experience when it comes to that. Enjoying Disney requires that you take it at face value. So be it. But, since we sooner or later we’re all post-contemporary philosophers, sooner or later we all go beyond face value.

One of the major complaints about Disney is the capitalist critique, if you will. (That old Lefty Baudrillard was of this position to some degree.) It is not so much the nature of the dreams being sold on the Disney market, but the commodification of those dreams, i.e., the actual selling. You go on the ride, and as you exit, you are bombarded with souvenirs of that ride, a concept of mementoes simulating the recently experienced simulacra that boggles the po-co brain. On a less theoretical bent, the common anti-business complaints are that rides that are no longer popular are replaced or updated with more popular (read, more financially successful) elements rather than revered as monuments, that classic films from the vault are travestied by made-for-video sequels, that new products are created simply to make money, heaven forbid! Where is the purity of Old Walt?

Yeah, right. The Disney corporation learned the art of selling secondary merchandise almost the moment Mickey pulled on that steamboat whistle. Walt and Roy may have had different approaches to money, but both brothers understood that money was necessary to run their business, and that it was a business, however creative it attempted to be. Walt was not a television pioneer, finding new ways to create for the medium, he was a television pioneer finding new ways to build and support Disneyland. Tell me, if you can, how the Mickey Mouse Club was a pure creative gesture. Old Walt was a master of promotion. He was also, coincidentally, a visionary: they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, his biggest vision was probably his worst: EPCOT. If he had built it the way he originally imagined it, he finally would have killed the corporation, in that the modernist, planned, inorganic city was about to disappear from the drawing boards right when he was proposing it. The original EPCOT is pure modernist urbanism; you don’t see that much anymore… But it never came to that, and what Old Walt did do—creating a seemingly timeless animated film mythology, creating the concept of the theme park—were pretty impressive.

There are a lot of people who harp endlessly on today’s Disney Corp as a mindless moneymaking machine, who accuse the company of having no soul, of letting people down, etc., etc., etc. When the company screws something up, it’s not seen as a mistake, it’s seen as an evil-empire attempt to undermine the original purity of Disney essence. For example, one big harp these days is The Tiki Room Under New Management, which takes an old “classic” attraction (which introduced the original animatronic figures) and attempts to update it. The attraction, to put it simply, was dying on the vine, running to empty houses because it was old and tired. Its oldness didn’t intrinsically make it classic; compare, say, Pirates of the Caribbean, which is almost as old, and still held up. Tiki was always old-fashioned, which is not the same as timeless. I simply can’t envision Walt insisting on keeping an unpopular attraction open just because it had sentimental value to him personally. Present management attempted to modernize the Tiki Room and, well, flopped. But it’s not a horrid travesty, it’s just a bad idea that isn’t as much fun, in context, as the old show was, in its day and its context. The room doesn’t get down like it used to. Too bad. But hardly reason to indict the company as craven devils. Just people who made a mistake, I’d say. They made some others, too. But probably some of these same mistake-makers are the ones who got Expedition Everest awesomely right. You win some, you lose some. The update of Pirates, with Jack Sparrow, works fine, so sometimes you can tweak without harm. Old Walt had his stinkers too, you know. For instance, there’s a big flap these days about the inherent racism of Song of the South, but if it ever is re-released you’ll discover the other reason they should keep it in the vault: it sucks (except for the animation). So there’s plenty of nasty stuff one can say and think about what was mostly the Eisner Disney, but there was some good stuff too. It’s a business, and businesses have their up and downs. Sometimes they even die. Life is like that.

So in Old Walt’s day it was dolls and watches and all sorts of comparable tsotchkes supporting the corporate machine. One of the latest attempts to derive value from preexisting materials is Disney’s princess push. This has been going on for a while now. It appeals to little girls’ desire to dress up—I’m not sure if little boys have that same desire, or how it’s expressed—and works it in with a basic theme that has run through Disney works since Snow White, which is princesses. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, as in, I’d like to be a princess myself, if it meant getting to loll around all day while somebody else cleans the place up. There’s worse things in the world for five-year-olds to daydream about. Disney capitalizes on the daydream by providing outfits, and at the parks, outlets, to wit, character meals. The little girl make-believe princesses get to hobnob with the “real” princesses. It’s sort of cute, actually. We’re riding an early bus to EPCOT one morning, and there’s a little girl in one of the standard princess outfits (you can get Meg, Belle, Cindy, Snowy, Jasmine, or Sleepy, and maybe some others I didn’t recognize) and before we get off at our destination the driver asks her and her family to stay behind. At the bus stop, after the non-princess riffraff debarks, the little princess is met by a welcoming committee with cameras and balloons and general hoo-ha which has to pretty much make a little kid’s day straight out of the gate. Only we non-princess riffraff could see the other little princesses debarking from their magical coaches to comparable attention. Then, I guess, it’s on to Norway (why Norway?) and the “real” princesses in the banquet hall. Throughout the week we saw princess upon princess. Some go whole hog, complete with footwear and hair extensions. Some manage at most to toss on a Cindy tee shirt. Whatever. They like it, it looks like fun, Disney provides a special entertainment, plus plenty of merchandise including costumes, thus at the same time capitalizing/commodifying its creative content. Win-win? Probably. It’s hard to see the harm in that.

I will point out that our group (grizzled forensicians, for the most part) did quickly conclude that Disney was missing a bet by not including Evil Princesses. Not every little girl wants to be Sleeping Beauty. Being Maleficent looks like much more fun, especially a young Maleficent. Or the Wicked Queen of Snow White, only younger. Young Cruella. Young Lady Tremaine? There’s others. A whole marginally goth market worth exploiting. They do have a Pirate Princess concept, but they need to take it to the next level. I would love to go to the parks and see not only little good princesses but a raft of little evil princesses, a collection of Charles Addams mini-Morticias to balance the Force, if you will. They do push Disney Villains, to the point where there’s even perennial rumors of a Villains Park, or at the very least, a Villains attraction (a Bald Mountain roller coaster is what I’ve heard). So if kids love villains, and princesses, why not villain princesses?

To the question posed earlier, do boys like to dress up, the answer is yes, to a degree. Show me a little boy and I’ll show you someone who probably wants to wear pirate clothes. Back in my day it was also cowboy clothes. I was quite the little buckaroo, let me tell you. (You’ll have to imagine that for yourself, there being no photos extant, but I even had a coonskin cap, which may explain the present state of the top of my head: who knows what they put in those coonskins?) The fact that there isn’t a comparable present-day young villain operation for boys to match the young princesses for girls, or a young heroes operation, or whatever, indicates that Disney, which no doubt has done its marketing homework, has probably concluded that it just wouldn’t work as well, so they concentrate their efforts elsewhere. So it goes.

Along these commodification lines, students of merchandising would do well to study the develop of the Fairy franchise, led by Tinker Bell. She has achieved star status in the geegaw category, and is the lead character in a series of fairy books, set, I think, in some very specific fairy universe, filled with new fairy characters. She has a movie forthcoming. Study this to study the extension of a pre-existing brand into a new franchise. Will it work? Too soon to tell. If you can name any Disney fairies five years from now other than Tink, then it did.

So what’s the bottom line then on Disney princesses? Well, if you’re a little kid, it’s cute, although if you’re still at it as an adult, it’s arrested development. Is Disney doing it to make a buck? Of course. So have they earned their buck? That’s the key question, I’d imagine. And from the looks on the faces of the families involved, I’ve have to say yes.

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Fair(y) Use
On another note, but not entirely, while we’re on the subject of Disney, and following the the Mark Helprin editorial in Sunday’s Times, the whole side note of copyright is worth looking into on this video. It makes obsession look positively maniacal, but also explains C in a circle in the most devious way possible short of bringing Sonny Bono back from the dead, plus it’s hilarious. Enjoy.

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Reassurance
Going to WDW and going to Universal in the same trip raises numerous questions. The attractions at the two Universal parks are fairly good, and some are excellent. There’s plenty of theming and narrative, some pretty much at the level of Disney. So why is Universal unsatisfying, while Disney is totally satisfying?

There’s a good book entitled Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, which accompanied an excellent exhibit about ten years ago. It’s funny how that word reassurance is so apt to the Disney experience. It applies to all the creative content, from the movies to the television shows with Old Walt to the parks. It is not that the Disney experience is comfortable, because that would imply a lack of drama. Sitting on the couch doing nothing is comfortable. Knowing that you will survive whatever happens is reassuring. Big difference.

At a core level, there is something about the Disney myths, or the way Disney approaches myth or legend, that strikes beyond the simple narrative level. This could be for a variety of reasons. The stories Disney tells are key narratives of existence, especially childhood, incorporating the various aspects of those key narratives: lost parents, growing up, not growing up, learning to be independent, friendship, romance. The milieus are larger than life—the West, the Jungle, the Future, Fantasyland, Old Hollywood—and we bring to each of them plenty of our own baggage, so we complete what the theming starts. In other words, Disney is about key stuff, or it is connected to key stuff. Add to this that some of this narrative material has been processed by us for our entire lifetimes in various formats: for instance, we’ve seen Snow White over and over, and we’ve also seen the dwarfs in all sorts of situations above and beyond the story, we’ve heard the songs in other contexts, we’ve seen that witch transformation maybe a million times in various clips—Disney's Snow White is a part of us. So is most of the other Disney material, depending on your age. But even if you’ve never heard of Walt Disney, you still know the Snow White story, and Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast, and you are already reassured by the concepts. It is all a part of us, even if, specifically, it isn’t.

There’s more to reassurance than the literal narratives, though. At the parks, we are reassured by the landscaping. The forced perspective, of course, which brings everything down to a more manageable, albeit often subconscious, notch. But also the use of all sorts of flora. At the park one is surrounded by flowers and trees and bushes and shrubs and topiaries: a veritable botanical garden. We send flowers to a hospital room because when you don’t feel good, they are a bright, beautiful, aromatic counter to our bad feelings. They make you feel better. They also make you feel better out in the world. We plant gardens around our houses rather than surrounding them with concrete. Cities are less comfortable than farms. So at Disney, not only are we surrounded by stories that reassure us, we are surrounded by flora that reassure us. This is subtle, but check out the flora at Universal and compare. Big difference.

So we have Disney giving us stuff to think about that’s more deeply connected to our psyches than Universal, which traffics in popular movies that come and go. The best film of the lot would probably be E.T., which is informed by the Disney values but, in the end, is just a movie and does not create in us those values, as does the animated features we started watching in the crib. Jaws, The Mummy, Back to the Future (emeritus)—these are not classics, really. They are not the stories we want Wendy to tell us over and over again when we are the Lost Boys. Additionally, Disney gets us at a sensual level of sight and smell, with gardens everywhere. And the third big piece of what makes the difference is aural. Compare the music at Disney to the music at Universal. At Disney, the music is mostly soft and gentle and, yes, reassuring. It wafts through Adventureland or Tomorrowland or wherever we are, appropriate, backgroundish, undemanding, themed, reassuring. There is nothing like music to set the mood, of course. At Universal, on the other hand, you are mostly bombarded by hard music, rock with strong backbeats, often very recent stuff to appeal to the presumably hip teenage crowd they wish to attract with their parks (and there’s no question that Universal, at least in Islands of Adventure, is aiming at a teen crowd as a counterstrategy to Disney’s family appeal). A little boom bucka boom goes a long way, even if you love rock and roll. It makes you want to dance, maybe, but it doesn’t make you want to hug everybody and love your family. The music of reassurance that Disney provides as a soundtrack does do that.

Sight, sound, mind—it’s the Twilight Zone! No, seriously, it’s an all-encompassing environment, well themed to make you happy, to make you enjoy the adventures you are undertaking. And for the most part, it is for the whole family. Sure, a few rides are age-specific, but the most thrilling of the thrill rides that Disney has are nothing like the Hulk or the Dueling Dragons. Compare Dr. Doom’s Dumb Drop vs Twilight Zone: I wouldn’t bother going on the former, but I do the latter for the theming alone. But the real point is, a place that is designed for families will be more reassuring than a place designed for teens. At some point, sitting in the Seuss area of IOA, aimed entirely at the kiddie contingent, Marc pointed out that there was a welcome lack of teenagers. Teenagers are LOUD, bubbalah. It doesn’t bother me—I wouldn’t be doing this job if it did—but it’s a big difference to be surrounded by families comprising all ages and by teenage groups comprising just, well, teenagers.

I still maintain that Spiderman is, in execution, the best simulation in any of the parks. Better than Star Tours, if you’re just talking about the ride as a ride. But if I never rode Spidey again, I wouldn’t mind. If I never rode Star Tours again, I’d miss it. Star Tours, in a word, has heart. Spidey doesn’t. And Old Walt knew all about heart (for instance famously claiming that the lack of heart was the reason Alice did poorly at the box office), and put it into most of what he did. His own, to begin with. And the hearts of his characters, after that. The Disney characters have heart, and we respond to that heart. On top of that, the parks have all our senses covered in every way possible to reassure us that our lives will have a happy ending. Wishes and dreams will come true.

What could be more reassuring than that?