I love Tintin! People in the US grew up with Marvel comic books. We grew up with Tintin, as did our parents before us. Can't wait to see what people do with it.
True, but unlike Tintin, Astérix is still being published, and (unlike, say, Spirou) the new editions by the writers and artist who succeeded Goscinny and Uderzo are actually good as well.
As someone who grew up on a small island with 700 people on it, with one tiny library that I could borrow unlimited amount of comic books from (a lot of Tintin and Asterix :) ), that does sound strange.
As well as Tintin, I also got Spirou[1], and my personal favorite, Gaston[2]. Gaston was more short format, but the slapstick humor and absurd scenarios really resonated with me as a kid.
They were translated to Norwegian and came in bound books. Still have them.
Wow, haven't seen those images in a long time. I can't recall where I read this Gaston comic—translated of course—but I have never laughed so much at comic strips in my life. I still remember that cigarette machine he built as well as alcoholmeter.
Should have been made into cartoon series, but seeing how old it is I wonder if it was before its time. It really had an originality unlike anything I've read before or since.
Amazingly it wasn't translated into English until 2017, which is probably why it's lesser known outside of Europe. I assume this is because the translation rights/contracts with Mr. De Mesmaeker took a long time to get signed.
Oh man I remember Gaston, I found some books in the library as a kid and loved them. I distinctly remember his car, he once modified it to run on wood-gas.
More than a reference. Ibañez, the creator of Mortadelo stole a lot from the creator of Gaston. He even created a character, Sacarino that was an obvious plagiarism (a mix of Gaston and Spirou). When pressed by deadlines the young Ibañez recycled entire vignettes and old histories redrawn with his own characters. He disliked the character but it grow so popular that couldn't stop drawing it. Finally Ibañez removed the character and apologized to the master Franquin for that.
Sacarino didn't end until the 80's. The point is Bruguera was highly exploitative with crazy deadlines and tons of short stories published, even from ghost writers. Ibañez was milked down. If he had a slower pace, yes, it could still create long story albums similar to the Franco-Belgian trend, but with its own detailed style. Such as the ones from El Sulfato Atómico and Valor y Al Toro, where you can see the obvious inspration from Gaston/Spirou, but you can also spot his own style on depicting the environment. Don't blame Ibañez, but the publisher.
Great news. The copyright owners of Tintin are very litigious [0].
I have some "Tintin in Vietnam" prints at home that are commonly sold in SE Asia [1]. Those street vendors will be happy to know that they're in the clear now.
American here; our kids pore over their Tintin books. I suspect we’re part of a trend; unsure how large. I vaguely knew about Tintin growing up but never had the opportunity to read more than a few pages, and no friend ever brought them up.
They (and the Asterix books) were pretty common in language learning classes in the US. Obviously, primarily French as that was the original language, but because both series have been translated into nearly every European language (and beyond) they are also useful for others -- we read translated Tintin and Asterix in my German classes as well.
What's interesting is that some of the Asterix were even translated in local dialects. It's the only comic I've ever read in Plattdeutsch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German). We also read it in a Latin class because some of the albums were translated in Latin (nice break between trying to translate texts from Cicero)
Typo, just spotted. Should read "In the US they apparently have a 95 year maximum term"
In the EU they brought books that had expired copyright (e.g. in the Uk which used to be life +50) back into copyright. This also did not happen in the US when it extended copyright to life + 70).
Ooh! I would super recommend reading into the Tintin author's friendship with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Chongren. It also touches upon and confirms/applies to what the French individuals say about Hergé, but up until his writing of The Blue Lotus, I'd argue.
The section on Zhang Chongren's wikipedia was cool
```
# Influence on Hergé
Hergé's early albums of The Adventures of Tintin were highly dependent on stereotypes for comedic effect. These included evil Russian Bolsheviks, lazy and ignorant Africans, and an America of gangsters, cowboys and Indians.
At the close of the newspaper run of Cigars of the Pharaoh, Hergé had mentioned that Tintin's next adventure (The Blue Lotus) would bring him to China. Father Gosset, the chaplain to the Chinese students at the University of Leuven, wrote to Hergé urging him to be sensitive about what he wrote about China. Hergé agreed, and in the spring of 1934 Gosset introduced him to Zhang Chongren. The two young artists quickly became close friends, and Zhang introduced Hergé to Chinese history and culture, and the techniques of Chinese art. Of similar age, they also shared many interests and beliefs. Hergé even promised to give authorship credits to Zhang in the book, but Zhang declined the offer. As a result of this experience, Hergé would strive, in The Blue Lotus and subsequent Tintin adventures, to be meticulously accurate in depicting the places Tintin visited.
As a token of appreciation, Hergé added the character "Chang Chong-Chen" (Tchang in original French-language version) to The Blue Lotus.[1]
As another result of his friendship with Zhang, Hergé became increasingly aware of the problems of colonialism, in particular the Empire of Japan's advances into China, and the corrupt, exploitative International Settlement of Shanghai. The Blue Lotus carries a bold anti-imperialist message, contrary to the prevailing view in Europe, which was sympathetic to Japan and the colonial enterprise[citation needed]. As a result, it drew sharp criticism from various parties, including a protest by Japanese diplomats to the Belgian Foreign Ministry.[citation needed]
```
I bought a copy of The Blue Lotus after learning about how the publication of that adventure was a turning point in Hergé's understanding and open-mindedness about other (specifically China, in this case) cultures.
Hergé's depiction of the Chinese was still quite stereotypical, although more benign than his previous treatment of non-Europeans. His depiction of the Japanese wasn't so nuanced (although fairly typical for the times).
He may have started to broaden his understanding of "foreigners", but it still took a while.
TBH, it's not really just a problem with Hergé. European comics throughout the century are full of stereotypes, typically used for comedic effect, which can look bad from a modern perspective. Asterix, by Goscinny and Uderzo, is entirely built on stereotypes. So is Alan Ford, by Secchi and Raviola.
In reality, most authors were not particularly racist; they just leveraged stereotypes to get cheap laughs, which was socially accepted back then.
Back in the day any European would laugh on itself as a tradition. Spaniards did the same with the Bruguera School (Mortadelo y Filemón, Zipi y Zape...) making fun on both the state/power/society and the outdated traditional family values. The Zapatilla brothers (Zipi and Zape) were subversive long ago before Bart Simpson and made a good laugh on the 60's Spain. MyF were basically "Get Smart" and the Superagent 86 10 years ago in the 70's, showing up a backwards Spain compared to France and Germany and making fun on the shitty infra we had on everything while we tried to fight crime. Luckly, times changed a lot in late 70's/80's.
Most of us will just ignore these parts (nobody's perfect, expecting that from a past author is a high bar, and would have considerably reduced the amount of entertainment available), but I also see an option for us to have alternative versions where those bits are either reworked or removed.
The original would still be there, and there would be a "modernized" version that's easier to digest for the newer generations.
Yeah I have fond memories of reading Tintin in my school library, but I recently downloaded and re-read one of the comics and while, by title, it was likely one of the less risky ones, it was still not up to the standard I'd expect of modern literature in this regard. To call it racist might be too divisive, but it certainly relied on stereotypes of race, gender, occupation, even neuro-divergency, too much for my taste.
It was pretty low quality compared to later Tintin books, and a lot more racist. No surprise though considering the era, and that this was during the midst of the Belgian occupation of the Congo.
Tintin is not a French comic, is from Belgium. And the first two comics are controversial, but also a product of that age. Blue Lotus also depicts a terrible image of Japanese.
Asterix is more consistent, complex and rewarding for adults. A part of Asterix has dated also because the endless cameos of real people popular in that years don't mean so much for new generations.
Other European comic in the big leagues is the Spanish Mortadelo and Filemon. If Tintin is adventure and Asterix is clever wordplay, Mortadelo embraces directly sadistic fun in its wild own way. If you don't know them still, see the film "Mortadelo and Filemon: Mission implausible" for a good glimpse of that world. You'll thank me later.
Mortadelo y Filemón were a parody on Sherlock Holmes and Watson first, but being a polar opposite duo a la Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Later, at the mid-late 70's they shifted to a James Bond like parody, being secret agents instead of private detectives.
And, OFC, as Don Quixote, they made fun of the Spanish society itself leaving no one without a critique. Politicians, bosses, the average Spaniard mentality of being half a cheapskate lifehacker and half a rascal, the Church, the shitty state infrastructures for its time, and so on.
The Brits have a similar setting with the Rowan Atkinson movies depicting incompetent spies with a Mr Bean like character.
Very good definition. Definitely Tom-and-Jerry-esque mixed with blue collar scroundrel overtones.
I would expect to have more new Tintin comics as result, but probably will be at most a good falsification (Don't made me make talk about the new "Lord of the rings" film).
Yes, the earlier Tintin comics, (like Tintin in Congo, which I don't think is published any more), are quite blatant in its colonial stereotypes. But to his credit Herge did change his world views (and that of Tintin), to become more "multicultural", when he became friends with a chinese artist and sculptor. (See: Tintin, Hergé and Chang – A Friendship That Changed the World - https://thewire.in/books/tintin-herge-and-chang-a-friendship... and the HN discussion on this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36468028 ).
> When Hergé published this comic book, he was only 23 years old and wrote it as part of government-led initiative to encourage Belgians to take up commissions in Congo ... Later on his life, Hergé would say: "For the Congo as with Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, the fact was that I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois society in which I moved ... It was 1930. I only knew things about these countries that people said at the time: 'Africans were great big children ... Thank goodness for them that we were there!' Etc. And I portrayed these Africans according to such criteria, in the purely paternalistic spirit which existed then in Belgium".
I have not read Tintin in Congo but apparently Tintin is (or was) quite popular in the Democratic Republic of the Congo according to a friend of mine who grew up in the DRC. Wikipedia also mentions it was popular in Francophone Africa, backing up what my he told me.
My friend is a big fan of Tintin and has a lot of really nice hand carved large wooden figurines of the characters and vehicles from the series.
I would normally think these figurines would be made for tourists but I don't think there is much of a tourist trade in the DRC. These figurines would sell for a lot of money in the USA or Europe.
Isn't it? Not sure about today but I bought a copy maybe 10 years ago after never having seen it for sale in living memory before that. It did come with some wrapping around the front that said it was of its time though.
I got a new French copy more recently than that as well (can't remember when exactly but it may have been in the last two years).
I just checked my French and English copies - the black and white edition was first translated to English in 1991 and the coloured edition was first translated to English in 2005.
The coloured editions seem to be the same in both languages except for the rhino encounter (plus the English edition having a content warning before page 1). I believe the changed rhino encounter was initially done for the Dutch translation many years ago.
Are you saying it is good that older art pandered to its era’s sensibilities, but it is bad that current art panders to ours? It seems to follow that the bad pandering today becomes good pandering after some amount of time?
It is a classic challenge with art: whether to view it in the context of its time or as self contained and removed from its context. Dunno if either view is better; they serve different purposes.
But I do think it’s notable that art from the same era, created by people with similar backgrounds, can vary widely in how much it parrots what we consider to be “warts” from the era.
Compare Jan Eyre and North and South: authors with similar social contexts, yet one perpetuates racist/colonial stereotypes and doesn’t question Victorian ideas about class, and one is much more modern in its view of gender and class.
I’m not sure I would say that part of what makes Jan Eyre good is its unquestioning colonialism. It’s a great book, no doubt, but its prejudices are a weakness, not a strength.
>Are you saying it is good that older art pandered to its era’s sensibilities, but it is bad that current art panders to ours?
Art can be good whether it panders to sensibilities or not. There are many more factors involved than that. For art involving social critique it's best to not pander, but not all art is like that.
But once it's created, it should be left to reflect its era, its creator, and the actual semtiments he had and wanted to express. Not retrofitted with later moral posturings.
>Compare Jan Eyre and North and South: authors with similar social contexts, yet one perpetuates racist/colonial stereotypes and doesn’t question Victorian ideas about class, and one is much more modern in its view of gender and class.
They are not redducible to one another though, as they cover different aspects of life, from different angles and viewpoints.
We should preserve Bronte's viewpoint though, not erase it or reject it, or keep the plot and change it's views and morals to our taste.
I'm not advocating book burning or anything. I'm just saying that we can look at Bronte and say "she had some good ideas about women's place in the word, but was totally blind to the racist / colonialist themes she adopted". It doesn't make her bad, but it does make her less of a forward thinking person than Gaskell.
> We should preserve Bronte's viewpoint though, not erase it or reject it, or keep the plot and change it's views and morals to our taste.
Eh, this is more complicated to me. If you were producing a modern play/movie of Jane Eyre, would you keep the psychotic creole woman locked in the attic, unchanged?
>Eh, this is more complicated to me. If you were producing a modern play/movie of Jane Eyre, would you keep the psychotic creole woman locked in the attic, unchanged?
Sure. I'd want to retain art as an ark of its time. The idea is to present the work of the writer, not to use their mere basic plot as a starting point.
Should we not judge a man according to what was acceptable during his time and not ours?
Herge was a very open-minded man for his time, but maybe not so much according to today's standards. But this probably applies to every man ever lived including our own parents
IMO we should judge people based on their efforts to improve, and based on their openness to learning that their views are imperfect.
I can’t speak to Herge or his era; if he was in the 98th percentile of tolerance and growth, I’d think super highly of him. If he was 60th percentile, less so, but as you say, we are all products of our time.
What I really dislike is the recurring talking point that we can’t judge people for merely being typical of their time.
There have been lots of historical times where the typical views were horrific, and where minorities who argued against those views were persecuted. I don’t truck with the “we can’t blame the persecutors, it’s what everyone was doing” line of thought.
> dislike [...] that we can’t judge people for merely being typical of their time.
That's all very noble but you have to apply it to yourself too. If you just go along with the popular morals of your time, you're no better than them. To a future society, our time may well look immoral.
Morals aren't universal. They depend on the environment people live in. As an example of something widely accepted today - we make children spend most of their childhood at school. Many of them don't much like doing that and it sounds like a fairly abusive practice if it didn't have any purpose. But kids have to go to school so they'll be successful as adults. It's a bad thing we do to people due to the circumstances of our society. Maybe in some kind of future utopia or a non-industrialised world there would be no need for school and the compulsory schooling of today would look like child abuse.
Are you sure you've progressive enough to even identify the bad beliefs of today's progressives, let alone stand up against them?
> we should judge people based on their efforts to improve, and
The world did not change very quickly in regards to social norms or acceptance even in 1950, and colonialism was still very much in vouge back then. The US didn't give up the Philippines and UK didn't give up India until WW2 was wrapping up. Most economic studies I've seen draw a thick line at 1950 as "post war economy" etc etc. Values of "efforts to improve" may not have existed at all in the mainstream media back then. Tintin was/is the French equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe today.
It is indeed, and not just Tintin in Congo, but as you say its racists elements come from the historical background the author was working on and not because Hergé was trying to promote racist views (except for Tintin in Congo BTW, because it was ordered by a very conservative editor as a propaganda work, like Hergé's first book Tintin chez les Soviets).
The vast majority of people in Axis-occupied Europe, especially in the West (France, Belgium, Netherlands) collaborated with the occupiers. I think this speaks more to the spinelessness of the average human person than to this man in particular.
"Collaborated" is overdrawn. While a very significant portion actively collaborated, it's more accurate to say that the broader majority simply acquiesced the Occupation.
This is not to diminish moral responsibility (which I think is an essentially moot topic at this juncture). But rather to bring the focus back to how these regimes actually worked.
You didn't need to be an active collaborator. You just had to not actively resist, and keep your mouth shut (or at least keep your grumblings insubstantial and subdued).
It's a real shame that copyright lasts as long as it does so that people can only really get access to things in their parent's past rather than being able to do something with the things they grew up with.
I'm still a little shocked Disney didn't try to get another extension this last time. Maybe they did quietly and were rebuffed or foiled by the utter gridlock of the US Congress.
IMO copyright should be short enough that things going into the public domain should be in the foreseeable future territory. So that it'd always be the choice of "do I watch this movie now and pay for it, or do I watch it in 5 years for free". This would disincentivize the current practice of hoarding copyrighted works for easy passive income and incentivize being actually useful for the society.
Ehh... I feel like this is heavily blockbuster-bias. If everything goes into the public domain in five years, authors will never make a dime (they already don't), and movie studios will literally just adapt the best books from the previous decade for free.
I think you need to have enough time to incentivize the creative arts to flourish. I'd say 30 to 50 years is probably fine. Enough where people are able to adapt their favorite things from their youth.
Maybe it should be different based on the type of the creative work. Movies will be fine with 3 years, music albums maybe 5-10, books maybe yes, even 30, and software (including games) let's say 10 years after release or 5 years after that particular version was last offered for sale, whichever comes first. My idea with this is that it should strike the balance between fairly compensating the author for their work and preventing the gross abuse of copyright we're currently seeing from major entertainment companies. For software, the goal is also to eliminate that whole "abandonware" grey zone that currently exists.
Do they? Usually, at least in all those movie databases, only the box office revenue is listed. And for good movies, that revenue alone covers the expenses (also listed in those databases) many times over. And, usually, if a movie failed in cinema, it's considered a failure overall. So I get the impression that it's only the cinema screenings that actually matter, and all the streaming and DVD deals are very much "nice to have" to squeeze a few more pennies.
It's not universal but a lot of movies made a lot on the long tail of DVD and broadcast rights. All the analysis articles about box office numbers are written long before the movies make it to other distribution channels. There's a whole sub category of movies out there that don't make it to the box office, "made for TV" and "direct to DVD/VHS", so need the longer tail to make their money.
The US is life of author plus 70 though meaning anything written in my lifetime will never be available in my lifetime. That number dominates for me personally and by dint of the weight and output of the US it has a big impact world wide too.
Like was saw with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19623240/), there's now also a slightly higher budget movie taking advantage of Popeye entering the public domain: Popeye the Slayer Man (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30956852/). Great line from the trailer: "You know why the factory closed down 20 years ago? There was a spinach contamination."
They need to be careful with the spinach mention! As noted in the article, the public domain version of Popeye is the version before he ate spinach. It's like how people got in legal trouble for showing Mickey with white gloves as the public domain "Steamboat" version of Mickey didn't wear them yet.
Both of the mentioned movies probably wouldn't have had any problem releasing while the copyright to the characters remained in-tact under fair use. If someone is trying to make a movie with existing well-known characters, people aren't too interested in non-transformative work, and distributors probably wouldn't distribute something due to the general lack of audience interest.
The main benefit that public domain brings to a work is that you can make small edits or changes to a work without violating its copyright. Imagine if you wanted to go through all the episodes of Spongebob, change the colors to make it clearer to watch for colorblind viewers[a], and then sell those edits as a box set or otherwise sell access to them via some accessibility-focused streaming service. Under copyright this would probably not be seen as transformative, and something non-transformative then has an incredibly high bar to clear for fair use to apply to it.
I also think that making new episodes that aren't super transformative would probably not have met the burden for Fair use: for example, making a new episode of Popeye that otherwise follows the same script beats as existing episodes would probably be seen as copyright infringement by the courts. However, once you get into the territory of making a sequel/prequel movie where you really flesh out his character, it starts getting into the realm of qualifying for transformative under fair use (depending on how the judge sees it).
But the mentioned movies really seem like they're so different from the source material. For Pooh Blood and Honey, it doesn't affecting the market for the original, given the works are so different in what they do (and there is likely 0.1% or less overlap between the audience of the slasher genre and the children's programming genre cohort), it did not use almost any of the original copyrighted works to tell its story, just its characters, and the content is transformative enough to where it's not like it's just another episode of Winnie The Pooh.
This popeye film seems to use the same approach as Blood and Honey: it's just Popeye killing people with stuff like "look, it's the Spinach from the original episodes!".
a: not sure if this would actually be beneficial, but it's the best example I can think of for a barely-transformative work other than putting sunglasses on the characters' faces or putting Subway Surfers next to it.
My understanding is that what counts as fair use is not well defined because litigation is expensive and publishers don't want to take a gamble, go to court, and potentially lose or have large legal fees to deal with.
It's less that "what counts as fair use" is ambiguous because litigation is expensive, and more that each situation of reuse is unique to where the law has codified that fair use be determined on a case-by-case basis. Case law can aid in proving your case for fair use, but there is not a framework for quashing a challenge to your fair use if your case is basically a carbon-copy of an existing legal case.
Even in this reality, for something like Pooh Blood and Honey, Disney wouldn't have touched it since their every action in legal proceedings (especially copyright-related ones) is closely followed by enthusiasts, bloggers, and the mainstream media alike. If Disney had challenged the Pooh slasher film while he was copyrighted it probably would've grossed an extra 10 million dollars.
Edit: I just learned that parody is part of fair use, so the first part of my comment is redundant.
~~I think that parody would be a far better defense than fair use.~~ But I otherwise agree that those gore movies based on children cartoons would probably be legal even before the original works had become public domain. At most, they might've required a tiny misspelling to be 100% legal and safe to sell.
I mean, South Park already had a gore parody of Mickey Mouse[1] decades before Steamboat Willie went public domain. In fact, South Park's Mickey Mouse has traits from later movies, still copyrighted in 2024, like the eye shapes and the lack of a tail.
That's why I'm unimpressed by these low quality gore parodies. What's actually going to be more exciting are the sincere animated adaptations that could be made from public domain stories, like del Toro's Pinocchio.
I found Breaking Free at random in a Brighton bookstore decades ago and it remains a cherished treasure. Glad to see someone else out there enjoyed it!
I picked it up from an anarchist stand at a comic convention in the late 1980s, where else! I don’t know where it is right now, and I’m not sure it’s a cherished treasure, more an amusing memento of my youth! Although I will be most annoyed if I can’t find it!
PSA: The 2011 Tintin movie by Spielberg is actually phenomenal. Some people were put off by the animation, but I didn't find it to fall into the uncanny valley at all. It's silly and cartoony in the right ways, and some of the action sequences are up there with the best of Indiana Jones.
Would highly recommend, though with the caveat that you'll wish they made a sequel. Unfortunately, Peter Jackson was supposed to take over for the second one, and he's not so reliable theses days.
I don't particularly like Tintin, but I was watching it with a kid and was pleasantly surprised. In the end, it was a better adventure movie than the last Indiana Jones film. The chase scene in Moroccan streets was somehow much better than the similar Tuk Tuk scene in "The Dial of Destiny" - I guess seeing CGI in a cartoon doesn't look out of place, while it didn't look close to natural in DoD.
There's this one part of the chase where Spielberg does this absurd minutes long one shot take including a 360 pan that would be impossible with live action. It's proof that we aren't awe-inspired by verisimilitude, but by audacity.
Here's a video of some of Spielberg's best one shot takes from the Every Frame a Painting channel: https://vimeo.com/94684923
Wholeheartedly agree. It bothers me how overlooked it is. Completely insane how well they captured the unique spirit and voice of the comics (read all repeatedly when young).
I have to disagree. That movie, which is a smorgasbord of incomprehensible action scenes, does not feel at all like a Tintin story. It's Indiana Jones with the numbers filed off.
The current popeye artist is a fairly interesting public domain ally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._K._Milholland ... he did a mickey mouse thing at the beginning of the year. I assume he's fine with it but I can't find any statements by him.
So in about a month we can expect to see a trailer for horror film renditions of Popeye and Tintin, (also board game Kickstarters that use them as a theme) like we did with Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh?
There's also the original 1957-1964 TV show, Herge's Adventures of Tintin. Here's a fragment of its original airing on Catalan public television (TV3) during the 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMH76zya8MQ. That's seemingly the only available piece of that particular translated version on the Internet, and its audio is damaged, at that. Makes me think of how much content has been completely lost through the years.
OTOH I miss the "Tricycle-Dinamita" absurd comedy series both in Spanish and Basque. For HNers, they are almost like the Catalan Monty Python with a background from theatres.
As a kid I found it embodied quite fittingly the naive mystery of the comics, the direction, pacing, music .. everything was on point. (Something that was lost on spielberg 3d movie variant imo, too much indiana jones in spirit)
If only it was that simple. IANAL and other disclaimers but let's take Mickey Mouse as a comparison point.
Steamboat willie is in public domain so that particular cartoon and aesthetic it introduces is fair game but modern day Mickey is not. To simplify: the one with white pants is good but the one with red ones is not.
So let's pretend Tintin had his hair style in 1929 but got his blue sweater at 1969. I would imagine that would mean that you could make anything with a Tintin character (and call it Tintin) that has the hair style but put him in a blue sweater and you'll get in trouble.
It's not just the character name that matters but various other pieces that make up the character and not all of them were introduced or became iconic in the same time period.
That must make it dangerous. If anything in your "old style reproduction" happens to resemble the newer version, even by chance, say he happens to wear a blue sweater one day. Or whatever they could claim in court was from the newer work.
My understanding, which is limited, is that anything that is from the 1929 Tintin will be public domain, but the later additions are still under copyright. So you can use the character, but not reference later stories or characters introduced later. It’s much the same as how you can freely make fiction about Thor, but you can’t freely make fiction about Thor, the Marvel character.
I searched boardgamegeek for games published in 1929. The only thing that grabbed my attention was Shambattle, the first published American miniatures wargame. It is an early, possibly the first, modern miniature wargame that used dice to resolve combat (no spring-loaded toy cannons like in Well's Little Wars for instance).
OK, I have to ask... so practically speaking, could someone use AI to create a dozen new TinTin books based on the old ones and/or background historical tidbits knowledge?
AI is a distraction here. You can use whatever tool you want. Copyright does not care how you made it. It cares about likeness and in imagery, music and text, especially names.
I’d assume you can freely use content from the earliest works, so if you eg use a character introduced in a later book it would still be covered by copyright. But I’m not sure.
I remember I tried to get an early version of Midjourney to draw something in ligne claire-style, no matter how I expressed it, it failed miserably at that. It was an early "Yeah, these models are actually pretty overfit" moment for me.
I haven't tried lately, though. I would assume it's better now.
Flux-1-Schnell does pretty decently just by prefixing a prompt describing the subject without style information with “An illustration in ligne claire style.”
Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large does pretty well out of the box (similarly to what I noted for Schnell in another comment, just using “An illustration in ligne claire style…” as the start of the prompt) without any custom fine tuning.
not a model per se but there are plenty of safeguards on, for example, oAI products.
Go ask an oAI product 'draw a portrait in the style of Patrick Nagel'.
Here's the reply I got : "I am unable to generate images in the style of Patrick Nagel due to content policy restrictions regarding artists' styles. "
I don't know of any specific copyright-centric error messages, but in my ignorant naivety I would assume that if oAI products are having problems mimicking an artists' style, it'll probably avoid copyright as much as possible.
I love reading Tintin, but being honest about it's origins and baggage is important as well. Highly recommend reading "Tintin: The Complete Companion" as well.
Looks like it will be "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets", which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Land_of_the_Sovi... says "is the first volume of The Adventures of Tintin" and "it was the only completed Tintin story that Hergé did not reproduce in colour" due to Hegré's "embarrassment at the crudeness of the work."
Every Tintin upto "Land of Black Gold" had a black-and-white version written before the war. They did not age well, and if you read them you can understand why Hergé had a hard time in the 1945-1950 period.
IIRC there were also plenty of changes in later editions that didn't relate to controversies (or to colourisation): for example radio sets were made more up-to-date.
I'd also mention that Tom McCarthy's "Tintin and The Secret of Literature" completely changed the way in which I viewed the series - genuinely exciting stuff.
It goes into public domain in the US in this case. In other countries it may remain copyrighted or already have been in public domain, depending on local laws.
In general, countries can't/don't enforce their laws outside of their territories, with lots of nuance and boundry cases.
There is zero chance that someone would "go after you" for, say, buying a copy of a Tintin book that was made without permission, in America. If you, say, wanted to publish a Tintin book and then export it to Europe, they might disallow it.
Belgians would have to look up their local version of that.
But to answer your question is it depends on the country. Les say one country has 100 years. Another has 50. It is now year 75. In the 50 year country and you make a derivative you are fine. But take that same thing to the 100 year country then you might be in trouble. But only if you bring the stuff into that country. Now others may import it but that is on them not you. But you might have to prove that out in court. Also in the US sound recordings can bet more tricky as there are also state laws that come into play.
The state law stuff only applies to unpublished sound recordings. Anything published has copyright terms fixed by federal law (although the terms differ from other copyrightable works which I did not know before googling this matter), but for the next couple decades-ish, sound recordings enter the public domain 100 years after publication.
So now that a lot of books used for studying literature will become freely available, I wonder how long it's going to be before the syllabus "needs revising"
Somewhat tangential, but it makes me nuts that my son's small high school, that is always struggling for money, pays stupid amounts for Disney scripts for the school plays instead of doing Shakespeare or any of the other public domain plays out there.
How much do they pay exactly? Does it come out of a specific program’s budget, eg drama? Just curious.
To play a devil’s advocate:
Perhaps the plays generate some money for the school or the drama program. Disney might draw a larger audience.
Also, for better or worse (probably worse), Disney is “safe” and designed for mass appeal.
Small schools probably have a harder time with these sorts of decisions. Ideally, a school might encourage adaptations of classics, to foster deeper understanding and creativity (as well as to ensure that there aren’t too many “re-runs”, furthering student and audience interest). But a larger student populace makes that easier via access to more ideas, more interest, more hands.
They pay about $1K per production. It's certainly not making them any money, as the ticket sales amount to about $500 total, and that money is coming from parents and family who would be paying the $5 ticket price no matter what is on stage. Nobody else is attending these plays. I think the main reason they're doing it is because it is what most the kids want to do, especially because it is a combine high school/middle school play so there are younger kids in it.
At least this year, they let the seniors pick the play and completely run the show. They're still paying about a grand for the rights, but they did make a more interesting choice, "The Crucible".
It's easier for the same reason that in 500 years no one will watch or have heard of any of Disney's products, and people will still be reading and performing Shakespeare wherever English is spoken.
Maybe the argument is accessibility, Disney is much more approachable and likely to get the kids invested and involved than Shakespeare and is worth the cost?
Not only that, but what GP is suggesting would require schools to have a reasonable, sizeable budget. Schools provide most of that reading material, so they'd have to be the party responsible for buying all of the new, copyrighted books.
A fairly laughable idea if you follow the general trend of school budgets...
Schools love nothing more than wasting money on unnecessary trash they get sold by their distributors, choose your own reasons for why that is in spite of ever-loudening complaints of budget constraint. How else could not just one but multiple full length textbooks on Algebra 1 get written, published and distributed every year?
Why? Most books you read in lit class aren't part of a textbook. You just buy the Dover Thrift edition of some book for $2.99 and read that. Or a used copy, or the Gutenberg e-text. Nobody at the school makes any money on it.
Crazy how much Walt Disney's lobbying so many years ago had such an impact and irreparable damage to digital content access, as well as, all the TPM nonsense that came after.
We simply normalized users not owning content because of him.
A 25 year window should be more than appropriate for copyright protection.
I completely agree, I'd fully support copyright being reduced to 25-30 years.
The whole point of copyright is to grant an initial monopoly to a creator so they can benefit from their work, promoting the viability of further creative works. It's supposed to be a positive for the ecosystem as well as just the individual creator but I'd argue absurdly lengthy copyright terms, the fact IP trolls are a viable business model, and the fact large corporations end up dominating the creative space are all ways copyright as it stands negatively effects the overall creative ecosystem. 30 years or about that would permit the creator to benefit exclusively from the original release and a nostalgia cycle, but then it'd be fair game for everyone else to build on which is how culture has always worked. I think that arrangement would be far healthier and promote more creativity.
So you want to live in a world where someone thinks they can get what they want by creating an incident serious and dramatic enough to garner media attention and that will wake people up? That’s not how you get things done. In fact I’d say it’s probably counter productive.
How about you work to persuade people why your opinion of copyright law is better than the status quo? Put the work in, attract followers and funding, get big enough so your voice has real political and democratic power.
This is how you affect change. But it takes work. Making a scene might feel good and is easy but don’t have any meaningful effect.
Set aside that none of the school shootings has changed national gun policy ...
Set aside that it's unlikely the US health insurance system is unlikely to change, especially given the majority party's calls to tear down "Obamacare" and privatize more ...
There is no head, not even a symbolic one, for the current IP/copyright system.
DRM is in every fucking thing these days because many businesses profit by protecting their business model via government-granted IP monopoly.
General Jackson may have slayed the Many Headed Monster, but at least you could count the heads. When 10,000+ organizations benefit from the IP/copyright system, the hydra heads are too many for one to make a difference.
>DRM is in every fucking thing these days because many businesses profit by protecting their business model via government-granted IP monopoly.
I never argued for tearing down the IP/DRM system. I'm advocating for better restricting it to shorter periods so that the initial IP holders can profit from it for a while but not virtually indefinitely.
> Set aside that none of the school shootings has changed national gun policy ...
Because they weren't strategically targeting anything...
> Set aside that it's unlikely the US health insurance system is unlikely to change, especially given the majority party's calls to tear down "Obamacare" and privatize more ...
That's up for debate since the event happened so recently.
> Because they weren't strategically targeting anything...
There is a long history of strategically targeted killings in the US not doing anything, so you need more qualifiers than that.
Kaczynski targeted "people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the natural environment." (quoting Wikipedia). Did that change anything?
The 1919 United States anarchist bombings targeted (if I interpret "Plain Words" correctly from the Wikipedia page) the powerful who started the class war. That didn't seem effective either.
> That's up for debate
That's kinda my point. You cannot say this is a "moment" and imply it will change anything when (so far) nothing has changed.
What do you think the change might be?
I watched Michael Moore's "Sicko" last night, after he released it for free. I found it far more powerful in convincing me the US healthcare and childcare system is totally fucked up.
Why didn't we have a Sicko moment when it was released, and what's changed?
> Kaczynski targeted "people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the natural environment." (quoting Wikipedia). Did that change anything?
Well, maybe not much but I believe it did a little. At the very least, it contributed to a growing body of technological skepticism. And it probably did inspire Luigi Mangione, too. If Mangione's attack changes something, then indirectly Kaczynski's work changed something too.
Again, not arguing morals here, just analyzing historical facts and extrapolating.
>Kaczynski targeted "people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the natural environment." (quoting Wikipedia). Did that change anything?
The problem with that argument is that Kaczynski targeted random innocent people who had nothing to do with the faults in the system, while Luigi targeted one of the heads(pun not intended) directly responsible for the faults with the system, which is why a lot of the people support his actions.
You may need even more qualifiers. Violent radical environmental groups currently carry out sabotage rather than targeting those directly responsible for the faults with the system, perhaps due to personal ethics, but perhaps because because they think a lot of people would not support those more violent actions.
A pro-lifer killed the doctor George Tiller, who was one of the few to carry out late-term abortions. Here too we see someone who considers the system so broken that it allows late-term abortions, and with others grateful for the murder, but we don't talk about that as a key moment.
I think the best parallel is Charles J. Guiteau's assassination of James A. Garfield in 1881 is a moment, which was a "moment" which helped the decades-long transition from the spoils system to the civil service system. Sadly, it looks like the next administration prefers going back to patronage.
BTW, I quoted how Kaczynski did not target random people (excepting, I think, Flight 444, which his Wikipedia article says he later regarded as a mistake because it was too indiscriminate.)
Actually, Kaczynski did attempt to target those responsible for failings of the system, including a geneticist, computer store owners, etc.
The reason why Kaczynski didn't have support is because he believed that all of advanced technology was a problem and of course he targeted "low-level" people compared to CEOs, and most people don't agree with his technology thesis anyway, whereas most people disagree that healthcare in the US is messed up.
How are computer store owners responsible for the societal change occurring due to technology at the time? Weren't the likes of IBM, PayPal mafia, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates the ones more likely responsible for that?
It’s not clear that insurance company CEOs are responsible for the problem. Insurance companies have rather low profit margins — even if they were non-profit, perfectly efficient, and all their employees worked for free, it would have a marginal effect on the system but not change it fundamentally.
Hollywood accounting has taught me to seriously distrust what "profit margin" means.
If company X rents a building from company Y, and X and Y are both owned by company A, then X can have no profit on the books, even though A still gets the money.
> Crazy how much Walt Disney's lobbying so many years ago had such an impact and irreparable damage to digital content access, as well as, all the TPM nonsense that came after.
This isn't true, but it won't stop people claiming otherwise on HN.
(The main reason the US extended copyright protection is because it had committed to not be out of line with the EU terms in international treaties, and the EU reached their number by harmonising to the longest amongst the member states which was Germany, and the main reason German copyright is so long is due to their domestic publishing and newspaper industries).
> and the main reason German copyright is so long is due to their domestic publishing and newspaper industries
This is surprising to me.
Not domestic publishing (I understand how that could have happened) but why would newspapers even care about protecting what they wrote about 30 years ago — how are they expecting to monetise today on how they reported in 1994 on such things such as the United Nations accepting Palau as a new member, or the Swiss Federal Assembly's approval of the Marrakesh agreement, or whoever won whichever sports events?
Today's headlines are tomorrow's fish and chips wrappers, as the British say.
I mean the main reason is that (at least then, but somewhat so today) the largest newspaper publishers in Germany and their biggest literature publishers were the same people, honestly. But it meant that the press were very much on side. They probably also felt that their archives were more valuable pre-internet.
Germany also just has a tradition of very strong authors rights.
See, every day we get new data to train LLMs. Just think, all of the current LLMs were trained without Popeye, Tintin, Faulkner and Hemmingway. Just imagine how much better they will be with all this new public domain data to use for training! /s
IANAL either, but that is _way_ oversold by the general public. It's only parody if the point of the new work is saying something about the original.
Popeye having explicit sex with Olive Oyl isn't parody, it's just for people to get their rocks off. There's no commentary on the original work being made. Nothing wrong with that, but if people think they're in the clear because they shout "parody", they're mistaken.
You act like that has stopped any artist. Ned time you hear about a new Pokemon game releasing or any expansion to a franchise. New characters will have content drawn of them before the announcement is over.
