Visual Novels

So on the subject of the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, January 1st, 2024 is actually the day the very first incarnation of Mickey Mouse will make it to the public domain. Finally.

Except...not quite. See Mickey's Headed to the Public Domain! But Will He Go Quietly? (HTTP-only):

The answer lies in the realm of trademark law. [...] So, on January 1, 2024, the very first Mickey Mouse cartoon Steamboat Willie will pass into the public domain, along with The Barn Dance. [...] Many people also believe that this means that Mickey himself (Minnie and Pete as well) will also pass into the public domain, and anyone will be able to make new Mickey Mouse cartoons. This is by no means certain, as the application of trademark principles may prevent this.

Leaving nothing to chance, Disney has also obtained 19 different trademark registrations for the words “Mickey Mouse,” including live action and animated television shows, 9 cartoon strips, 10 comic books, 11 theme parks, 12 and computer games. 13 Disney also has trademark registrations for Mickey’s visual appearance for animated and live action motion picture films.

Somehow, trademark law is being abused to eternally extend copyright! Trademarking characters prevents commercial distribution of work that is not copyright-infringing. We'll see if Disney is actually able to employ this in practice starting next year. Way to go Disney, plundering our public domain and ladder-pulling it for the rest of us.

And I'm sorry if this is not interesting to you at all, lol.

Holy, I didn’t know of Veronica Mars before this but it doesn’t really surprise me. I bet they figured the movie would never break even normally so they just extorted fans; this doesn’t even remotely look like incompetence.

Veronica Mars is a great show! At least, the first three seasons are. The movie is alright, and the fourth season is...fine. It's just a shame Warner Brothers are, well, a corporation. And after doing some more reading, it's possible the reported budget of the film only includes the production budget and not the marketing budget. $3.5M seems like a pretty bad performance so I wonder if they did actually make a profit in the end.

It's worth noting that backers who could actually watch the film on Flixster (WB's part-owned streaming service that has since died a violent death) had a worse experience than people who bought the film on iTunes or wherever else. They didn't get a HD version. So backers ended up mailing in receipts after buying the film elsewhere, which Warner Brothers refunded. Sounds like a total mess.

I’ll keep that in mind; it is sad to see it’s not FOSS (or at least not from what I can see).

Yeah, sorry, I should have mentioned that. MakeMKV is proprietary and under standard copyright, but the sources for every release are provided for compiling yourself on GNU/Linux (and wherever else you can get it to work). It's C++ and you can try poking around in there. I don't know C++ yet, so I couldn't tell you what the program does :) Some of the components GulpinSoft has developed seem to be free software, just from checking the headers of some files?

Sources here: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=224 (Edit: Fixed URL)

The linux release includes full source code for MakeMKV GUI, libmakemkv multiplexer library and libdriveio MMC drive interrogation library.

I'm not quite sure how it works. I think they have a keyserver which provides keys for particular Blurays. My understanding is MakeMKV does extract the key itself, so it's not like you need to rely on keys from the developer's site...but I could be wrong. Regardless, I've found the interface a lot more usable than Handbrake and it has been very reliable.

You can use MakeMKV indefinitely with the Beta key. The program has been in beta for over ten years now, so there's probably not much risk of a full release... even then, it's only a one-time purchase for a license you can use on as many computers as you like, on any operating system you like, forever, even with the full release.

I should note that mpv seems to be handling subtitles very poorly in the resulting mkv files. Like, sometimes not being able to switch to them or the timing being out. VLC handles them completely fine though. I don't really care, since I don't use subtitles, but it seemed important to note if you use mpv (which you probably do).

MKV video is fantastic though

It's a fantastic format for playback! It's It's not so great for editing in an NLE because of, well, how much stuff it supports.

Same happened with the switch to smartphones where these devices lost things like user replaceable batteries even though there is no technological reason for it, and it’s taking the might of the european union to undo this age old trend.

Yeah, that's true. I hope it actually does get better over time...I feel like a luddite sometimes eschewing new technology because I don't like the way they treat me.

Definitely going to give that a read; I do know that we have proper technologies for decentralized file hosting and indexing (not just bittorrent, but also IPFS which bases itself on the same technologies), these will definitely become a requirement if we want to fight over the ability to share information freely.

The article touches on the history of libraries but is more focused on comparing it to file sharing, which nonetheless, I found super interesting. Is there a particular advantage IPFS has over BitTorrent? BitTorrent has a lot of advantages over HTTPS for transferring files, so I'm curious. BitTorrent is technically superior to HTTPS in several ways, so for practical reasons alone it's worthwhile using. The decentralized aspect is a bonus.