“There are not two sexes, there are n sexes; there are as many sexes as there are assemblages. And since each of us enters into several assemblages, each of us has n sexes. When children discover that they are reduced to one sex, male or female, they discover their powerlessness: they lose the machinic sense and are left only with the signification of a tool. And then a child really does fall into depression. They have been damaged; their countless sexes have been stolen!”
— Gilles Deleuze, “The Interpretation of Utterances”
the thing about copyright abolition is that. what makes theft bad is that something is taken away from its rightful owner. in this sense, copyright infringement is literally not theft, because making a copy of something doesn't tangibly cause the original owner to lose anything that they would otherwise have. copyright enforcement, on the other hand, does take away people's access to what should be theirs. anyone who makes art while employed by a corporation and is unable to sell their work because it does not belong to them, anyone who's been sued by a pop musician for making music that sounds vaguely similar if you don't allow the jury to listen to the actual songs, these people have far more in common with victims of theft than anyone whose copyright has been infringed
like the thing with the film rights to MLK's speeches being owned by spielberg / dreamworks, that's not actually an instance where copyright law failed to protect artists. that's the system working as intended. MLK's speeches were his intellectual property. when he died the rights to that intellectual property transfered to his family, and his family decided to sell those rights to dreamworks, thereby functionally preventing anyone else from legally using those speeches in a film for the next several decades. no crime was committed, nobody was tricked into anything, that's just how intellectual property rights work
Legalizing copyright infringement would be dismantling one of the few limitations on the white urge to steal from Black Art and Black Artists. The practical application of it would be anti-Black as fuck
this argument makes so many assumptions that I disagree with that I don't know where to start
Steven Spielberg has received criticism for buying the film rights to MLK's speeches, and further controversy stems from King's estate.
In 2009, Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks company paid the estate for film rights to King's words, along with his life rights, which allow a person or company to make content based on an individual's story. DreamWorks has yet to produce or direct Spielberg's planned King biopic, but the rights have caused complications for numerous filmmakers. (Neither Spielberg's literary agent nor King's estate returned Broadly's request for comment.)
King has received only one major biopic, 2014's Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay […] Instead of using King's speeches, DuVernay wrote original monologues that sounded like soliloquies the civil rights leader could have given. […] When asked about the changes in 2014, DuVernay told the Washington Post, "We knew those rights are already gone. They're with Spielberg."
This is not the first time the dead have been used as actors in a game.
As noted earlier, Stranger Than Heaven is about gang violence in Japan, but more than that, it is about how the protagonist goes on to found the Tojo Clan, the largest and most powerful gang within the Like a Dragon games. The fact that Shakur was himself a victim of the type of violence the Tojo clan goes on to perpetuate makes his inclusion in the Tojo’s founding chapter astonishingly distasteful. RGG Studio’s explanation of his inclusion and depiction is lacking as well, with them telling Game Informer, “Well, if Snoop Dogg and Tupac have this relationship in the game together, you'd probably cry about that because it's so cool!'” […]
In the absence of Shakur himself, his estate controls the rights to his likeness. This is also true for every other person who has been brought back in this way, but there are key differences in how this has been handled among the various parties named earlier. For Fisher and Cushing, their inclusion was in a long-running series that they themselves had already been a part of in life. While they did not themselves agree to the appearances, there remains some level of continuity of point and purpose for the inclusion.
For Shakur, the Like a Dragon series is entirely foreign. He did not know of it, and the extent of what Shakur could have envisioned as the use of his likeness in perpetuity is beyond our knowledge. Further still, the executors of Tupac Shakur’s estate are not actually members of his family; it is controlled by former Warner Brothers record executive Tom Whalley. Whalley was left the estate by Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s Mother, but ongoing legal battles with Tupac’s remaining family color Whalley’s handling as less than stellar. So while RGG Studio claims they received approval from the family, RGG Studios finds themselves between parties looking to control what remains of Tupac Shakur’s legacy.
When all of this is considered, it becomes impossible to separate Shakur’s appearance in Stranger Than Heaven from the longstanding exploitation and commodification of black bodies throughout history. As noted in Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife, Harvard restricted access to and profited from images of slaves in compromised positions (though they have since relinquished ownership), entire industries and subcultures were built upon photographs of lynchings, and more recent tragedies like the murder of George Floyd have been subject to continual public viewing, all while being used by corporations for marketing ends. Violence against black people is continually dredged up for some other purpose, removing the humanity of those involved from the equation.
2pac’s sister, Sekyiwa Shakur, is reportedly taking legal action to protect her brother’s estate. As reported on The Jasmine Brand, Sekyiwa
[…] After Tupac’s tragic death in 1996, his mother, Afeni Shakur, was the beneficiary of his estate. She passed away in 2016, and Whalley became the executor of Afeni’s estate, which has funds from 2pac primarily. Sekyiwa and ‘The Tupac Shakur Foundation’ accuse Whalley of embezzling millions “for his own benefit.” According to the lawsuit, it says, “Upon information and belief, Whalley has already received more than $5.5 million that he has paid himself in the last five years through Amaru… he has effectively embezzled millions of dollars for his own benefit well in excess of what would be reasonably necessary to retrain a property qualified third-party to perform such services.” It goes on to say, “As a result, Whalley has unreasonably enriched himself at the expense of the beneficiaries and in bad faith by taking excessive compensation.”
gamechangershow
origamiaround
amandla
theartofmadeline
