afloweroutofstone:

bogleech:

titleknown:

afloweroutofstone:

I’d like to thank The American Prospect for giving me the opportunity today to publish my first ever article in an actual established outlet, hopefully the first of many. Here’s why I think we need to break up the Walt Disney Company.

This has been an incredible year for the Walt Disney Company. Not only has Avengers: Endgame become the best-selling movie in box office history, but Disney currently holds all four slots for this year’s top-earning films. However, the company’s dominance isn’t quite something to celebrate.

At the moment, almost 38 percent of all U.S. box office sales in 2019 have gone to a Disney-owned movie, down from a peak of over 40 percent earlier this year. And that’s even before coming releases of Frozen 2, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker. As we can see by looking at the U.S. box office over the last 30 years, Disney has more than doubled its already significant market share in just five years, reaching an unprecedented point in modern history for a film company…

Within the next couple of years, there is a good chance that the majority of all money made from wide-release movies will go into the pockets of the Walt Disney Company. Even if you consider yourself a dedicated Disney fan, this should concern you…

The Walt Disney Company is no longer the gentle giant of film and animation of yesteryear. Today, Disney is a multinational corporate conglomerate that takes in over $10 billion a year in profits alone. Its consistent growth and strategy of buying out other firms has put the company in a position of nearly unprecedented power in the U.S. media market, and thus in the global media market as well.

This position gives Disney the ability to offer lower-quality products, crush competitors, squeeze profits from other markets, influence politicians in its favor, and more. As the controversy around modern monopolies heats up, it is becoming clear that we need a generalized revitalization of antitrust law in the United States. As part of such a campaign, Disney too must be identified as a monopolistic corporate titan in severe need of being broken up into a number of smaller companies in order to restore both fair competition and the sanctity of American democracy.

Reblogging because, I will say as someone who’s been relatively…. salty  in the past over your media takes, I’m surprised how even-keeled and not-condescending this was. 

My favorite quote (bolding mine):

This is perhaps the best case for why Disney’s monopoly status is a problem even for fans of Disney and its subsidiaries: The lack of powerful competition means Disney simply doesn’t have to make as many films. Based on the numbers above, the Disney of today would likely have never approved the making of lesser-known fan favorites like Air Bud, James and the Giant Peach, Ed Wood, or O Brother, Where Art Thou?, nor would they have agreed to distribute Japanese masterpieces like Howl’s Moving Castle or Spirited Awayin America.

Reduction in the quantity of movies doesn’t mean an increase in quality; it may well mean the opposite. When Disney decides what ideas to put money behind, they aren’t doing it based on the actual quality of the movie, but on its potential profitability. Ed Wood, one of Disney’s worst-selling movies of 1994, has a 92 percent from critics and an 88 percent from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. Compare this to Beverly Hills Chihuahua, a film that made 16 times as much in net gross but received a 40 percent and 52 percent, respectively. Guess which would get made today?

I’d also cite Tron Legacy and The Black Cauldron as those sorts of experiments that’d never be done today, perhaps even Kingdom Hearts, and I have a hunch that my Disney-fan friend @friendlytroll​ would find that a compelling argument.

But, there is one caveat I will add: Any movement to break up Disney needs to be inherently entwined with the movement to reduce copyright duration, because the current copyright monopoly due to its overextension is what’s fueling this “consolidation creep”

Like, I will say, the way copyright has been expanded and the possibility of narrative crossover (A natural tendency of human storytelling, if you know your history) being tied to the “generosity” of a monopoly is an extremely classic “enclosure of the commons” scenario. 

Doubly so when one considers the re-conceptualization of copyright as a temporary legal protection to a god-given right, or even the backlash that is punching down at people for their desire for crossover rather than protesting its capture.

I say reduction back to 56 years, retroactively as per the previous extensions, is the most solid idea, specifically because of its precedent in previous copyright law and it being long enough to help individuals more than mega corps*, and also because; essentially; if it were done, everything Walt did during his lifetime would be public domain.**

And, I think the public would be way less willing to back Disney, as some of the cynics suggest they would, if the proposition were framed as “Break up Disney and give its stories back to the people,” rather than “Break up Disney, fuck you sycophantic fan-drones” 

So yeah, we cannot separate the fight to break up Disney from the fight to reduce copyright, because the expansion of copyright is the major force driving their consolidation creep. #56OrBust Y’ALL!

*Though, I will say also that in this law there’d need to be a program of reparations paid by the corporate rightsholders to those families whose works will lapse because of this, who did not get proper restitution from the corporate owners of said works in the creator’s lifetimes. 

Cause, the treatment of independent creators as “collateral damage” is far too common in copyright-shrinking discourse, and a thing we need to talk about, but that’s for another post.

**This also goes for most of the major Marvel superhero properties Disney uses, all the Carl Barks duck stories Duck Tales was based on, and all of the 1950s monster movies that Fox’s big franchises were basically modern revamps of.

Actually didn’t we used to have laws specifically against being this big of a conglomerate? I could swear when I was a kid it was all over the news that some huge corporation was taken to court and broken up into smaller companies. Am I imagining that? If I’m not, what changed and when?

@bogleech​ A lot of people have replied to this, but I’d figure I’d give my own answer. You’re likely thinking of US v. Microsoft in 2001, which was the last truly major anti-trust case that the US government has brought. The short answer to your question is that the laws still exist on the books, but have been reinterpreted over time by conservative scholars like Robert Bork who argued that anti-trust laws not only should be narrowly focused on specific economic criteria (a myopic understanding of “consumer welfare”), but also that that was indeed the original intent of the laws. Though this is demonstrably false, the neoliberal revolution of the 1980′s and beyond solidified its position among other absurd doctrines in the consensus of Washington policymakers.

Here’s a segment of my article which was cut for length:

Anti-trust laws aimed at breaking up monopolies were weakened to the point of irrelevancy in the 1970’s and 1980’s, in large part due to Chicago School economists who claimed that the laws should only serve an extremely narrow economic purpose. But from the beginning, anti-trust laws had not only economic considerations in mind, but political ones too. In his excellent book on our modern monopoly problem, “The Curse of Bigness,” Tim Wu notes that Senator John Sherman, the namesake of the trust-busting Sherman Act, feared that when “the concerted powers of this combination [‘of inequality of condition, of wealth, and opportunity’] are entrusted to a single man, it is a kingly prerogative, inconsistent with our form of government.”

Others agreed. In Standard Oil Co. v. U.S., conservative Justice John Harlan warned in his partial dissent of “the slavery that would result from aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations controlling, for their own profit and advantage exclusively, the entire business of the country, including the production and sale of the necessaries of life.” Later, in a dissent for another case, Justice William Douglas added that the Sherman Act was passed out of the view that “all power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy.”

The conservative Chicago school interpretation of anti-trust not only ignored the variety of harmful economic effects of corporate concentration that didn’t meet their specific criteria (effects on wages, innovation, business formation, etc.), but they also completely ignored the political case for the laws. That’s what I mean when I say in the article that “Many of the pioneers of antitrust law were not only worried that monopolies are inefficient and rig markets, but also that they are undemocratic and rig governments.” If you’re interested in the topic, I’d highly recommend that book I mentioned, Tim Wu’s “The Curse of Bigness,” which is a great recent read on the evolution of anti-trust in the US and why we should bring it back.