Disney Claims Anyone Using a Twitter Hashtag is Agreeing To Their Terms of Use (slashgear.com) 91
Chris Burns, writing for SlashGear: This morning the official Disney+ Twitter account suggested that Star Wars fans could celebrate the next big holiday with the biggest brand in the galaxy. "Celebrate the Saga," they said, "Reply with your favorite #StarWars memory and you may see it somewhere special on #MayThe4th." The follow up to this message with a bit of lawyer language. "By sharing your message with us using #MayThe4th," said the account, "you agree to our use of the message and your account name in all media and our terms of use here: disneytermsofuse.com."
The only possible response is (Score:5, Funny)
#FuckYouDisney
Another one - #GoodLuckWithThat (Score:5, Insightful)
IP whores defending IP that shouldn't even be IP 43 years after its creation.
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Yeah also: #MakeAFuckingGoodMovieFirstThe4thBeWithYou. Pretty sure a disclaimer must be attached to the thing it's disclaiming.
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#FuckYouDisney
... even better, avoid financially supporting any multinational corporations. They can only exploit us, because we continue to allow them to do so.
Even better, (Score:4, Informative)
Even better, pay attention to which ones do bad things and which ones do good things. Like men, or "white people" or whatever, not all are the same. Being led by different people, some people do good via their companies and some do bad.
For example, Newegg leads in the fight against patent trolls. Other companies ARE patent trolls. Slight difference. It would be error to lump them both together and treat them the same because both are companies.
Re:The only possible response is (Score:5, Insightful)
@Disney regarding #StarWars, let #MayThe4th be the end of the Kathleen Kennedy era.
Re:The only possible response is (Score:4, Insightful)
It's either that or the end of Star Wars.
What made Star Wars special ain't the story. It's the millenia old story of knights and sorcerers put into space. That's basically it. And while the special effects were groundbreaking back in 1977, they weren't even that stellar anymore when the prequel trilogy came around and they sure as all hell didn't push any kind of envelopes in the sequel trilogy.
What made Star Wars the phenomenon it was was the huge, HUGE overblown universe that was created around it and the people who would spend every waking hour trying to learn about it. Because they were also the ones that bought your merch. I mean, be real, do you REALLY think anyone would buy a toy for their kids that costs a couple 100 bucks and doesn't even remotely look like it warrants that expense? Let's face it, those things were bought by geeks who sunk their life into that whole story.
That kinda goes out the window when you toss that whole universe out on the curb and basically tell exactly those people who were your cash cows to grow up.
Re: The only possible response is (Score:4, Interesting)
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It was a very good fiction, though only barely sciencey. The story was pretty cliche but told in a very compelling way. Then enormous, immersive lore was built around it, and it sold well.
Then some idiots discarded everything that made Star Wars good, the whole rich decor, kept only the generic structural parts, applied new, unappealing paint and were surprised nobody liked it.
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I would equate it more with fantasy than I would with science fiction. It's set a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. It doesn't try to even justify how anything works on a scientific level, and doesn't even talk about how technology influences society. it's really just a bunch of wizards and knights running around in space.
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Mostly because it isn't Science Fiction. It's Fantasy in a space setting.
The story of Star Wars (the original one) is basically the staple of Japanese medieval kabuki theater. The old samurai master who was disgraced, swore off fighting and lives the life of a peasant finds a young apprentice who insists in being trained by the reluctant master, the master sacrifices himself to protect the apprentice and regains his honor that way, with the apprentice righting the wrong that disgraced his master. That's in
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discalimer: i never sat through any of the films in its entirety so maybe there's a sudden twist at the end that lifts it from a interesting VFX spectacle to something spectacularly interesting?
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Nope you got it. Hell most of my friends that are star wars fans don't even like the majority of the movies. They like the first 3, none of the prequels and 1-2 of the sequels. That's a crappy average for a multibillion dollar franchise spending hundreds of millions per movie. A 40% hit rate might be ok if you pick a random big budget movie off the shelf I suppose, but to worship a franchise like it can do no wrong when that seems like all its been able to do for the last 25yrs ...
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The hardcore fans are not the main source of revenue for Star Wars.
Most of the merchandise is not what fans collect. It's t-shirts sold in supermarkets, Lego sets, cheap plastic light sabres. Even those disposable plastic cups they serve your Star Wars coke in count towards the merchandise income numbers.
Most of the rest of the income is ticket/DVD/streaming sales and licencing. All the rest of it, the conventions and EU books and the rest, are small fry.
That's why Disney ditched all the EU stuff. It was fa
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I'd guess that's a bit short sighted. Let's face it, every Star Wars fan bought every single version of Star Wars that Lucas ever produced. In between moaning and whining, they bought every collector's edition, revamped edition, HD-whatever edition and everything else of every single movie they already had in at least half a dozen other versions at home. Who does that? Sure, you can cash in right after pushing a movie out on selling some trash with the movie logo on it, but who gives half a shit about it a
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She has a 5/2 hit:miss ratio which isn't bad.
Force Awakens, Rogue One, Last Jedi, Mandalorian and Clone Wars were all good or great. Solo and Rise of the Skywalker sucked.
Prior to that you had the prequels. Be glad they took it away from Lucas.
Re: The only possible response is (Score:1)
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The only scene in "The Force Awakens" that was really good had Max von Sydow in it. Then it went downhill.
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The only one I saw was Force Awakens and when I walked out of the theater the franchise was dead to me. It felt like an AI had be programmed to watch the original trilogy and write a script in the same vein. Every scene had to be an homage or have some wink to the originals to assure the viewers, "Don't worry, we won't spoil your wonderful Star Wars with any original ideas." The prequels were fantastic and original, despite being significantly different from the first trilogy, and that's why the fan base ha
Re: The only possible response is (Score:1)
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It wasn't that bad, but what really ruined Rise of the Skywalker was that they listened to the internet fanboys too much. All the good ideas and interesting stuff in Last Jedi got ditched and they just made a couple of hours of lame fan service and half baked ideas that would have fit right into one of the terrible Expanded Universe novels.
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As usual you're living in opposite-world. Listening to internet loudmouths is what caused TLJ to be such an absolute steaming pile of shit that it destroyed the entire Star Wars brand name. TLJ didn't have "interesting stuff" and "good ideas" that the next movie "ditched", it WAS the movie that ditched anything remotely salvageable.
Re: The only possible response is (Score:2)
The Thrawn Trilogy was a pretty good âoesequelâ to the original trilogy. IMHO, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I will have to give the prequels credit for doing something different. Especially since the sequel trilogy ended up just rehashing the original trilogy over and over. Their main problem was characters that we mostly didn't really care about, horrible dialog, special effects that really haven't stood up that well, and some of blatant merchandising tie-ins (pod racing) or just making the movies too kidsy (Attack of the Clones). I'd say their biggest problem was letting George Lucas control most everything
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Force Awakens, Rogue One, Last Jedi, Mandalorian and Clone Wars were all good or great.
Rogue One was a big old pile of meh in my opinion, right down to every character dying in reverse order of importance. It as very by the numbers. The Last Jedi was 50% of a really good film and 50% if a terrible film.
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Ah, the -1 disagree "troll" mod. Some moderators are such snowflakes, can't handle people not sharing their opinions.
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Cmon Ami you can't have it both ways, either you can claim that SJW Star Wars' staggering unpopularity was all due to russian bots OR you can pretend they were popular but not both.
Mandalorian and Rogue One are the only Disney properties so far to be merely mediocre rather than complete garbage. TLJ in particular was so awful it led to the first Star Wars property to lose money in the history of the franchise.
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Um, The Last Jedi grossed $1.3bn at the world wide box office and was the highest grossing movie of 2017. It's also the second most profitable Star Wars movie ever with a net profit of $417 million.
You will also note that audiences liked it too. CinemaScore interviews people as they leave the cinema and found an average rating of A on a scale of A+ to F. Other surveys that ensured people had actually seen the movie before rating it found the same thing.
It's all in the Wikipedia article complete with numerou
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Well said. I think the average "fan" only likes 2 out of 11 movies and two TV shows.
They complain about TLJ not having accurate physics... In a Star Wars movie. The EU novels they cite as the gold standard are mostly awful.
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No Contract, No Agreement (Score:5, Informative)
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What's the current contract to begin with? I don't use twitter but it seems to me a public platform with public posts.
The news seems to take any tweet they want and use it as click-bait - do they have to ask permission? Does anyone?
Can I quote your post Xopher? Can I link to it on a page I run for profit ?
Obviously I Am Not A Lawyer.
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I agree, but you can still learn about the mental state of those that even try to make those statements.
They are basically sociopathic arrogant bullies.
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it's a public corporation that sells stuff to consumers.
it's not meaningless if they claim something and try to get away with it. they could for example claim that you agreed to pay them more by going to the movies - it's illegal to try to claim stuff like that as a company selling to consumers. in most countries anyways.
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If this flies, abuse is afoot (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's how:
1. Lay claim to something you don't own.
2. Pretend using it means that whoever uses it agrees to any arbitrary clause you attach to it.
3. Profit.
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And see the twitter thread go south.
I doubt that Disney want to put claim to most of what's posted now.
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Posters on Twitter don't own their tweets, either. They're fair game for anyone to post anywhere else without asking permission from the poster. It's in the Twitter TOS.
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Its amusing, but you can actually do this in many states in the US - file a lien against a property (easy to do, just file it - you dont need proof or permission from the owner) but never tell the owner. Really complicates matters when it comes up in a sale and can be a bastard to get removed without the permission of the filer of the lien.
Land of the fr^H^HLawyers (Score:3, Insightful)
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Is it me or does "influencer" sound like some kind of disease?
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Is it me or does "influencer" sound like some kind of disease?
Likely some form of medical abnormality or procedure. Almost certainly requiring a finger up someones butt.
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I believe it's a social (media) disease.
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It's a comment on a public forum and copyright should cover the usage one way or another.
They can't arbitrarily decide usage of a pattern grants consent, but it is Disney so it would likely never be contested.
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#MayThe4th Disney ... as if millions of voices [...] were suddenly silenced.
I hereby claim... (Score:1)
I claim any use of the tag #boulficerent belongs to me, and all words surrounding the associated tag thereof!
Good luck in court with that though.
Sounds like some Disney lawyer was hitting up the Covid a little hard that day to me.
#SlashMillions (Score:2)
I hereby claim #SlashMillions. Use of this on a website requires a payment of $10M USD within 24 hours... Pay up Slashdot. Pay up.
Hilarious (Score:3)
Given the numerous ways twitter users can discover trending hashtags, I don't see how they could possibly argue anyone even saw their terms or even knew they existed. Since it's an entirely uncommon use, a typical twitter user could not even have expected that terms might have existed.
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Not only that, but they're attaching it to a yearly pun used by the fans of Star Wars for the past multiple decades which only makes it even easier to say you had no idea about Disney's new rules - you were just posting Star Wars jokes on that date because of the pun.
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although the majority of tweets with the tag now are people telling disney to go get fucked
What an amazing coincidence! (Score:3)
By using #MayThe4th Disney is also agreeing to my terms of use.
Ever since society cast that magic spell in the mid-1970s that causes people to agree to whatever you want them to have agreed to, life sure has been interesting.
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By using #MayThe4th Disney is also agreeing to my terms of use.
Ever since society cast that magic spell in the mid-1970s that causes people to agree to whatever you want them to have agreed to, life sure has been interesting.
That was *my* spell that was cast in the 70's. So by quoting that you agree to my terms of use (see the fine print at the bottom of this very legal document)
But to help you out, (I'm not unreasonable after all) the relevant passage is:
Anyone quoting anything to do with OzPeter owes OzPeter a bajillion dollars.
You can read the full terms of use in the fine print shown here => .
(You may need to zoom in a bit)
Disney does not care they (Score:2)
Just my 2 cents
So don't reply to Disney's tweet (Score:5, Informative)
It seems simple - celebrate Star Wars® any way you want with any kind of hastag but don't reply to the original tweet.
RFTA - right at the bottom:
“The above legal language applies ONLY to replies to this tweet using #MayThe4th and mentioning @DisneyPlus. These replies may appear in something special on May the 4th!”
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It seems simple - celebrate Star Wars® any way you want with any kind of hastag but don't reply to the original tweet.
RFTA - right at the bottom:
“The above legal language applies ONLY to replies to this tweet using #MayThe4th and mentioning @DisneyPlus. These replies may appear in something special on May the 4th!”
IANAL, but I can't really imagine any legal claim that they own the usage rights to tweets containing "#MayThe4th" and/or "@DisneyPlus" whether in a reply or otherwise succeeding. They don't own Twitter (yet). On the other hand, I also can't imagine any challenge to prevent them from using any tweets, especially those posted to a public profile, succeeding either. Knowing Disney, though, I wouldn't put it past them to *try* and copyright those terms en perpetuity -- like Micky Mouse.
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Yeah that looks pretty stupid. Classic "someone from the communication department got an idea, then lawyers came and made it and ruined everything". They would have a couple of other options :
- Get tweets, select the one, ask in private the winner for use rights.
- Ask people to add their agreement at the bottom of their tweet (like, copy/paste that text at the end of your tweet).
Exactly! (Score:1)
t seems simple - celebrate Star Wars® any way you want with any kind of hastag but don't reply to the original tweet.
Exactly, it's not the tag but the reply. With no link they can't do anything, and replying to the Disney tweet it seems reasonable Disney could reproduce that any way they liked, just as I would feel free to reproduce anything anyone said in response to one of my own tweets.
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It also took them 5 hours to publish that "it only applies to replies" tweet. The initial tweet is only 8 hours old. This thing blew up fast. Lawyers were ALREADY involved based on just how legalize the initial tweet was. They had plenty of time to respond. The outrage is fully justified.
For a time based comparison, it took Oreo a few minutes to put out a customized ad from scratch during a power outage at the super bowl 7 years ago. https://twitter.com/Oreo/statu... [twitter.com]
Not Worth The Paper It's NOT Printed On (Score:2)
Such a lawyerese interpretation isn't worth the paper it's not printed on. Ignore it completely.
Just as I have ignored the last few Star Wares movies. Disney commercializes EVERYTHING, as you know if you've ever been to a Disney property. The exit of every ride goes through the gift shops, and the entire place is a racket.
Disney being Disney (Score:2)
I spent a few months working as a temp at a Disney outpost in Seattle. My boss told me: "Most of the time, when I tell people I work for Disney, their reaction is 'Cool!!' But from time to time, Disney gets in the news for something related to copyrights, and then people tell me 'You work for the Man!!!"
If I saw him today I would totally say it. "You work for the Man!!!"
Twitter controls the rights (Score:2)
Twitter agrees to using the GPL (Score:1)
Hashtags are legal magic, apparently. (Score:2)
Therefore I suggest if you use #MayThe4th you also add the hashtag #WithoutPrejudice [businessdictionary.com].
Wretched hive of scum and villainy (Score:5, Funny)
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than Disney Corporation.
Obey (Score:2)
Be careful when it comes to Disney, they own a large number of congresscritters who can be instantly unleashed to write any law they need. They do it every time Mickey mouse is going to expire. Let's not forget the disaster they caused to people when they purchased a law titled "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension" back in 1998.
Jeez, cool the libertarian frenzy a bit. (Score:4, Insightful)
This entire post (and almost all of the comments) seem based on the self-evident truth that all things Disney does are evil, because as we know, power === evil, and they have a lot of power. And, yes, they do plenty of evil! Paying zillions to their execs while laying off massive numbers of employees during the lockdown, for example.
Buuuuut...they're totally open that the whole point of this campaign is to use people's comments in some sort of promotion. So, *of course* they'd have to secure (something US law would consider) your permission to do that, and *of course* they're not going to send letters from their legal department to every commenter. How on earth would they?
So they're doing pretty much the only thing I can think of: tying permission to the use of this hashtag and the reply to that particular tweet. That's pretty much going to narrow the application of their terms of use to only the people who read that tweet and understand that their words are going to be used. Honestly, this sounds like the work of somebody trying to do the right thing within their legal department, walking the line between the law, their customers, and the whims of the marketing department. And despite, all the while, knowing they'll surely be vilified on Slashdot for merely drawing breath.
Can we dial down the knee-jerk hysteria? They could have just said nothing, and still used your tweets.
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I'm sure disney's hearts bleed for the 200k dorks on /.'s opinions. Hate them all you want how many people are boycotting the next Star Wars or Marvel movie over it? All about the benjamins.
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So, *of course* they'd have to secure (something US law would consider) your permission to do that, and *of course* they're not going to send letters from their legal department to every commenter. How on earth would they?
They could send DMs. Also, who gives a fuck if getting permission requires work on their part? "Oh, it was too much effort to get permission from the copyright holders, so we just made up our own laws." That's not how it works.
Remember that they are trying to tie any Twitter user using the hashtag to their very specific terms on https://disneytermsofuse.com/ [disneytermsofuse.com] and not just the Twitter terms of use. I could similarly claim that if you reply to this message, you agree to my terms on https://prepareyouranus.com/ [prepareyouranus.com]
Make money from Disney (Score:2)
1. Copyright something.
2. Post it with the #MayThe4th hashtag.
3. Sue Disney for claiming copyright over your work.
4. Profit. And if not, at least troll these bastards!
Slight problem for them (Score:2)
They have no ownership or rights to hash tags and as such there is no exchange of value. Not a valid contract.
1977-2020 (Score:1)
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Keeping with tradition (Score:2)
In keeping with the responses to DeBlasio's "snitch on your neighbor" email line, how do you send a dick-pic with a hashtag?
This won't work... (Score:2)
Disney blinked first (Score:1)
The followup to the furor they caused was that if you have BOTH the hashtag and you @ DisneyPlus then they feel they have the right to take your tweet and use it however they want for all eternity. If you just use the hashtag they're benevolently going to let you think they won't take your tweet and use it however they want for all eternity.
To be fair at least they're giving some notice about it. Most places just do it without telling you.
How about (Score:2)
#disneypus?