• 19 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • Agatha Christie is probably one of the most popular writers of the 20th Century, and one of her classics is now published under the title “And Then, There Were None.”

    If you’ve ever seen a movie, play, or game where a group of people are invited to a house only to be killed off one by one, you’ve seen something influenced by “And Then, There Were None”.

    Generally the victims are symbolized by figurines on the mantelpiece which get gradually destroyed one by one as the murders progress, eventually leaving “none”.

    The previously published title was the incredibly culturally insensitive “Ten Little Indians”, and the figurines were just that.

    The original published title, in the UK, in 1939 - an era when we DID IN FACT KNOW BETTER was “Ten Little removeds”.

    They did not change the title in the UK until 1985(!)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None




  • Can it really be an infringement if there’s no physical source though? That’s the question.

    Say someone does an online comic strip, I download the images, re-format them for print, and sell a print version.

    There is no physical version to bootleg, the only reason a physical copy exists at all is because I put the time and effort into making one.

    Same with the “Calvin peeing on things” car stickers. King Features and Bill Watterson could absolutely produce those themselves, but don’t. Watterson refuses to license the character for anything.

    At the same time, they also haven’t gone after the people who are producing them.