Abigail De Kosnik on Baby Yoda in the Washington Post
Image by Disney
Published online on November 27th, BCNM Director Abigail De Kosnik wrote about the Baby Yoda GIF takedown in a Washington Post article titled "The Baby Yoda GIF takedown shows us how media corporations misunderstand fans". In the article, she highlights the current issue of how GIFs of "Baby Yoda," one of the new characters from Star Wars: The Mandalorian, have been taken down online. She argues why the GIF takedown matters in regard to the large amount of power big media corporations such as Disney hold over copyrights for something as small (but exciting for fans) as a GIF of a character.
From her article:
These companies fail to grasp that the war they launched hurts them and damages their brands. If fans fall silent for fear of legal reprisals, they’re not going to promote the content that IP owners are putting out [...] Capitalism works on media time, rendering commodities obsolete quickly so that it can constantly entice consumers to buy new ones. But human culture — the way that people engage with the world, including with art and music and film and television and books and games — operates on fan time. If only media companies could relinquish their efforts to tightly control their IP, giving fans leeway to fuel their creative and community practices, they would make even more money on fan time than they do on media time.
Read Gail's entire article here.