we just had this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32110420

making money as an athlete used to disqualify you from the olympics

This had nothing to do with selling out. Olympic athletes were supposed to be amateurs and not professionals.

If you were paid to be an athlete then you had a competitive advantage, or so was the thinking.

The amateur/pro separation is spelled out most clearly in the early history of cycling, and it has very little to do with the punk rock idea of selling out: gentlemen with a family name so big they likely had minor celebrity status even before sports showing off how far and fast they could go starting to hire a series of pacemakers to draft behind. Then one day, particularly strong pacemakers got sponsorship, starting in their own name, with their own relay of pacemakers, and they took the prestigious titles. Gentlemen were not amused and started their own racing series. Members only. (right before falling in love with the speed provided by the internal combustion engine)

In the UK we have the split between Rugby Union and Rugby League, now two distinct sports. The history of that split gets to the heart of British class distinction and is more interesting that you might at first think.

There's a good description of it here[1] but the TL;DR is:

In the South of England rugby was played by independently rich amateurs and in the North of England it was played by the working class men who needed to support themselves and their families and wanted it to become professionalised.

The groups couldn't agree and so split. With the rules of Rugby League supposedly changed to make it more appealing to paying crowd.

1. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/sport/2019/10/split-bet...

That might have been the thinking, but it was also totally associated with selling out, and being an inferior athlete, morals wise.

While it certainly sounds more honest and less commercialised, it also means that high level sports is mostly a rich-people's game. Poor people often can't afford to say no to money.

At some point, they even found it dishonest to train for event specifically.

Especially if you were Native American

Did you see they restored the 2 Olympic medals for the pentathlon and decathlon to Jim Thorpe just the other day. Long overdue.

The parent comment I responded to referenced this, but inaccurately portrayed it as an issue of amateurism rather than that being the cover story for blatant racism

I'm a millennial, I don't see how licensing IP would be selling out compared with carrying sponsorship messages. I understand how the latter can be seen as selling out

If you saw Calvin in a Cola commercial, you wouldn't feel that lessens the artistic value of Calvin and Hobbes?

I've seen people with interesting and valuable YouTube channels suddenly pimp Raid Shadow Legends, which definitely cheapened their channel to me and made me lose some respect. I do understand it, but I'm not happy about it.

Yeah, when a woodworking channel spends half a video "testing" some new product on their table saw, I begin to feel like I am being sold a bill of goods.

How to you distinguish that from someone trying out a product to review it?

It's a tough line to walk. For something like woodworking, I suppose I'm not looking for "a new product"?

Perhaps there should be separate channels in such a case: the wood-worker-reviewing-stuff channel and the making-things-from-wood channel.

It's one of those grey areas that comes down to the integrity of the channel owner. There are probably people who never find anything wrong with stuff they're sent to review and there are people who give honest reviews. Conflicts of interest are everywhere but it doesn't mean that a potential conflict of interest automatically translates into bias.

I feel the same way about music licensed to shows or commercials. Due to the amount of airplay a show or commercial gets, the music becomes overused.

The USPS use of "Fly like an Eagle", and overplayed CSI: X shredded The Who songs.

Although, "Love and Marriage" used in "Married with Children" (90's) doesn't have the same tiredness, probably because that Sinatra really wasn't in my listening list.

I was wondering why I heared 'Running up that hill' from Kate Bush so much on the different radio stations. Then HN had an article about someone recreating the synth sound of it. Why the renewed interest?

Yesterday I heard it got used on a popular Netflix show. Ah.

It could be worse, I thought they were forcing interest in some new album from her.

Still laughing about the irony of Melanie's "Look What They've Done to My Song" becoming "Look What They've Done to Oatmeal".

Can't un-hear.

I think it's ok to cash out once your career is over. It's bad to do while creating, because the money people will inevitably influence your works. But, if you're not creating anymore, then there's no great harm in it.

It may depend on the type of work but there is something to be said about the longevity of the art and legacy.

Calvin and Hobbes was a massive part of my youth. It fed that creative and mischievous part of me that "regular" life just wasn't satisfying. I was smitten and still am.

Fast forward to my daughter's birth... At around 4 years old, I bought her the giant anthology of strips which includes everything Calvin and Hobbes ever printed. Like me, it shaped her in undefinable ways. It drove her drawing and reading off the charts. She very much grew as a person because of Bill's work and my influence in reading to her often. She took over very quickly! She latched on and studied those books with a fervor that I've not seen repeated in her yet.

Do you think the result would have been the same if there were T-shirts, TV shows, video games, and the like plastered all over? You can only shield a child from the world so much. They absorb everything.

Anyway, I think Bill absolutely made a most excellent decision. Not only for himself, but for us.

> Anyway, I think Bill absolutely made a most excellent decision. Not only for himself, but for us.

Especially for us. It has remained special all these years later as it hasn’t been supersaturated or made overrated by virtue of being commoditized.

I’m guessing whoever inherits his estate sells the license and rights for untold millions. You can only hope a billionaire super fan buys it and buries it.

At some point in the future it will all be public domain anyways. So enjoy it while you can.

> I’m guessing whoever inherits his estate sells the license and rights for untold millions.

I wouldn't be surprised if he sets up a trust to control the rights to prevent that from happening.

That is still a crap shoot. I hope his legacy is well-protected, but you could still end up with a Dr. Seuss situation. Or Tolkien for that matter. I get it that Christopher hated the movies, but they were done with great respect and love. The moment he passed away, however, Amazon descended and began their... what I can only describe as rapine.

In the case of Calvin and Hobbes, I think a lot of the meaning would be lost if you saw Calvin selling sugary cereal on TV.

The philosophy of the strip is fundamentally incompatible with commercialization.

I do see a lot of car decals with Calvin pissing on [insert name of hated automaker]. Now obviously these are unlicensed, but a lot of people obviously have no problem with it.

Bill Watterson once remarked: “I figure that, long after the strip is forgotten, those decals are my ticket to immortality.”

And you can probably find unlicensed porn of every IP out there, but I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from that.

Sure, but what if there were Calvin and Hobbes plushies, or something similar. Setting aside, of course, all the reasons Watterson gave for not wanting to do that sort of thing. There's licensing and there's licensing.

You can buy an Opus doll, but he's not flogging soft drinks.

T-shirts of Ernesto "Che" Guevara are the top example of this. It's too take an ideal, whatever you agree with it or not, and to convert it into a product for profit.

It's to commercialise ideals, memories and anything that makes people human. It reduces the idea's value and by extension our own humanity.

some people just care about their work more than money.

Now imagine that the whole star wars franchising made more money by selling merchandise than everything else combined.

That's why new movies and shows are being produced ever more often: to sell toys and merch.

And that's also why the quality and the creativity went down compared to the original movies.

There's a price to pay when you start thinking your business is not the art itself anymore, but selling or licensing it.

Ha ha, characters appearing for a few seconds in a background shot just to get their cameo before the inevitable Kenner/Hasbroken figure release.

This is because in the last couple of decades "selling out" has become not only acceptable, not only a desirable outcome but in fact the ultimate end goal. Probably one of the key defining factors between Boomer/Gen X and Millennial/Gen Y/Z/etc. or however they are labeled.