gedaliyahWhen will Mickey Mouse enter the public domain?
S410Even with the character in Public Domain, I doubt Disney would be particularly happy with anyone using it.
They can send cease and desist letter left and right, claiming that "the use of the mouse is fine, but the elements X, Y and Z were introduced in a later work of ours that's still protected", even if it's a plain lie.
Trying to take Disney to court is suicide.
The have enough money to hire half the lawyers in the world and make them come up with a lawsuit even if there's no basis for one. They can stretch the lawsuit process to last years, and yet the fees would be but a fraction of a fraction of a percent in their yearly spending. Almost any defendant, meanwhile, would be financially ruined by it, even if they end up winning.
SCBI find it insane that anyone should be allowed to use Mickey Mouse. Similarly, the 30s version of Superman is in public domain, soon, and that is similarly insane to me.
These are still Active properties closely tied with a company’s marketing and image. We badly need to update our IP laws.
HeavybellWe agree on updating IP laws, but I think they should be curtailed rather than extended. You should not have the monopoly on an idea your entire life. If you can’t milk a fortune from it in 50 years it wasn’t that good an idea, so everyone else should be free to build on and improve it after that point.
And even if you absolutely kill it and your brand is still going strong decades later, that 50 years will cover anything new your did in that time. Plus it’s not like people wouldn’t know yours is the original even after the copyright expire; something entering public domain doesn’t make it legal to claim you invented it if you didn’t.
If you make something, it should be yours to disseminate as you wish. It’s silly to suggest otherwise. You literally created it.
Copyright isn’t just paying for an idea, its giving a complete monopoly over a concept. We came up with the idea of copyright to give creators a much easier way to profit off their creation (not having to compete after its created) to make sure innovation is very rewarded. That said, its still a government enforced monopoly, with all the issues that come with that, and with how much its been extended, its far past the point of encouraging innovation and instead just works to cement large companies in place, resting on their laurals rather than making anything new. Even when a copyright ends, the current copyright holder wouldn’t lose the idea, they just no longer have a monopoly on it. Disney can and will keep making Micky Mouse content, and the mouse will probably keep being accociated with them for centuries to come unless someone makes something that dwarfs the impact of Disney’s work with the character, in which case its best that it was released anyway.
I don’t disagree with this necessarily (obviously, I think Mickey Mouse should belong to Disney forever) but this is why I recommend reform rather than throwing it out
Well, why should the government protect their monopoly? The original creator is dead, so he doesn’t benifit from it. The cartoon is 95 years old, and I doubt Walt Disney factored in the profit his company would make 60+ after he died, when deciding to make the original animation. The only reason to let Disney maintain their monopoly on it is to allow a massive coorperation to get more money without doing any new work.
Except they do create new works using that same IP, quote regularly.
I think you’re misunderstanding how copyright works. Losing the copyright doesn’t mean they won’t be able to make new works, nor does it mean those new works won’t have copyright. Copyright is only lost on the original work, so while others can use Steamboat Willie, and that very specific version of Micky Mouse, Disney still owns modern updates to him. Either way, the end of that monopoly opens more avenues for newer authors to build on it, while again, doing nothing but reducing Disney’s passive income for work their founder did a century ago. Its a more physical example, but along the same line of logic, if I cure cancer, it might make sense to give me time to get a head start on profiting from it (so I am rewarded for my work) but it would be ridiculous to say no one is else is allowed to use my cure for cancer or build on it for the next century or longer. Theres absolutely no reason not to allow the ideas to spread once the author has had plenty of time to make a profit.