I think most lawmakers have lost sight of the fact the original mandate of the entire legal concept of IP in the United States is explicitly to foster creative output for public good. Intellectual property was given legal enforcement as a necessity for adding to the public domain. Nowadays they act as if it were the opposite, the public domain being a "necessary evil" to keep the plebs happy.
This perpetual copyright extension fails to take into account the public's investment and contribution to keeping characters such as Mickey Mouse relevant. It really should be public property by now.<p>Another example although, thankfully sanity eventually prevailed: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You</a>
I think it might me interesting to ask the HN crowd: if you were to fix copyright, how long would it last and why?<p>I like a fixed term of around 50 years. That's long enough for a creator to monetize a work over a majority of their adult lifetime, but short enough that people would have the unrestricted opportunity to remix works they enjoyed in their youth later in life.
As far as I can tell, the article is massively overstating the role of Disney in bringing about the Copyright Act of 1976.<p>There had long been widespread agreement that the 1909 Act needed significant revision to deal with the large technological developments since then in how copyrightable works were created, copied, distributed, and consumed, and to make US copyright law more compatible with the rest of the world. The copyright term provisions of the 1976 Act are straight out of the Berne Convention, and were included in the act to pave the way for the US to eventually join that and other international copyright agreements.<p>Disney may have been in favor of the 1976 Act, but it would have come about in substantially the same form if they had said nothing or even lobbied against it. The 1976 Act was one of those "its time has come" things.
From 14 years to what now will be an eternity:<p>This original provision allowed authors the right to print, re-print or publish their work for 14 years, with the option to renew the copyright for another fourteen years. Today, copyrights can last well over 100 years, with the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extending copyright protection for most works to the life of the creator, plus 70 years.
I don't see why IP such as Mickey Mouse should be treated any differently than patented IP. 20 years is a fairly length time to have a monopoly on your creation before it becomes public domain.
I would be curious where the economic costs truly lie. Is Disney rent-seeking? Well, that would depend how many non-Disney entities are deploying Mickey Mouse and paying royalties for so doing (probably not common). Is there Mickey Mouse content sold by Disney that would command lesser prices if a competitor could ALSO generate Mickey Mouse content? Probably (in which case consumers pay higher prices, and competitors lose the opportunity to partake of that money trough).<p>However, the steel-manned argument for Disney is something like "look, you could always make some other character (e.g. Rowdy Rat), sell tons of them, and compete with us...what's so damned special about OURS apart from the creatives who build a world around him? If this were REALLY harming consumers, wouldn't there be all sorts of derivative works inviting lawsuits to determine what is and is not too close to the original?" The real question is whether Disney is so large and their litigiousness so frightening as to chill even that type of battle?
One of the reasons that I have been boycotting Disney for years. I refuse to give them money. If somebody asks me if I've seen <disney movie> I tell them, "yes, and it was horrible! They've ruined <movie franchise>!"
Supreme Court decisions on copyright and trademark are shamefully pro-business, and really show how there is shadow money flowing through all American positions of power from business, even in the US Supreme Court.
This is a fairly poor article.<p>I can't take seriously anything that notes US copyright was increased primarily to reach some form of life+70 and then claims that Disney was responsible, not mentioning it's that exact number because the US had already agreed to it in international treaty negotiations because it's was the duration of copyright in Germany.<p>It's US centrism gone wild.
My meta theory of the new movies is that Snoke was a representation of Mickey Mouse and First Order was Disney. The movies was an analogy of how Lucasfilm would survive a corporate takeover.