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When will Mickey Mouse enter the public domain?
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this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Even 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.
I 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.
Companies last longer than a hundred years, now. It's silly we allow these things.
You do know that Disney made money from other people's works like the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen right? Their works are in public domain
The point of patents and copyrights is to promote and reward creative artists and inventors, not create a permanent revenue stream for corporations. Walt Disney died in 1966 and he, his investors, his heirs, and even their heirs have all been handsomely rewarded.
Now let’s get Steamboat Mickey in Smash Bros.
Are you for real? The creators have been dead for decades. Apart from the discussion of who was actually creatively responsible for Disney's as significant characters. Copyright was invented to protect them, not to be a gravy train for their useless descendants or the faceless companies owning the right for some (often murky) reason.
I find it insane that tvshows regularly show people watching 70+ year old tvshows. Nobody does that in real life. Doesn't feel authentic.
I find it insane that we've reused characters in stories for thousands of years, but just a century ago it suddenly became illegal until almost every character was old enough to be forgotten and culturally irrelevant.
Fan fiction of relatively new IPs should be sellable, imho, without having to beg a corporation for permission. Its stuff we've grown up on. Disney and others are literally holding our culture hostage and dictates terms.
The public must gain it's share of the revenue for allowing a private company to use public domain IP exclusively.
Hold a yearly auction to see who is granted rights to the property which is now the public's.
Pretty strongly disagree with the idea of a company's product just becoming the public's because a certain amount of time has passed.
I cannot even conceive of what the argument for this could possibly be.
Copyright was never meant to be used how it is today. It was specifically made to protect small creators from having big companies come in and rip them off. Companies were never meant to be the beneficiaries. But lot of lobbying plus corporations are people too bullshit changed that.
Copyright is meant to last roughly the lifetime of the artist, but organizations can live forever. And then nothing ever goes in the public domain, a shared culture dissolves in to nothingness.
the argument is that the people, and the political system the people put in place enabled the company to create and benefit off its creations.
"we live in a society" but unironically.
Disney themselves benefited from the public domain since they didn't invent the stories of Snow White, Cinderella, etc.
We 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.
Hail corporate.
I don't feel that this would have the positive impact you seem to think it would - and I cannot even picture how you think this would be a positive.
I mean, IP isn't all bad. I can't start selling p*ss in a bottle and label it with Coca-Cola branding. I'd get sued into oblivion. In this particular case, that would be a good thing. It also means that if you find a rat in your coke, you can sue CocaCola. If there were no IP, everyone could make it and it would be almost impossible to know where it came from.
There would also be no widely distributed film, TV, music, books, etc. Do you really want to live in a world where WattPad is the engine of literature?
No.
I'm not sure how court works, but can't you just take the cheapest defense possible? Even if it's just you showing up in court alone and pretending to be a lawyer.
Is the system really set up so that if you can't afford legal fees then you lose by default?
Trying to represent oneself in court is a pretty stupid thing to do, generally.
I am not a lawyer, I'm pretty you need to be able to defend yourself withing the legal system following all of its rules. You need to know the laws, their quirks, loopholes, etc. to construct your defense properly. Even if the case is complete nonsense, but you lack the knowledge to defend yourself, or the ability to use the knowledge you have coherently, you'll loose.
A neat paper a filed in accordance with all the rules, a paper that quotes actual laws and precedents, will, generally, beats oral argument backed by common sense. And that's in general! Let alone when you're going against Disney and their nigh infinite army of lawyers.