It's entertainment. Why should anything other than being good for shareholders matter? It's not an essential goods company like say food or medicine
The problem is the easiest way to protect this is by having Congress extend the copyright law duration on all copyrighted works. There are possibly other mechanisms that would work better at letting un-used IP go to public domain (and Disney would likely be fine with this), but it's complicated and I think that would require a political movement to get started and nobody cares enough to do it.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Much of our creative works and culture are driven by building on top of what came before. The asinine length of copyright we have today means we have to wait entire generations before works are available to adapt and build upon, which is extremely hypocritical wrt Disney since most of their classic movies were based on public domain books.
Should we let companies keep some percentage of their IP out of the public domain?
We have ALWAYS lived in a culture where reusing older works in newer ones has been a driving force for creativity. I just went to a play a friend helped put on a couple weeks ago called Heddatron, a mashup of Hedda Gabler, a telling of Ibsen's life, comedy and robots. The whole thing made absolutely no sense to me, but it was amusing as hell to watch. Hedda Gabler came out in 1890, if our current copyright laws applied to his work it would still be under protection and there's a good chance it would have never come to light.
We don't need to grant MORE protections to IP, we need to severly reduce the copyright terms back to sane levels.
Copyright terms that allow 5 generations of descendants to live off continuing royalties while the property rots are not beneficial (I am not anti-inheritance, I just don't think it helps anyone for exclusive monopoly rights to last so long). Extensive copyright powers that make _everything_ that gets digitized subject to draconian copyright protection are not beneficial. Arcane legal processes and astronomical legal costs blocking the useful application of the small amount of recourse available in these laws is a travesty.
Should companies whose primary function is pressing "go" on the DVD assembly line be competitive with massive, serious logistical operations that deliver necessities like food and energy? Is it possible we are rewarding companies who invent cute characters a little too much?
Do note that copyright is not a natural thing; it exists only due to governmental fiat, the government's threat to use force to stop someone from drawing Mickey Mouse in an unflattering pose. We are so protective of "free speech", yet are not concerned when we see government goons hauling people off for offending BigCo?
But they keep buying up alllllll the popular IP....so that kind of doesn't really work now.
It may not be directly life and death, but the negative ramifications of excessive copyright monopolies run deep, on both the culture and the market. The only people it's good for are the entrenched interests who are trying to milk the same good idea from 90 years ago, and want as much money as possible to crush upstart competitive threats, regardless of the value that the market ascribes to those competitors.
In tech alone copyright has killed a non-trivial number of good companies. One could argue that the internet is fundamentally anti-copyright, as in the words of Bruce Schneier, "trying to make digital bits non-copiable is like trying to make water not wet". The internet is based on rapid, exact duplication of information and its instantaneous worldwide transmission.
Copyright law as written has already been repeatedly and grievously misapplied to weaponize this detail of computer networks against People Who Can't Afford To Pay Munger Tolles & Olson One Thousand Dollars An Hour to Harass Competitors. Remember, these laws fundamentally benefit the large players who have the literal millions of dollars in spare cash resources to pick these fights, at the expense of those who don't.
It's ironic that we all act like net neutrality is the front lines for the fight for internet freedom, when it's really copyright and network access laws like the CFAA. Could this have anything to do with powerful VCs and popular media interests (yes, including online outlets like Google and Facebook) leaning heavily on outlandish copyright enforcement for their own competitive edge?
There is a separate section of law designed to protect such brand associations called "trademark". As long as Mickey Mouse is a registered trademark (which he is), TWDC will retain the ability to stop uses of the mark that would be deceptive or misleading.
Trademark protections are much weaker than copyright protections and apply only to commerce within the pre-defined areas in which the trademark is registered. Disney would lose the ability to lock up anyone who published an image of Mickey Mouse that they didn't like, but would still be able to protect its brand, as long as the public associated Mickey Mouse with TWDC in the relevant areas of commerce. This should be more than sufficient to stop, e.g., Universal Studios from putting up Mickey Mouse banners at their competing theme parks, implying an endorsement or association with Disney.
What it may not stop is a use of Mickey Mouse that doesn't imply association with or endorsement by the trademark's owner. For example, under copyright law, Universal cannot create a "Punch Mickey" attraction. However, one may be able to argue that such an attraction is legal when Mickey is only protected by trademark law, because then the only uses that are barred are those that are likely to confuse or mislead the consumer. I'm sure this would be litigated out if it actually happened and some judges are definitely stodgy enough to say that any use of someone else's trademark automatically rises to the level of misleading consumers (and we should not discount the rarely-discussed incentive that judges have to rule in favor of powerful interests, nor should we pretend that we don't see that on a regular basis), but under copyright there is no real way to argue that this is non-infringing.
The main point being that Disney would no longer be able to use the FBI as Rent-A-Cops to stop any use or depiction of Mickey Mouse that they disliked, under the auspices of "promoting the progress of science and useful arts". People who wanted to make their own unofficial Mickey Mouse content or merchandise would be free to do so without threat of arrest or lawsuit, so long as they did so in a manner that was not misleading about the association with Disney.
We can't release it into the public domain, and we can't allow anyone to make derivatives, 50 years later. We even tried to prevent Disney from continuing to create new derivatives, but lost that case.
A family legacy can't be reclaimed, or preserved, because of copyright extensions.
Disney won't _die_ if their early characters become public domain. If they're hurt it will be very slowly, with enough time for jobs to shift.
And it's not clear that copyright is necessary for creativity. In some ways it can hindrance sometimes. See the case of the fashion industry https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashi...
I guess people somehow think that only the lowest quality versions of public domain works will be popular, when the opposite is frequently the case. Like it happened, for example, with Disney versions of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Which is rather ironic: Disney created an empire in big part thanks to public domain.
So iTunes having CD ripping ability is facilitating infringement according to UK law, I wish they'd try and prosecute that!
It's not enough to pay creators to view their work anymore. Copyright legislation lets works get locked up eg by DRM and formats falling out of use; this subverts the creators part of the contract of copyright, we only grant it on the basis that works enter the public domain in a timely manner ... without that copyright should be void.
Meanwhile big businesses like Google get a special exception on "orphaned works" ...
There are others where they might have different interests, but not that.
This is why if you have one person bargaining with five the one holds a much better bargaining position.
Here we go, gentlemen. The cattle take as their own the pablum the owners feed them.
(Cheers.)
(This is one of the reasons why I oppose capitalism)
Because monopolies greatly reduce or limit competition, and competition is the big force that makes capitalism work properly.
Capitalism without competition is no different from Communism or a lot of other systems in which one party rules supreme.
The main difference being that corporations divide up the different experiences of life, where fiefdoms divided the land. In the end we have absolute rulers in their own private domains who only have to pay a small tribute and lip service to the nation they are nominally aligned with.
Can you explain further?
Given that revised definition of "Communism," a greatly consolidated, monopolistic Capitalism, with increased favoritism by the state for leading firms, does start to seem similar in some interesting ways.