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Comment by sidpatil | Hacker News Reader

The root of the problem here is the excessively-long copyright term that facilitated this. Excessive copyright is one of the biggest enemies of cultural preservation and dissemination.

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i suppose we'll get to see by 2024 if disney drafts yet another legislative extension to keep mickey out of public domain. may as well just come out and pass a law that disney owns all human culture – present past and future. now pay up.

I saw someone on here who proposed a simple sliding payment scale to keep things out of copyright after 5 years. 100 years out it might cost $1 million/year to keep it out. That way things naturally fall out unless a company needs to keep it in copyright.

That might have been me. The idea is to have an exponentially growing fee paid to maintain a copyright after some fixed initial term.

If Disney really wants to keep Mickey out of the public domain, they could do so by paying ever increasing fees into the public coffers. It might be worth it to keep their handle on things for $1B a year. And if not, then the public gets it.

You could just partake of culture outside of Mickey Mouse cartoons.

Does even Disney really push Mickey Mouse cartoons much any more? They seem to mostly focus on other product lines. I wonder just how much they would lose out on with no further copyright extension.

I don't know, but to the extent you're not talking about Mickey and Donald, you're not really talking about copyright extension anymore; under any reasonable copyright term, they'd still own Frozen and Toy Story.

I agree with the sentiment, but considering the catalog that Disney has amassed it's fairly hard to stay away from their properties if you want to partake of much media-based culture.

When a reader thinks of the "catalog that Disney has amassed" that is part of our "media-based culture", they are overwhelmingly thinking of titles that would remain copyrighted --- for quite some time --- even without the Copyright Extension Act.

Somehow I feel like we don't have too many preservation concerns around the Charlie Brown Halloween Special.

Why not?

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