[echelon]

Is Mickey in the public domain now? Can other companies start using him and the other early Disney characters in new content?

As an aside, people are awfully enamored with "Star Wars" and other big tent pole series. However, if the costs of writing and filmmaking were low or non-existent, I believe the market would be flooded with new creativity. There would be tons of new stories in the sci-fi and fantasy genres, and the value of any single brand or series would plummet.

All of that to say, I don't feel like people are necessarily attached to "brands" or "licenses" like "Mickey" or "Star Wars", it's just that there aren't enough choices available. It's too expensive to create new entries. Copyright enshrines these brands, companies seldom want to invest in creating new ones, and the barriers to entry make it hard for competition to arise. Experiments are risky.

Imagine a world with substantially lower cost to produce. In the limit, there would be so many stories that we'd be hearing about new experiences in content from our friends on a daily basis. We couldn't explore the entire graph. Discovery would be ephemeral and happenstance, and very few things would ever rise to the cultural prominence of Marvel, simply because there would be worthwhile novelty everywhere you look.

Imagine when our computers can dream up stories to tell us. That excites me.