[njl]

There are two competing interests here. First, Disney wants to keep control of Mickey Mouse cartoons, and it doesn't feel unreasonable at all that they should. Second, the rest of the stuff that is of little commercial value but of potential cultural value should be freed from uncertain or uninterested ownership.

The answer feels trivial to me, which means I'm probably missing something. Fixed term for a few decades from the creation of the work, maybe 30 years or 40 years. After that, you need to give a copy of the work to the Library of Congress, pay a nominal fee, and you get a 5 year extension. Take as many of those as you want.

This greatly simplifies everything. If you find a work that is older than the base term, you look it up in the copyright extension database. If it's in there, you can find out who owns the rights to it, and try to license rights. If it isn't in there, it's public domain. If somebody doesn't stay on the ball enough to renew their rights every five years, it probably isn't all that commercially valuable, and moves into the public domain.

[w1ntermute]

> Disney wants to keep control of Mickey Mouse cartoons, and it doesn't feel unreasonable at all that they should.

It feels completely unreasonable to me. There's no reason why Disney should be given an exception when others aren't. It's idiotic to suggest that they should get special treatment just because their IP is commercially valuable.

[officemonkey]

Mickey Mouse is protected by trademark.

The Steamboat Willie article is specious. Thanks to a failure to register copyrights (back when those things mattered) the Fleischer studio "Superman" cartoons are in the public domain. The world did not end. People may use and sell these cartoons, but they still have to be careful not to run aground against the Superman trademark.

The same thing would happen to Steamboat Willie.

[crpatino]

I don't think "Disney" is capable of wanting anything, since old Walt's been dead for decades now. That's what happens when you grant personhood status to abstract entities.

[Contero]

Why is it idiotic?

I see more value in having Disney pay an appropriately large amount of money to keep their IP than I see in making sure that their specific content gets into the public domain.

Who cares about steamboat willy if Disney is going to fight tooth and nail over it? It's everything else that will expire into the public domain that I care about.

[notahacker]

Disney are only willing to pay an appropriately large amount of money to keep their IP if they believe the public are actually willing to pay them significantly more because they have that IP.

It's not such a big deal applied to films; the amount in the government coffers is swollen by less than the extra Disney fans have voluntarily spent on old films, but no great loss is suffered by those who aren't willing or able to pay Disney's asking price. But establishing a principle that corporations should be able to retrospectively extend the fixed-term of their IP for cash would be particularly dangerous when it comes to things like patents...

[coderdude]

I disagree. Disney is the perfect example of when copyright should be extended. Disney (the man) is dead but he didn't die owning a portfolio of cartoon IP. Disney (the corporation) owned that and still has a global business that lives and dies by the fact that it can maintain its brand. I don't see any benefit to mankind if people were suddenly free to print Mickey Mouse onto t-shirts and sell them.

[pyre]

  | I don't see any benefit to mankind if people were
  | suddenly free to print Mickey Mouse onto t-shirts
  | and sell them.

Mickey Mouse is a trademark of the Disney Corporation. Someone selling Mickey Mouse t-shirts would quickly run afoul of Disney's trademark lawyers. If Steamboat Willie fell into the public domain it would just mean that I could legally sell copies of it on DVD, or I could dub my voice over the video and post it to YouTube. Neither of these would materially harm Disney. Printing frames captured from Steamboat Willie on t-shirts would fall into an area where Disney could reasonably take someone to court for violating their trademark. Printing a generic image of Mickey Mouse on a t-shirt would be blatant violation of trademark, and practically an open-and-shut case.

I can't tell if you're just trolling or uninformed, but there are always a handful of posts in these discussions that don't understand the differences between patent, copyright and trademark.

[coderdude]

I just didn't know that Mickey Mouse was also trademarked. I do understand the differences between the three, however.

[danielweber]

I had a really long convoluted discussion with an IP lawyer, and he claimed that only specific instances of Mickey Mouse's likeness were protected by trademark.

I haven't really absorbed his argument, but he seemed pretty sure about it, and that we needed something else to (legitimately, in both our opinions) protect Disney's ability to control their brand even if copyright expired. He recommended giving Disney something very much like "right of publicity" for Mickey Mouse so they can still control the character, while allowing lots of old stuff to still enter the public domain.

[pyre]

To me, this sort of stuff seems like the IP law equivalent of bailing out banks (or GM) because they are "too big to fail."

Even if specific instances of Mickey Mouse's likeness are trademarked, I have a hard time believing that someone could be selling "Mickey Mouse" t-shirts on the street and not be in a risky legal grey zone.

[I'll also note that as an IP lawyer he probably has a rather conservative view of this. Thinking from Disney's perspective they don't want any trademark lawsuit to be in a legal grey zone. They want them all to be slam-dunks so that they can get their way.]

[jkn]

You're confusing copyright and trademark. If copyright was allowed to expire, people could freely share the earliest Disney movies, but they still couldn't infringe the Mickey Mouse trademark by printing t-shirts since the trademark doesn't expire.

[coderdude]

Yeah, you're right. I should have done a little reading first.

From Wikipedia: "It is sometimes erroneously stated that the Mickey Mouse character is only copyrighted."[1]

I could have avoided this one. :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse#Legal_issues

[MartinCron]

If you change it from a nominal fee to a progressively larger and larger fee, you let content owners who really care about their long-term IP ownership compensate the public for the fact that the work isn't part of the public domain, as it otherwise would be.

[205guy]

I think there is a distinction here that needs to be made: copyright is about the marketplace, not actual ownership. If I drew a mouse cartoon and really liked it, and maybe just showed it to my kids every year, I could keep it secret and I (or my heirs) could own it forever. The public isn't owed any private works or any compensation for what could-have-been in the public domain.

But if I want to commercialize this art, then I need to release it into the marketplace. As soon as it is released, it can be copied (or there will eventually be a technology to copy it). Therefore, copyright is society's (and the government's) way of protecting my ability to profit while making my art public. In exchage for that protection, the US laws used to impose (there was not choice, other than secrecy or copyright) the release into the public domain after a certain time.

The issue is, marketplace protection (legislation, enforcement) costs money. The richness of public domain material seemed to justify the cost on society. If copyrights become perpertual, it would make sense to me that the ones who benefit should pay for it. Then again, they could argue that an open marketplace full of desireable content is valuable in and of itself (to both society and the economy).

[SoftwareMaven]

That's a reasonable compromise, but copyright law for the 20th century was anything but about compromise. It was about ensuring big corporate content producers are given a default of "copyright forever" with no costs or effort on their part.

After all, it is society, not the content producers, that pays the price for having no culture returned to the society that birthed it. Right up until a company like Disney finds there is no more public domain for them to take ideas from. But, like most problems we Americans have, we'll let a future generation worry about that.

[jarjoura]

I'm sure an idea of a similar framework gets proposed all the time, however once stakeholders look at the huge cost in it, it gets tabled.

An argument people make on Hollywood's side is that sure, there are entire storage facilities of content that should be moved into the public domain, but who is going to fund the conversion (old deteriorated 35mm film) to media usable by the mass public?

Then on the public side, who is going to manage/fund the perpetual database and management of what's public domain now and what's still copyright protected.

I'm glad that Europe is stubborn and is moving works into the public domain. As more and more good content is becoming freely accessible, it gives our policy makers here material to argue with.

[joshuahedlund]

> An argument people make on Hollywood's side is that sure, there are entire storage facilities of content that should be moved into the public domain, but who is going to fund the conversion (old deteriorated 35mm film) to media usable by the mass public?

I'm not familiar with this argument. My understanding is nothing has to be "funded" to be "moved" into the public domain, it just becomes public domain by default and if anyone wants to make the necessary conversions that's their voluntary prerogative (ex. Gutenberg Project). In fact I've read that public domain works are generally more likely to be preserved, and that there are loads of early 20th century works that are fading away because essentially no one is free to make copies of them to keep them around.

[georgemcbay]

I would be fine with a provision to extend copyright by paying fees, but only if the fee went up each time, like say 2^x * 100 dollars each x year over the base.

[danielweber]

You have to decide that kind of unit you need to pay fees on. Is "Steamboat Willie" 1 work? If a photographer releases a bunch of photos, are each of them their own work? Should he release them as a book?

[TruthElixirX]

They're already paying fees for this in the form of lobbying. The money from your fees would go to the same people the lobby money is going to now. How does that fix anything?

[MartinCron]

The money from your fees would go to the same people the lobby money is going to now.

No, lobby money goes to lobbyists, election campaigns, and to support services of the lobby industrial complex. Money from "this should otherwise be public domain" fees could go to the general treasury and help pay for, well, anything.

[darkarmani]

> pay a nominal fee, and you get a 5 year extension. Take as many of those as you want.

Absolutely not! Why let them get unlimited extensions? How does that give back to the people?

[jacques_chester]

Disney have trademarks on all their characters; that should be enough.