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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

The wealth creation is completely artificial. I'm not sure how having to pay a tax to Disney for a Winnie lunchbox "creates wealth" more than getting the identical thing for cheaper.

Basically your post is a more subtle version of the broken window fallacy.

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I think his point is you wouldn't get the same thing. If Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain today, a decade or two from now nobody would know who he was. You might get some cheap Pooh-themed lunchboxes from China early on, but without Disney pumping money into him, Winnie would fade into obscurity. (e.g. Винни-Пух, the people's Winnie)

As for the wealth they create: http://americasmarkets.usatoday.com/2015/06/24/disney-gets-1...

That's actual college-and-braces money that shareholders are making on the copyright, that otherwise wouldn't exist. And don't say that money is being stolen from us, because first of all, we're all potentially "them", and second, we all get to watch Winnie's Big Adventure on Netflix.

I think you're incorrect. It will mean more entities will be able to freely create properties based on Winnie the Pooh, instead of just one. For example, right now the board game industry is getting floooooded with Cthulhu themed games, since it's now in the public domain, to the point where the publisher for the game Smash Up made "The Obligatory Cthulhu Expansion". It's almost as prevalent as the generic "Zombies" theme right now.

I can imagine, at least in the board game arena, that there would be several Winnie the Pooh themed games. I can think of at least one Alice in Wonderland themed game off the top of my head, called Parade.

Now will third parties choke the market with merchandise like Disney likes to do? Probably not, but Winnie the Pooh will have longevity beyond Disney's ironclad grip of its copyright.

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