There definitely is a problem with how long copyright lasts, and Disney is directly responsible for strongly lobbying to make it last longer.
Franchises aren't everything. Otherwise the highest grossing movies wouldn't be Avatar and Titanic :)
What Disney wants is to grab everything it can. Not that surprising. What it needs is to be able to protect its reputation and for its name brand to mean something. That does not require multi-century copyright terms... it requires trademarks.
Making me less happy, I'd be comfortable with a regime where copyrights expire after 10/20 years or something, but companies can indefinitely renew them on an exponentially-growing basis every decade or something, making companies have to decide whether they are actively using a property or whether it's more economical to just let it go. The major problem with the copyright term being so long isn't that it covers Steamboat Willie... the major problem is that it covers everything. An absurd amount of culture is not just tied up in copyrights, but copyrights that literally nobody knows where they reside, because who wants to track the rights to some kids book from 80 years ago carefully or something?
And if they are... I really don't mind. I'm a bit less incensed at the fundamental idea of "culture being locked up"; if something is being maintained as Star Wars is, for instance, let Disney have it for as long as they can homestead it, basically. I'm personally far more aggrieved about the pile of stuff that nobody owns and nobody particularly wants, but is locked up because Disney wants to own Steamboat Willy. My pragmatic solution is to basically let them, but to do so with much, much less collateral damage.
Even when other people gain the right to make derivative works, the cultural concept of canon separates certain works as authoritative from the mass of non-canonical fanfiction.
If Disney did not own copyright over the existing Monkey Island games, and trademarks on the Monkey Island characters and settings, a new game by the original creators of the game would almost certainly be received as canonical.
It would be like Tim Cain making another Fallout game, even though Bethesda owns the rights to the franchise now. Indeed, with both him and Feargus Urquhart together at Obsidian, one might argue that they have at least as much canon right to the franchise as Bethesda, who owns the actual legal rights. Similar with Fargo, Stackpole, and Danforth at inXile making Wasteland sequels, except they actually had to buy the rights to the trademarks. Or it would be like Meretzky making another Planetfall sequel, yet Activision has just been sitting on the rights to do that for decades.
The original rights have long been transferred to different corporate owners, in some cases several times.
There is definitely room to change copyright and trademark such that some rights are permanently invested in the individual contributors to a work, that cannot be quashed or transferred, regardless of work-for-hire status or corporate transfers. When a studio goes under and fires everyone, yet retains all rights that get transferred to a successor company that just sits on them, that isn't encouraging the creation of new works. It's forcing the actual creators to go find new jobs, where they are legally forbidden from continuing their previous work. It might be appropriate to allow some rights to escheat back to the creators, with the successor corporation getting something more like an automatic license.
Imagine if someone like Disney lost the right to draw Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to Universal Studios, who poached all his animators out from beneath him except Iwerks. They'd have to start all over with a completely new character that no one knew about, and directly compete against their own previous work, that would then be out of their control. And then they'd have to see Oswald pulled away from even those poached animators, by corporate fiat and a poker bet by Lantz, only to be buried shortly thereafter by Woody Woodpecker.
Separating the rights from the creatives entirely seems to have been somewhat unwise, judging by the history. Some rights now are literally too complicated for anyone to unravel, thereby preventing not only derivative works, but even just new copies on the market. How bad would it be, really, to just go to the named author (or their estate) to grant new licenses, instead of trying to chase down a corporate paper trail of transfers and contracts?
"It would be like Tim Cain making another Fallout game, even though Bethesda owns the rights to the franchise now."
A very bizarre choice of example, since Fallout is precisely what got made because they couldn't get the rights to make Wasteland 2, so Fallout is already "another Wasteland game"! http://wasteland.rockdud.net/fallout.html
The example was intentional. It's why I also mentioned Wasteland. Obsidian and inXile are very close, and Obsidian did work under contract to inXile for Wasteland 2. Those studios are both filled with ex-Interplay/Black Isle people. They all got fired, and the rights went somewhere else.
And the hacker scene is directly respondible for not developing darknet software with which one can circumvent these copyright restrictions.
Having a darknet software that circumvents copyright restrictions won't prevent a squad of guys with guns appearing at your doorstep and taking you to a place, where you will spend several years. To prevent that, you need another solution and the answer is not technology or software.
That is why I wrote "darknet software". If the software cannot ensure anonymity, you get this kind of problem.
> To prevent that, you need another solution and the answer is not technology or software.
Sure, but until a solution appears, better create technology and software that makes civil disobedience easy.
I already do, so to me this is nothing even worth talking about. :-)
The problem rather lies, for example, in the "cultural" references that people use all the time.
> than making them a victim and giving them a reason to push for much more draconian laws.
I tell you: You can do what you want - they will make you a victim in any case.
In this sense I do not just ignore their movies etc., but also ignore their rights to have a right to censor (copyright), too. I am against violence, so I am against copyright, too.
Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)
He was a kind, brilliant person, barely out of childhood, and his life has come to an end.
I admire what he did and I find the way he was treated criminal and deplorable. However, Its difficult to blame developers for not wanting to go to prison and/or be harassed to death.