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Comment by justinl33 | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell if people just love the idea of the public domain, hate Disney, or both.

I think a big part is that disney seems hypocritical. A big part of their success is monentizing public domain properties from other creators but then preventing others from doing the same with their creations.

E.g. pinnochio was released in 1940 based on a book from 1883. At the time the original book was published i believe copyright only lasted at most 42 years. It seems unfair that disney got to benefit from short copyright terms in the beggining and long copyright terms at the end. Nobody likes to see soneone eat their cake and have it to.

It was such a gigantic and obvious screwjob twenty years ago, when we were young and sorta optimistic. God bless the tree that Sonny Bono ran into.

The cartoon had very limited distribution on film, I saw it at a university showing. Disney would distribute Donald Duck and etc but back then all the Mickey material was kept on the shelf for some reason. But then the "Mickey Mouse" law made this notorious.

For me it's... neither, I guess? I hate that Disney abused the political process to milk their cash cow for longer, but I don't hate Disney otherwise. I just am glad that we didn't get another Mickey Mouse protection act passed.

I'll never understand the mentality where a random company not named Disney feels it's now entitled to profit from Mickey Mouse.

That's the thing about the public domain; it belongs to the public, not to any one company.

I doubt you have any problem with people profiting off of Shakespeare, Mozart or fairy tales, so what is different about Mickey Mouse?

How many of Disney's cartoons do you think were based on public domain works?

Disney profited from the works of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Shakespeare, Osamu Tezuka, European and Chinese folklore, and many more sources.

Great artists build upon the work of those who came before them. This is how it’s been for millennia. Why should Disney be the end of the line?

This is actually the natural state of affairs. Intellectual "property" protections are a relatively recent invention (15th century) - created in theory to encourage production of more intellectual property and abused in modern times to provide eternal rents to owners.

Why should modern shareholders of the Disney corporation earn all the profits from what some people did 120 years ago? What good does that serve?

Well they currently are still making Mickey Mouse cartoons. Are you saying that the characters should only have a limited copyright and corporations/authors should lose control over the characters after a shorter period?

By the time I was born Mickey Mouse was so embedded in popular culture that it would be unreasonable to expect me to avoid the character. I certainly won't be telling my daughter to choose which characters to like depending on the state of so-called intellectual property laws, that would be absurd.

All this adds up to the fact that established characters are already effectively part of the public domain. A perpetual monopoly on children's culture is both unnatural and unjust.

Disney still benefits from trademark law on their characters along with a generous monopoly on new creations. I would argue that extending this further would reduce the incentive to innovate.

I don't know what the parent poster had in mind, but in my view losing most control by now is absolutely right and proper.

Disney created the character and was able to profit from it for years, but Disney has equally profited over characters it didn't create but instead created their own adaptations. Why should other companies be denied the same thing Disney had access to?

How do you feel about people who didn't create the English language being entitled to profit from being able to speak English?

We progress because we're able to build on what previous generations built.

Both. It's both. We hate Disney because we love the public domain.

Probably a lot of both. Disney is almost single-handedly the reason copyright is as screwed up as it is here in the U.S. as they have been the primary corporate actor behind the copyright extensions over the past several decades.

I just hate infinite copyright.

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